I don’t know why the best desserts I’ve ever eaten come from the hands of nuns. Perhaps it’s because in those convents, all broken loves, all hidden passions, all repressed desires, snuffed-out temptations, misunderstood aspirations, and all the great human appetites end up inside an ancient recipe, hidden and protected. Oh! Venerable women! Intermediaries between body and soul!
Nothing like the “Sorbetto alle viole” made by the nuns of the Emiliani Convent in the small rural Italian town where I live. It’s a cold, light ice cream, like fresh foam, with a taste of violet and honey that melts in your mouth, capable of satisfying the dullest palate and stimulating the lacking desire. The scent of violet, on the other hand, reminded me of my Aunt Estela’s cologne. Now I understand why my brother-in-law, along with his two dogs, a truffle hunter, had such a fright, thinking he saw ghosts in the woods. They were the elderly nuns who wandered around during the damp autumns, intent on searching for violets. The recipe was taken to the grave by the last nuns who lived in the convent. The new ones come from Africa and Latin America and aren’t very interested in desserts and recipes.
Another dessert that made me burst with happiness was the “Íle flottante” or floating islands prepared by the nuns of “Marie Pussepin,” where I attended high school. As we devoured, without understanding the seductive power of this precious delicacy, they claimed it was the original recipe from the 1800 book “Le Cuisinier Imperial.” Truly a royal delicacy, capable of producing sexual alterations and ensuring a profound enjoyment of the senses on the carnal level. Reworked by replacing the vanilla with passion fruit, so, the Maracuyá, the result was a tropical version that French and Creole nuns made disappear.
But to get to the point, the best dessert is undoubtedly: “Las tetas de monja” (Nun’s Tits or Nun’s hooters), formerly known as “tres tetas” (Three Tits/hooters), an explosion of all the senses, worthy of worship and remembrance, capable of unleashing human passions. All the spiritual reasons that led the nuns to create this dessert have an explanation: to meet physical needs to elevate the spirit. It is said that the origin of the name comes from the custom of some nuns to wear a protuberance in the center of their chest, so that the breasts would be less pronounced. Others claim that a nun, tired of hearing obscene insults from a drunk on the street referring to her tits, made this precious morsel and gave it to him, saying, “Here! So that every time you eat it, you’ll remember me.”
Caribbean, adding coconut and covering them in chocolate, giving them the name “Black Woman’s Tits.” Later, due to social and prudish problems, they were called “Black Woman’s Kisses.” Now racial problems arrived, and they didn’t know what to do anymore. As a child, still without weight problems, ignorant of diets, I devoured many black woman’s tits every Sunday. My father bought them very early at the market, since by 10 a.m. they were nowhere to be found.
Speaking of my father, a Caribbean man, full of imagination, who naturally distorted reality with fantasy, he passed on to us, his three daughters, and my mother this rule of life: eternal magical realism.
As a family, we have always humanized animals, animalized humans, confused objects with animals, and created new beings and names for human beings. This has influenced my work to the point of unconsciously creating a sculptural series that blurs the boundaries of the most erotic female form, the breast, with the most erotic animal form I know, the sea urchin.
When this series was born, I didn’t have a name for it; I was simply creating. It was my friend Isabelle, who left Paris to live in a magical and peaceful medieval Italian village, who created the French name: Sein-oursin (Breast-Urchin). It was a stroke of intuition; creating this word with a perfect assonant rhyme, which describes with melodious and sensual precision what was in my imagination and expressed through porcelain.
Since then, the Sein-Oursin series has expanded and evolved into new ones, having fun with combinations of colors, shapes, dimensions, and positions, expressing emotions and periods of my life without falling into the debate or controversy surrounding the concept of art.
