From Written on the Body:
“The potatoes, the celery, the tomatoes, all had been under her hands. When I ate my own soup I strained to taste her skin. She had been here, there must be something of her left. I would find her in the oil and onion, detect her through the garlic. I knew that she spat in the frying pan to determine the readiness of the oil. It’s an old trick, every chef does it, or did. And so I knew when I asked her what was in the soup that she had deleted the essential ingredient. I will taste you if only through your cooking” (Winterson 36-37).
This passage, which takes place before the narrator has an affair with Louise, actually describes a crucial part of their courtship. The narrator claims that they “will taste [Louise] only through [her] cooking,” like they long to know Louise in an intimate way but are forced to put a barrier between them for the sake of propriety. The use of food as courtship is effective here because eating is inherently sensuous, much like sexual intimacy. The narrator even references Louise’s body and brings her physicality into the creation of her food through Louise’s spit-test. The narrator wants to get to know Louise through their mouth, through the food that Louise creates, the same that literally contains Louise’s saliva. Their mouths touch in spite of the narrator’s attempts to keep a safe distance.
In fact, Louise’s spit might even be the primary thing that the narrator is looking to take in. After all, lots of food is referenced in this passage but it is all in service to finding Louise’s taste beneath this food, all about the narrator connecting to her through the vessel of food. The narrator realizes that Louise’s hands had touched all of their food and they immediately “strain to taste her skin,” looking for Louise’s flavor instead of the food’s. It is a flavor that is evidently missing, the “essential ingredient” that has been left out.
This sense of unconventional intimacy falls into a larger pattern of the novel, of the narrator having markedly different romantic experiences with all of their various partners (tales that are all told out of order, another untraditional element to her affairs.) The narrator’s lovers are of all sorts and all experience intimacy in different ways—for I the radical it was blowing up museum bathrooms, for Jacqueline it was quiet domestic life—and Louise is another person with whom the narrator experiences unique intimacy. The current love is no better than the last love, and this way of representing relationships legitimizes all of the narrator’s partners as valid, important, and capable of unique love.