"With precision, candor, and gentle seduction, Maryline Desbiolles transports us to the privacy of a houshold kitchen, where the aromas, tastes, and textures of food evoke a woman's most intimate thoughts. Searching for mastery over the unique ingredients of her identity, she is beckoned by a richly-drawn cast of characters in her life and is pulled deeply within to confront the haunting dreams and the sublimated traumas of her childhood.".

"Over the course of creating her delicacy, a recipe she lovingly follows in anticipation of her guests' arrival, the narrator is by turns nervous, sensual, and powerfully psychoanalytic. As she reveals in the magic of cooking, she expounds on the combination and transmutation of the various ingredients, especially the diaphanous cuttlefish - as elusive and delicate as the feminine self she strives to capture."--BOOK JACKET.