Louise T. Guinther

Valentine’s Day Recipes for Romance, plus a baker’s dozen operatic serenades to feed the soul.

Valentine’s Day is not just for lovers. Everyone can get in on the fun.

When I was growing up, every February 14 my Dad would bring my Mom a nice bouquet (roses, carnations, Peruvian lilies — the price didn’t matter, only the sentiment), plus a beautiful heart-shaped box of chocolates from Hannah Krause’s Candy Kitchen on Metropolitan Avenue (now Aigner’s: https://aignerchocolates.com: new owners, still the best chocolate anywhere). A couple of days before Valentine’s day, my sister and I would be invited to come along and help him choose among Krause’s broad array of elaborately adorned packages. Did we think Mommy would prefer the deep red velvet with a satin bow, or the springy yellow with tiny orange buds and a silk rose in the center, or the one covered all over with ruched lavender lace? (Meanwhile, back at home, we assisted Mom in making a batch of Dad’s favorite sweet treat — candied grapefruit peel. Here’s a recipe, but fair warning: these should properly be dried at least overnight, not the mere 2-4 hours suggested in the recipe) https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/candied-grapefruit-peel)

Dad was a romantic, but he was also a family man, so instead of a night out for him and Mom, Valentine’s Day dinner was for all of us. Mom would make something fancy, like lamb chops with homemade mint sauce, or filet mignon  with béarnaise (https://www.simplyrecipes.com/classic-bearnaise-sauce-recipe-5193246), and she’d let us help with the valentine sand tarts, rolling and cutting thin little hearts and then sprinkling them with sparkling red sugar in patterns that got more and more elaborate as we grew older and our fingers gained more motor control.

The pièce de résistance was the coeur à la crême, made in its special heart-shaped mold and garnished with strawberry sauce with a dash of kirschwasser.

Dinner for two is lovely, of course, but in our house, a table for four was twice the fun.

The great thing about romance is that enjoying it vicariously can be almost as enchanting as actually being in love — particularly if you’re an opera fan. Nobody can conjure those surges of adrenaline and cortisol like a great opera composer, and whether a single character is mooning about in a solo aria, rhapsodizing on his/her/their one true love, or a pair of turtledoves is joining their voices in duet, you can get all the Valentine thrills you want from a seat at the Metropolitan Opera, or even a vinyl disc on the old Victrola.

To entrance your ear while you nibble on your Aigner’s chocolates and your heart-shaped cookies, here’s a little musical playlist of my Valentine favorites. (Full credit, of course, to the lyricists as well, since opera starts with the words — or doesn’t it? See Strauss’s Capriccio for the full story on that. Texts and translations are here: https://louisetguinther.com/texts-translations/)

1. Before all hellish jealousy breaks loose in Verdi’s and Boito’s Otello (via Shakespeare, of course), Otello and Desdemona are madly in love, and while some scholars argue that in the play that love is never consummated (a highly debatable point anyway), Verdi’s Act I duet makes it pretty clear what’s going to happen when the newlyweds finish with this little ditty, here sung by Plácido Domingo, the definitive Otello of my opera-going era, and Mirella Freni, the most touching Desdemona I ever saw. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9MFz2UrXWo&list=RDW9MFz2UrXWo&start_radio=1

2, 3, 4. Three arias, all sung by tenors, express different but equally heartfelt aspects of true love. These guys are clearly looking for more than just a casual date on a Saturday night. “Un aura amorosa,” here sung by the incomparable Canadian Léopold Simoneau, conjures the ineffable sense of wellbeing, even euphoria, that comes with proximity to the object of one’s affection. The character who sings it, as it turns out, is hardly anyone’s model of a devoted lover, but in this moment, he is fully swept away by those irresistible pheromones, and Simoneau’s tender, earnest sound and elegant delivery make his rendition the epitome of romantic sincerity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in7Nhn1H7Zs

In “Ah sì, ben mio,” from Trovatore (Domingo again), Manrico describes the ability of true love to confer superpowers and transcend death — or at least the illusion that it can do all that, which in a way is the same thing. Show me a woman who wouldn’t want her man to say such things to her, even if he was on his way to almost certain death. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMs3Yrp4W0w

And Don Ottavio’s “Dalla sua pace,” from Don Giovanni, explores the kind of partner we all long for: a man for whom our happiness is the very foundation of his own. Ramón Vargas, one of the nicest, most loving people I ever met, comes across onstage just as sweet and caring onstage as he does in real life, and I’d take a declaration of devotion like this for my bedtime lullaby any time.

5. It’s a little harder to find a model lover among the baritones, who tend to be cast as the bad guys. Then again, most of them don’t think of themselves that way. Count Di Luna’s love may be unrequited, but his outpouring of affection for Leonora is every bit as persuasive as if his sentiments were returned, especially when sung by the charismatic Sherrill Milnes.

6. On the more philosophical side of things falls Wolfram’s “Blick ice umher,” from Tannhäuser, in which the more noble and less hotheaded of the two “minnesingers” vying for our heroine’s hand explains the ideal of a love too exalted to be acted upon.

7. If that’s too high-minded for you, you might prefer Don Giovanni —a lascivious rake, but from his point of view, he’s doing womankind a favor, since committing to just one would amount to depriving all the others. Mozart gives the Don all the charm and seductive power a good duet requires in “Là ci darem la mano”. My mother’s favorite Don Giovanni was George London, partly for the way his legs looked in a pair of tights, but mostly for that rich, rolling baritone and easy sex appeal. Anna Moffo is at her adorable best, bling and all, in the old-style “music video.”

8. It would hardly do to round up classic expressions of love without including those most iconic of lovers, Romeo and Juliet, who have only one night of ecstasy before their tragic ending.  

9-10. Leave it to the French to moon less over each other than over the whole general idea of love. That is exactly what happens to Dido and Aeneas (Tatiana Troyanos and Plácido Domingo, whose stage chemistry was incendiary) in Berlioz’s epic opera Les Troyens …

… and to all the characters in the Venetian act of Contes d’Hoffmann, a veritable orgy of romance.

11. Just because I’m fixated on tenors myself doesn’t mean sopranos aren’t just as good as conjuring the most ravishing of romantic moods, as does Susanna when she summons Figaro with this heart-stopping serenade, here sung by the magnificent Helen Donath.

12. Just to show that I am NOT on board with the Trump administration’s attempts to sweep the entire trans community under the rug, I happily include the gender-bending final duet from Strauss’s Rosenkavalier, sung by the velvet-voiced Tatiana Troyanos and the radiant Judith Blegan. The voluptuousness of their paired sound will take you to paradise.

13. I’ll end by straying a bit outside the operatic realm, to another brilliant diva deserving of mention any time, but particularly during Black History Month — Lena Horne, in “My Funny Valentine.

Recipes:

Coeur à la crème

1 cup cottage cheese

1 cup cream cheese

1/2 cup sour cream

1/2 cup heavy cream

Beat together cottage cheese, cream cheese & sour cream with electric mixer until well blended. Whip cream and fold into cheese mix. Line mold with cheesecloth, letting edges overlap. Smooth mixture into mold, packing firmly. Fold cheesecloth over top and place mold, bottom down, on plate. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight. To serve, unfold onto platter. Remove cheesecloth. Serve with strawberry sauce and garnish with fresh strawberries

Strawberry Sauce

2 10-oz packs frozen strawberries

1/2 cup sugar (or more to taste)

1 Tbsp. Framboise, kirsch, mirabelle or other white spirits

Mix berries with sugar in blender. Blend to fine purée. Add liqueur. Serve chilled in sauceboat.

Sand Tarts

3/4 cup butter

1 1/4 cups sugar

1 egg

1 egg yolk

1 tsp. Vanilla

3 cups all-purpose flour, sifted before measuring

1/4 tsp. Salt

Colored sanding sugars

Cream butter and sugar until very soft and creamy. Beat in egg and yolk, vanilla and flour. Chill dough for 1 hour. 

Preheat oven to 400°. Roll dough very thin. Cut into heart shapes and transfer to ungreased cookie sheet. Decorate with red and pink sanding sugar. Bake for 6-8 minutes, depending on thinness. They should be just a tiny bit tanned around the edges.