Erotic Cuisine: a Natural History of Aphrodisiac Cookery

By Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz

The idea that gastronomy and sex are related is not new. Its been expressed through art, literature, early science, in locker rooms, beauty salons and on the street. Some examples of these expressions are included as context for the aphrodisiac recipes which follow. For millennia, cooks have prepared dishes enriched with ingredients they judged to be sensually invigorating, and this tradition continues today. Some approaches are humorous, while others are doubting and satirical. Yet others are ponderously medical. This book is none of the above. It offers an anthropological approach to the spicy life of love and food which includes cross-cultural, historical and current views. It is the kind of natural history which consists of culinary history and recipes in equal measure. After all, the mind - which is perhaps the most potent aphrodisiac - should be cultivated in equal measure to the body which is physically stirred by erotic passion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 12, 2001
• ISBN: 9781462832231

Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz

Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz, a retired Cultural Anthropologist, enjoys writing fiction, non-fiction and culinary history. After many world travels, she appreciates retirement in the beautiful, rocky desert surrounding Palm Springs. She invites you to travel with her on her published trips through the times and spaces of a fictional shared world and history.

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EROTIC CUISINE:

A NATURAL HISTORY OF APHRODISIAC COOKERY

Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz

Copyright © 2000 by Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

APPENDIX OF SOURCES FOR INGREDIENTS AND SPICES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CONSULTED SOURCES

SELECTED APHRODISIAC BOOKS IN THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION

My gratitude to those who shared their time and recipes with me during more than the decade when I data-gathered for this book. And for the many tasters of dishes made and critiqued. They came from many countries and cultures. And most of all, thanks for the memories of a true world class eater: in memory of Robert Ravicz, Ph.D. Then to my children and to theirs. Last of all, to you.

EROTIC CUISINE:

A NATURAL HISTORY OF APHRODISIAC COOKERY

CHAPTER I

SETTING THE STAGE OR STAGING THE SETTING

Take me a turtledove

And in an oven let her lie and bake

So dry that of her you may powder make

Which, being put into a cup of wine,

The wench that drink’st it will to love incline.

(Quotation from Rowlands, an early English Playwright)

IF YOU WERE to test your aphrodisiac food quotient today, how would you score? You might rate about average if you mention oysters, eggs, shellfish and maybe—just maybe—the noble truffle. But what if you wanted to score higher in the erotic food game? To learn more about the culinary history of aphrodisiacs, the ins and outs of Aphrodite’s and Venus’ dedication to erotic eating? To be the first in your block and maybe your city to become an expert in this recondite field of sensual endeavor? If your answer is yes, read on. And after reading on, cook on and love will blossom in the context of a wealth of historical precedents.

For thousands of years humans have searched for edibles to enhance their sex lives as eagerly as they sought to transform

base metals to gold. Gastronomy is linked to a sister art, love, since glands, digestion and the mind stoke passion just as fire heats the hearth. The passion meant here is one of sex, of the come-and-go, the preening … of two people who know enough … to woo with food as well as flattery (M.F.K. Fisher,7foe Art of Eating, p. 678).

The idea that gastronomy and sex are related is certainly not new. It has been expressed for millennia through art, literature and early science; as well as in streets, beauty salons and locker rooms. Some examples of these expressions are included in this book to serve as context for the aphrodisiac cookery recipes which follow. Some sample the past and others point to the future. You may have your own store of aphorisms and proverbs to add.

Since before written history, cooks undoubtedly prepared dishes enriched with ingredients they judged to be sensually invigorating, and this tradition continues today. There are many approaches to this endeavor: some are humorous and off the cuff; others are doubting and satirical; and some are ponderous and medical. This study is none of the above, but offers an anthropological approach to the spicy life of love and food which includes cross-cultural, historical and current views. It is the kind of natural history which consists of culinary history and recipes in equal measure. After all, the mind, which is perhaps the most potent aphrodisiac, should be cultivated in equal measure to the body which is physically stirred by erotic passion.

Most people who read cook books realize that they are not novels. So they are not wedded to peruse them chapter by chapter and often skip around with abandon. For this reason, I offer the following outline to guide your skip-around predilections. Pick, choose and ready yourself to cook with love and for love.

The following is our plan for action. An introductory chapter reaches back through millennia to relate human evolution to the importance of food and commensality, of eating together. The second chapter contains selected references to culinary history and samples cross-cultural ideas about aphrodisiacs. A third chapter refers to human sensing systems, since these furnish the vehicles for the planning and enjoyment of aphrodisiac meals, just as they do for any other ‘art’ form. The fourth chapter lists some of the many ingredients traditionally accepted as aphrodisiac, and the fifth includes recipes which follow the typical service order for meals. The sixth chapter includes foods for dining al fresco, along with comments regarding the nature of love and picnics. In the seventh chapter, recipes for potions and beverages are included. The final brief chapter bids you farewell and fondly cheers you on your way as new members in the ancient order of aphrodisiac chefs.

The literary excerpts included illustrate how food and love have sparked centuries of writing which link the lust for food with the lust of erotic expression. Some poems even include recipes from different historical periods! By savoring these, a personal cooking odyssey can tap the richesse of ancestral examples. Occasional suggestions regarding environmental and decorative props are also included, along with a bibliography of pertinent publications which aficionados of aphrodisiac cookery might wish to consult.

Through most of history, the use of aphrodisiacs has operated between the culinary and medical worlds in a kind of liminal arena pertinent to both. In this book, however, even when describing drinks noted as potions, emphasis remains on the culinary. Today, some aphrodisiacs have become completely unhinged from the culinary and relegated to the status of prescribed medications. It isn’t a bad thing that pills, if they are not harmful, can prolong sexual excitation for the male; but medical automation is never that much creative fun.

Although aphrodisiac cookery emerged out of a medical and quasi-scientific background, it has merited only minimal scientific experimentation in modern times. This seems strange considering the weight of its importance, but there you have it. So there remains a caveat about whether or not there exists a strictly scientific basis for suggesting that certain foods are aphrodisiac. On the other hand, since this premise is seldom investigated scientifically, you are free to subject it to your own proof in the pudding so to speak.

At any rate, food, eating and love are so life-affirming that no one can lose in any endeavor entailing this mighty triad. Serve your aphrodisiac dishes forth with grace and beauty! You are part of an ancient tradition of specialty cooks.

So while Aphrodisiac cookers of the World Unite under banners which celebrate the natural history of erotic cuisine, let the stage be set and the setting be staged by an ancient love and life-affirming song which links foods, the senses and erotic love. Theologians tell us of that there is spiritual symbolism lurking in this verse. But you can always choose your own interpretation.

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.

As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.

Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick with love… .

The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape gives a good smell.

(Chapter two, Songs of Solomon)

Food ingredients and their preparation are so important that they helped to shape the historical fates of entire nations. Even today they remain critical to trade alliances and political platforms. This is no surprise since food has always functioned as a linchpin between the personal and social. Eating together—commensality—provides one important archaic pillar of social order, and anthropologists have concluded that it assumed this status during the formative period of human evolution.

The synergy involved among food gathering, preparation and sharing reached the level of simple hunger satisfaction early. Later, when greater varieties of foods were available, these—along with innovations in cooking methods and containers—gave impetus to the creation of fine cuisines.

From the beginning, food and eating have served as biological and expressive universals, and special dishes were relied on to elevate eating from simple gruel-grubbing to feasting with aesthetic trappings. Even museums now feature exhibitions illustrating how the presentation of highly decorative dishes transforms mere dining into an art form. But meals can and do also stimulate an anticipation of erotic pleasures. Just listen to the famous Sheikh Nefzawi whose voice dates back to the sixteenth century through The Perfumed Garden:

… The causes which tend to develop the passion for coition are six in number: the fire of an ardent love, the superabundance of sperm, the proximity of the loved person whose possession is eagerly desired, the beauty of the face, exciting viands and contact (Sheikh Nefzawi, p. 111).

Anthropologists place great stock in describing the importance of food gathering and processing as critical activity patterns which separate us humans from our non-human animal cohorts. Let’s think about the implications of this idea. For aeons, humans found it imperative to transform animals into food, although the reverse was fortunately less common. Then as now, each society generated rules—some quite rigid—about proper foods and their proper consumption. These rules function like microcosms of macrocosmic cultural values, especially when some are also embedded in religious ideals.

Anyone who wishes to explore pertinent examples can consult such books as: Claude Levi Strauss, The Origin of Table Manners; Jeremy Mac Clancy, Consuming Culture; Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner; and, Marvin Harris, Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture.

While most societies simply link food with pleasure empirically by analyzing the contents of experience, early East Indian philosophers suggested that food becomes part of human being itself. This more metaphysical approach was noted in the ancient Taittiriya Upanishad which defines human ontology as follows:

From food indeed do creatures come to birth,

Whatever [creatures] dwell on earth.

Then again by food they live,

And again pass into it in the end.

For food is the chief of beings,

Hence it is called the elixir of all.

All food most certainly do they attain

Who reverence Brahman as food.

For food is the chief of beings,

Hence it is called the elixir of all.

From food do beings come to birth,

When born, by food they grow,

Eaten, it eats [all] beings,

Hence it is known as food {an-na, ‘eatable’} …

Bravo! Bravo! Bravo! I am food! I am food! I am food!

I am an eater of food! I am an eater of food! I am an eater of food!

(cited in Joan & John Digby, pp. 38-40).

I am food! So food is serious business with highly expressive qualities of communication. In this work, the expressive communication aspect centers on a specific appeal: sex appeal. After all, doesn’t one canonical pillar of Western religion, the book of Genesis, symbolically link disobedience to sexual awareness which arose from eating the infamous apple (quince or whatever)? But that remains the concern of theology and not culinary history. Yet after that, the apple (or whatever) suffered bad press and only centuries later emerged from its nefarious past to become a healthful food with only a hint of the erotic. Why have aphrodisiacs been popular throughout human history and probably before? Or is this by definition a stupid question? For males, the focus apparently was (and still is) to enhance potency and/or staying power. For females, the traditional issue was focussed less on performance than on fecundity: the power to reproduce, since lineage was of greater economic and social importance than merely fueling the libido. While both reasons may remain important, it is unlikely that the desire to enhance sensual pleasure was ever absent from the medical or culinary search for aphrodisiacs. On the contrary, increasing pleasure remains a constant in the inventory of reasons offered for the use of aphrodisiacs by both sexes.

Philosophic niggling aside, the link between food and sex is relatively easy to understand. Each life commences with a sexually-based liaison of eating and satisfaction: a linking of breast (or nipple-on-bottle) with warmth, bodily contact and a feeling of replete satisfaction. And food fuels every human life stage. In fact in most societies, the shift from one life stage to another is celebrated by feasting. Our own word bridal is a contraction of bride and ale. Most human rites of passage involve food shared in some kind of celebratory feast during which libidinous expressions sometimes emerge as well.

Many cultures reveal their connections between sex and food through expressed taboos, myths or rituals which define proper etiquette. Copulation and resulting births were sometimes thought of as analogous to the sowing and production of crops. Therefore, in some rural societies, ritual intercourse, during which the seeds were ‘enriched’ by the effluvia of human sex, preceeded planting. Aphrodisiac food for plants?

Since humans seem ever eager to embellish biological imperatives with aesthetic trappings, many poems and love songs express emotions, or the physical characteristics of the beloved, in terms of food. One richly sensual example is the following love poem by the Haitian poet Emile Roumer:

High-yellow of my heart, with breasts like tangerines, you taste better to me than eggplant stuffed with crab, you are the tripe in my pepper-pot, the dumpling in my peas, my tea of aromatic herbs. You are the corned beef whose customhouse is my heart, my mush with syrup which trickles down my throat. You are a steaming dish, mushroom cooked with rice, crisp potato fries, and little fish fried brown … My hankerings for love follow you wherever you go. Your bum is a gorgeous basket brimming with fruits and meat.

(cited in Evan Jones, p. 276 )

If we wish to comprehend the intimate intricacies of the natural history of erotic cookery, we need to understand how the linkage between sex and food came about during human evolution. And considering these ideas leads us to think about the aesthetic, the artful. For art, a human universal, is also an inevitable concomitant of evolutionary history. And food preparation and presentation have many artistic aspects.

Socialization ties food with sharing in all societal levels from hunters/gatherers to post-industrial world cities, because food, affection and emotional warmth are linked to a home-base. At least that’s been the case until recently when, although evolution appears stabilized, we see a weakening in the fabric of that linkage in our contemporary world of pandemic nervous system stimulation.

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While many literary examples expressing similar ideas could be cited, one will do: that of a Frenchman, Grimod de la Reyniere (1758-1838), who wrote extensively on culinary history and influenced Continental attitudes toward food. He was a shrewd observer of social patterns and reported there are only two essentials for a home: the kitchen and the bedroom. You might want to add bathrooms and television, but that’s another story.

Since even the latest trends and aesthetic components of great world cuisines are rooted in human evolution, to better understand this, our first mental trip is backwards. very far backwards in time.

Physical anthropologists suggest that the direction of human evolution was closely linked to hunting and gathering activities which netted not only food, but also the materials for tools, shelter and clothing. Collectivity, or working in small then larger groups, enhanced successful hunting and gathering. This successful adaptive arrangement spurred the development of language, and shaped the bases for human organization. In other words, collective activity and sharing proved to be highly adaptive.

Because food was necessary to life, food sharing rules dominated even small hunting groups. If broken, the results might include strarvation, ostracism or even death, as noted in remaining analogous cultures. Since the genes of the best fed and adapted parents were more often represented in subsequent generations, they became our progenitors. Maybe our most loving progenitors.

Research suggests that divisions of labor between the sexes developed early. It also suggests that tasks were allocated based on physical differences in size and sexual functions and nothing else. Females gave birth to infants, and thus required quiescent periods during the later days of pregnancy and birthing. So it seemed a good practice to establish base camps as activity centers. Home bases provided a place for nursing/caring activities and were most consistently used by females, children and less vigorous elders.

Males didn’t need to cope with childbearing and were larger and stronger than females. So while males ranged farther and hunted, most gathering activities were performed by females who roved the environmental niches around camps to search for foods and other raw materials. This is not to say men didn’t also gather similar materials during their ranging and hunting, because they undoubtedly did. It is also the case that females hunted smaller animals and, during later periods, both sexes participated in complex hunting drives which required many people.

Ranging and hunting for animals also involved hunting for other humans, less often as potential foodstuffs—although archeological evidence indicates cannibalism occured—but to spur the exchange of persons for mating. While searching far for a mate does not appear to be a huge problem today, earlier humans relied on their clan or tribe to help them find appropriate mates. Since groups were small, it was necessary and proper to develop liaisons with other similar groups in order to marry-out. Group exchanges of people as well as goods resulted; and ever since, trade has furnished a cornerstone for human relationships whether intra-group or inter-group in nature.

The more pernicious sex-specific divisions of labor were not generated during the earliest human evolutionary periods. They came about after the agricultural revolution with its sedentary residence patterns when different divisions of labor were incumbent upon farming families: inside of the home and outside of the home and garden. This equation became: inside (female) + outside (male) = the root of unequal pay and opportunity. The perimeters of the acceptable became sex-defined in a new way. Females exceeded these boundaries only when economically necessary until recently.

Most anthropologists conclude that females were the primary ‘inventors’ of agriculture, since their occupational orientation was focussed on the selection, gathering and storing of plants. They learned to recognize the most useful plants, and grew to understand their life cycles and the functions of propagation and seeds. When leftover seeds dropped on the ground and another plant generation appeared, the conscious move to control and expand this process eventuated in proto-farming.

Since this hypothesis appears to be valid, it represents a monumental case of females being hoisted on their own petards for centuries afterwards. But after the industrial and post-industrial revolutions, when people reside in cities without gardens or rural niches, the original justifications for keeping females homebound has become null and void. Any such reasons remain cultural and not biological artifacts, even if they continue to define the roles of both sexes as differential economic beasts of burden.

But back to the ancient picture. Successful hunting and gathering adaptations depended on quick physical reactions and sensory acuteness to the environment. To the best memories and recognition talents belonged the spoils. And to the best fed belonged the highest potential for living long enough to procreate repeatedly. After all, infant death was frequent, and the human ancestral life span was much shorter than it is in most societies today.

Once again the liaison between sex with food appears, now filtered through the veil of successful nervous systems. Individuals with good perception and recall regarding animal haunts or niches rich in plants were more successful sexually. Those quickest to recognize the types, colors, cycles and locations of desired footstuffs were the best fed and most dominant. It’s an old story, repeated when current sensitive individuals choose the best restaurants or bars for maximum erotic potential. Or among aphrodisiac cooks who know precisely what they are doing!

It is relatively well established that the diet of paleolithic humans was primarily vegetal, with animal products proportionately less represented. If your mental image of the ‘cave men’ suggests a stooped hairy apelike creature gorging only on haunches of meat, forget it. However, this doesn’t mean our ancestors were vegans either. They may have devoured more plant materials, but undoubtedly ate any and most animals they could catch and kill. Plants are easier to catch, after all. Logically, the best fed were perhaps also the most potent sexually. And since their memories for different ingredients were better, food preferences may have gained momentum early during human evolution.

We see how intelligence and survival were intimately connected during evolution. The most alert human nervous systems were more successful in securing food. And intelligent individuals were also more successful in the manufacture of tools and the creation of the innovations on which advances in human development depended. Experimentation and innovation must have played a role in the discovery that fire, initially another gift from nature, made foodstuffs more palatable and easily digested. While it remains a little difficult to imagine the caveperson as chef, filleting or mincing with a stone knife, and dashing outside for a few sprigs of wild onion, it probably came to pass. Early memories were perhaps spurred by the wonder of what came to pass after an especially aphrodisiac dinner.

Successful hunting and gathering sometimes netted an abundance: more than enough for daily subsistence. The presence of extra food was celebrated through feasting or whatever passed as joy and happiness among our sloping-foreheaded ancestors. Time, repetition and human inventiveness eventuated in ritualized sharing, along with the songs, dances and special objects chosen to communicate appreciation for nature’s gifts. Eventually, great religious dramas and celebrations developed around food consumption, sociability and gratitude which was directed to a god or gods.

While eyes may glaze over when considering that all this happened such a long time ago, perhaps we forget our heritage at our own peril. However small the abundance, and however far we have strayed from the natural into the manufactured world, there should be time for sharing and celebrating any surplus we are able to offer family and friends. Even those from other ‘tribes.’

The human penchant for rituals is deeply seated. It permeates human neurology and we are literally coded for ritual behaviors. As hominids developed physically, speech and interactions became more predictable. Participants learned to share systems of learned symbols. Sound, color, spaces and the materials for manipulations were elaborated.

Those who learned how to avoid illness and enhance curing became important to the group. Their special knowledge as healers was honored and placed them apart. Again, women probably dominated early in this sphere which was more plant than animal oriented. With settled life and emerging male social dominance, these patterns changed too; although among primitive societies today, women phytotherapists or curers remain popular.

Life and ritual celebrations developed to include such artistic items as decorations and special foods prepared for the occasion. Sometimes the objects—however beautiful—were ritu-ally destroyed, and we know how food disappears! But the aesthetic ephemerality of such items remained enshrined in memory, especially since they usually represented artistic transformations of familiar materials from the natural environment. Their ephemeral nature required repeated manufacture, and interaction among participants during their making made them important vehicles for teaching social values. Food remained central to these special celebrations.

Eating together is a celebration of survival. A meal is a metaphor for the acceptance—both emotionally and socially—of one or more individuals engaged in sharing. Whether merely sharing one basic food item or engaged in prolonged feasting, commensality occasions positive social interaction. Eating together remains a stable component of the small group, whether family or work-based. The meal as metaphor for personal and social acceptance, or for the expression of deep-seated values and social expectations, remains implicit during dining today.

Every culture has guidance principles which define acceptable food ingredients, and how interactions during meals should be conducted. These rules range from mandated complete silence (perhaps for religious reasons), to limiting what are socially acceptable topics in conversation. Seating arrangements can be important, and the do’s and don’ts of food handling and tool use are elaborately ritualized. Or at least they were until some current generations. Graceful acquiesence to these rules affirms sociability. When Cicero’s friend Paetus said that he wanted to stop attending boring dinner parties, the sometimes churlish Roman orator tried to change his mind by making the following case for conviviality:

Really, Paetus, I advise you to spend time in honest, pleasant, and friendly company … I am not thinking of the physical pleasure of dining, but of community life and habit, and of mental recreation, of which familiar conversation is the most effective agent; and conversation is at its most agreeable at dinner-parties. In this respect we Romans are wiser than the Greeks. They use words meaning literally ‘co-drinkings’ (symposia) or ‘co-dinings’ (syndeipna), but we say ‘co-livings’ (convivial), because at dinner-parties, more than anywhere else, life is lived in company.

Dining rules and the aesthetics of etiquette change, but their presence is constant through history. Elegant Romans tickled their throats with feathers to incite vomiting so that they could eat more. Egyptians ate sitting and with both sexes present, while the Greeks dined reclining and usually segretated by sex. Arabs burp loudly to signal their content, but others are horrified by such eructions. By the thirteenth century in Europe, a set of Fifty Courtesies of the Table defined appropriate conduct when dining. Among these are the following guidelines:

Do not fill your mouth too full; the glutton who fills his mouth will not be able to reply when spoken to.

Those taking soup do not swallow your spoons. (sic!)

Let those who serve be clean, and let the servants be free from any smell which might give nausea to those eating.

Let the hands be clean, and above all do not at table scratch your head, nor indeed any portion of your body.

When eating with others, do not sheath your knife before everyone else at the table has done.

Do not mix together on your plate all sorts of viands, meat and eggs, for it may disgust your neighbor. (excerpted from George Lang, pp. 86-87).

If eating together is healthy and important to humans, eating alone hints of intentional or necessary alienation. While most personal or social wounds can’t be healed by inviting someone to dinner, or by simply saying ‘let’s do lunch,’ the sharing of affection and love through food remains a life-affirming gesture. Eating together is pleasurable and results in profound sensual satisfaction. Conviviality isn’t possible for the alienated or solitary person since it depends on sharing with another or others. And eating with others is, as Cicero said, life lived in company.

Guest hospitality through food sharing is a protected status among most societies. The breaking of bread and sharing of salt signals—however temporary—the suspension of hostility and the affirmation of shared humanity. The lonely diner evokes a kind of sadness. To document this, note the appended passage entitled the bachelor dinner, from The Futurist Cookbook, by Futurist artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, p.115:

Futurist cooking sets out to avoid the usual pitfalls of eating alone:

1)     The anti-human solitude that fatally drains a part of

the stomach’s vital forces.

2)     The meditative silence of meditative thought which

taints the food and makes it leaden.

3)     The lack of a living, human, fleshy presence, which is

indispensable for keeping alive the palate of the man who is confined to the zone of animal flesh.

4) The invitable speeding-up of the rhythm of the jaws as they take flight from boredom.

In a dining room decorated with Aeropaintings and aerosculpture by the Futurists Tato, Benedetto, Dottori and Mino Rossom, on a table whose four legs are made of accordians, some food portraits are presented on jungling plates bordered with bells:

1)     ‘Blonde Food Portrait’: a beautifully sculpted roast

veal with two long eyes of garlic in a dishevelment of chopped boiled cabbage and small green lettuces. Dangling earrings of little red radishes soaked in honey.

2)     ‘Dark Man-Friend Food Portrait’: well modelled cheeks

of pastry—moustache and hair of chocolate—big eyes of milk and honey with pupils of liquorice. A split pomegranate for the mouth. A nice necktie of tripe in broth.

3)     ‘Beautiful Nude Food Portrait’: in a small crystal bowl

full of fresh milk, two boiled capon thighs, the whole scattered with violets.

4)     ‘Food Portrait of the Enemies’: seven cubes of Cremona

naugat, each one with a little well of vinegar on top and a big bell hanging on one side.

Alas, although it is unlikely that such tongue-in-cheek portraits could help the solitary diner much, the sentiment expressed is genuine if surreal. But dear erotic chef, please note that many aphrodisiac ingredients are included in the menu. Could that be happenstance?

What have these ruminations told us about our subject, in case you’ve forgotten while rambling around in the muck of early human history? They remind us that our archaic past has more profound present reverberations than previously imagined. They remind us that we are far from—yet ever near to—the archaic roots of our evolutionary heritage which continues to shape human eating patterns and the atavistic need for commensality.

While gathering and hunting extend far back in hominid history, directives which recommend specific foods as aphrodisiac are far more recent. Or at least we think so. Our historical data-bank of information regarding aphrodisiacs reaches back only to relatively recent times, since by definition history is primarily written. Although archeology reveals that rituals using primitive altars with decorative offerings and footstuffs date back nearly 100,000 years, documentation of herbal magic and love potions reach back only as far as written history. But oral traditions undoubtedly preceded written history.

Since our knowledge about different cultures is not equal in depth, we must be satisfied with the available data which favor some cultures more than others. This pattern is reflected in following chapters which are more Western than Asian.

The use of aphrodisiac potions and foods remains widespread. Hints about them are gathered from fables, myths, the association of special foods with spirits or gods, as well as later historical references to specific practices. Jokes and folklore link foods and satisfactory sex. From millennium-old references up to viewing such movies as Le Grand Bouffe or Tom Jones, food and sexual stimulation remain linked. The Chinese penchant for using food to reinforce social and sexual ties is evident in the film Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. And the magically realistic exploration of food, cultural patterns and sex depicted in Like Water for Chocolate bears ample witness to this awareness.

This cookbook means to be informative, sometimes amusing, useful, and above all expressive of an attitude which is respectful of human bodies, minds and aesthetic sensibilities. It should evoke warm human bonding and enhance sensuality with wider meaning. While some recipes included are so perverse it is unlikely you will try them, they are here to inform, amuse and introduce unusual cross cultural examples. Cooking becomes creative art if its presentation stimulates as many senses as possible in a satisfying manner.

The relationship between aesthetics and food is often celebrated through the visual and plastic arts. A significant percentage of paintings from Asian or Western cultures depict food, in or outdoor dining, food preparation or some combination of these activities. A number of recent cookbooks attest to famous artists’ interests in cuisine, recipes and how foods were related to their particular life and environments. Salvador Dali, master of the surreal in thought and deed, documented his ‘philosophic’ ideas about aesthetics and food as the "Spirito-Mystic Monarchic, Catholic, Apostolic, Romanism of DALINIAN GASTRO ESTHETICS.’ In, Les Diners de Dali, he writes:

I attribute capitol esthetic and moral values to food in general… . The jaw is our best tool to grasp philosophical knowledge … I hold visceral impulses to be the supreme indicator … My enlightenment is born and propagated through my guts … Everything begins in the mouth before going elsewhere with the nerves … The jaws of my mind are in perpetual motion … The supreme philosophic tool of man, is his contact with reality through his jaws … The essential intelligence housed in the tabernacle of my palate beckons me to pay the greatest amount of attention to food … (excerpted from Captain J. Peter

Moore, pp. 10-12).

As historical context, the next chapter samples various dining and feasting patterns which exemplify the importance of food as cultural expression: especially those with an erotic aura. The

Latin word for hearth is focus. A curious shift of history now relegates the ‘hearth’ to the kitchen, and ‘focus’ to the realm of cognition and the senses. Yet their implicit theme remains one of bonding. Remember that the kitchen and bedroom function as two ends of one continuum!

CHAPTER II

the presence of our past: a history of dining delights

There was a young lady of Kent,

Who said that she knew what it meant

When men asked her to dine.

And served cocktails and wine;

She knew, oh she knew—but she went!

(Anonymous)

SINCE NOT EVERY edible is thought to be aphrodisiac, we need to consider how and when humans became aware of food as comestible with flavor and variable results, rather than mere fodder. We know that during the paleolithic period (750,000