Plathological

Honey Wine

Cenamorous:

“an intimate meal, often laden with aphrodisiacs, whose intention is to arouse feelings of passion. From Italian cena, ‘supper.’” [Gastrabulary, A Future Terminology of Eating: Ken Alba and Lisa Cooperman]

Sure, I’ll blanch the quart of almonds, and will never have to see their original form again. Pound them, using a mortar, take note of phrases like: stir well together, over a gentle fire, come to a fine paste, take care and, perhaps most tellingly: serve when hot.

Thus, Pilaff Bey instructs me on the making of Almond Soup, the first recipe in Venus in the Kitchen or Love’s Cookery Book. This is aphrodisiac cooking as captured in the forties, peeling, chopping and melting with the intention of getting laid or, at the very least: finding the life partner of my most subconscious/Jungian dreams. All I’m asking is: he better not be a skinny little shit, though it’d be easy enough to fatten him up nicely with Pie of Bulls’ Testicles (you take four of them, Bey informs. And, after boiling in saltwater, you must promptly strip them of the membranes that cover them). That should do the trick—how can boiled bull parts fail me in any way?

All is well with me, save for the fact that I’m spending my afternoons dressed in tight-fitting tweed under the sun while scanning the pages of Love’s Cookery for phrases, (because for me, phrases are enough) that will get me off. Bey took twelve years putting this book together (“twelve years is a long period of time,” he writes in the preface, “but my leisure is not wholly given up to researches of this kind . . . I have other ‘hobbies,’ as they are called, such as the collecting of Persian carpets . . .” and who could have denied him such divine pleasures?). I, for one, have tightly bound principles. Trusting a man who collects Persian rugs as a “hobby” with telling me how to get my sex life going is definitely one of those principles.

Though I only know of his flair for recipes and subtly sardonic tones--little else, really, I love Bey. Here is a man who has handled the testicles of lambs, adding a good-sized pinch of powered cinnamon, and quite possibly served the dish to a lady for the purpose of testing. There’s just something about a man who’ll handle mounds of stripped animal testicles just to see if you’ll lift your skirt for him that I find grotesquely, perhaps dangerously, intriguing. I also find it hot. Obviously. I want him to serve me. I want to be served.

Bey also has brains. Fried Brain of Beef, Brain with Truffles, Brain of Veal a la Mustafa, even the flutter of Sparrows’ Brains. I’ll invite a follower of Foucault or Derrida (i.e.: one who lives to deconstruct and add suffixes, prefixes onto any word that will take them) over for Brain with Truffles (how could he resist such an offer? I mean, there’ll be a steamy-hot brain dripping on the table, served as the main course). Be sure to clean (the sheep brains) well of red veins, so as not to, you know, terrify the poor bastard off, fork in hand. Nothing says flaccid cock faster than veiny sheep brains dripping red.

Perhaps Sparrows’ Brains might produce more desired results. Apparently, “Sparrows have always been praised as stimulants,” Bey says from the recipe’s get-go. Makes sense. Chaucer did use the phrase “lecherous as a sparrow” in The Canterbury Tales, did he not? I think we’re all in agreement here, especially with that literary reference. So, let’s get to it: “Whoever wants to test this should take several brains of male sparrows and half the quantity of the brains of pigeons which have not yet begun to fly.” I find the last portion of that instruction to be highly poetic. It makes me want to read recipes all the time. It makes me want to take dead things, things that have not yet learned to fly, and create flight with them, cover them with goat milk sauce. Flight in my own (sex) life. I mean, I'm easily taken that way. I can be got with one phrase or twist of phrase, alone.

It may be difficult to tell whether I am being at all serious. What tone am I cooking up here, anyway? We’re talking coercion, sauces, sex: in these matters, one can either take things all too lightly or all too seriously-- rare, well done, charred to the bone. Regarding sexy recipes, I mean every word. I seem to be matching Bey, tone for tone, quip for quip. So it seems.

There are drinks, of course. Alcoholic ones. Give me one sip of red wine and I’ll want to molest the person sitting next to me, gender or previous history (or lack thereof) with me not an issue. If one can simply get some box-wine, get drunk off his or her ass and put one’s tongue through the first desirable (or handy) mouth in view, why bother with something so fully loaded with overt intention, something so time consuming as the reading up on and gathering the ingredients for aphrodisiac recipes? Because, as Bey points out, the usual drinks are not enough in the Lover & Co. department. Apparently, I have been missing out on something big all these years of carrying gin & tonic in my little flask. Maybe Bey’s drinks can make the one night stands even better. Maybe I’ll start to forget faces, as well as names. Wouldn’t that be dandy? All that sex, so little baggage.

Let’s get started! As I flip through Bey’s section on Drinks, I come to something called Hysterical Water. Sounds simply mad! Good enough for me. But, in case it wasn’t, let’s just say there are a lot of roots involved. Beaten roots, added to a quarter of a pound of dried millipedes. And, if getting drunk off of a pile of desiccated insects that appeared in the reoccurring nightmares of my childhood still isn’t enough to make me jump into the mugwort water, then at least there’s Bey’s ever gentle, well mannered use of the English language: “You may draw off nine pints of water, and sweeten it to your taste.” Yes, I may, darling. “Bottle it up,” he says.

Despite my obsessive fascination with Bey’s sexily quaint old-world deviant phraseology, my bottom line is this: serve a man a good enough meal and he’ll no doubt go for seconds and will have to unbuckle his pants anyway. But, in the mean time: “Take a good piece of tenderloin. Beat it well,” to, you know, brush up on your Loin of Beef.

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Addendum: I have not tried any of these recipes since the food bank feeds me, and, unless any of these recipes can be made with fruit from a can, smooth peanut butter, macaroni and cheese from a box and frozen loaves of bread (which they can not), I assure you, Bey’s grand dreams of improving my sex life with dishes that are “very stimulating indeed” are bound to fail. So, I guess my real Bottom Line is: find me a job and I'll either a) be your best friend or b) give you the best blow job of your life. As long as the job does not involve the giving of blow jobs, because I'm clearly better than that.

Posted by caroline at June 6, 2005 7:25 PM