A – Aphrodisiacs
“Turtle soup with ambergris, sole à la normande, reindeer fillet in cream sauce, salmis of veal, roasted young pigeon, watercress salad, asparagus in hollandaise sauce, bone marrow pudding, port; Bordeaux, coffee and coca.” This menu, from a C19th collection, was the highest tech amorous enhancement available to a blissfully previagran world. It’s hard to imagine following a blowout like that with a night of anything other than crippling indigestion and drunken flatulence, but perhaps our ancestors were tougher than we credit them.
According to the French, who spend far too much time theorising about this sort of thing, aphrodisiac qualities are attributed to food for many reasons: physical resemblance to the genitals, a perceived fecundity or sexual prowess in the donor animal, a general heating effect on the blood or intoxication. Were this true, one could infallibly score with a dinner of large, comedy turnips, rabbit curry and a surfeit of alcohol.
I find any and all food to be potentially aphrodisiac in the right circumstances. While still at college my flatmate and I discovered that, with minimal effort we could save ourselves from a diet of takeaway and pot noodle simply by learning to cook. By learning to cook better we guaranteed ourselves a string of grateful dates. It doesn’t take much. Successful results from student Bolognese rather knock holes in the argument for oysters and champagne.
The secret seems to be in the way that food becomes a measure of effort and, by extrapolation, caring. Blokes aren’t usually good at expressing affection or cooking. By getting the sauce right and the pasta al dente, a fellow can usually generate enough happy confusion to ensure the desired result