Felipe Fernández-Armesto chooses ambience over aphrodisiacs
Choose ambience over aphrodisiacs for Valentine’s Day, says Felipe FernándezArmesto
‘‘ Scientific experiment shows,” proclaimed my English poetry primer, “that moonlight on stained glass does not produce this effect.” The footnote was to a line in The Eve of St Agnes — the only poem with a description of sexual intercourse approved for young minds — in which “warm gules” appear like brothel-neon on the heroine’s “fair breast”, while “her fragrant bodice creeps rustling to her knees.” (Maybe Keats didn’t know that St Agnes defended her virtue even in a bordello.)
The hero — “ethereal, flushed and like a throbbing star” — produces a feast of aphrodisiacs from a handily placed cupboard. Then “into her dream he melted, as the rose blendeth its odour with the violet.”
The two most notable saints in the calendar for January and February, Agnes and Valentine, have been appropriated, despite their chastity, as pretexts for erotic eating. In a cold climate, love is a seasonal dish.
Keats’s menu had the typical taste and texture of a love feast: sweet, sticky and squelchy, featuring “quince and plum and gourd and jellies soother than the creamy curd.” The “spicèd dainties” had the extra allure of exoticism — “from silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.” The original St Agnes would have been unmoved. She dismissed her suitor’s gifts, somewhat unappetisingly, as “nutriment of sin and food of death”.
The legend, however, that lovers appear to sleeping virgins on 19th
January licensed Keats’s fantasy. The search for effective aphrodisiacs has continued undaunted. Readers who are planning menus for St Agnes’s eve and St Valentine’s Day may appreciate a word to the wise.
Magicians and procurers in every society have encouraged the quest. Thrashed borage seeds, according to one school of thought, were the aphrodisiac of choice in paleolithic times. They don’t work for me.
Pythagoras, mythicized as a mathematician and proto-scientist, was a magus, whose followers believed that he had a golden penis. “Thou wretch,” he warned the erotically susceptible, who knew that proteins feed passion, “abstain from beans!” Most dietitians have detected no effect except flatulence.
Truffles are widely fancied. BrillatSavarin put their reputation to the test. “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” he replied to those who accused him of “an investigation indelicate and likely to provoke cynical laughter. The pursuit of truth is always praiseworthy.” One of his interviewees confessed that her guest became uncharacteristically importunate after a supper of “superb truffled fowl from Périgord . . . What can I say, Monsieur? I put it all down to the truffles.”
As my primer might have said, scientific experiment does not endorse her inference. The High Sexuality Diet, however, reports that truffles contain hormones “identical to those contained in the male boar’s saliva at the time of mating”. Which part of the anatomy is the author trying to pull?
Supposedly suggestive foods — asparagus tips, felt between fingers, or the slither and softness of the vulvashaped mussel — recall squelching organs and sexual fluids to suitably disposed minds.
The open allure of the oyster, from whose shell Aphrodite sprang, was a stimulant to lust in the Dutch Golden