Food

As an ingredient becomes common, and thus cheaper, it loses its magic. Case in point: the potato. Your modern Brit is unlikely to find a plate of mashed potatoes sexually stimulating, but potatoes and sweet potatoes were hailed as aphrodisiacs when they were first introduced to the European palate; in Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Falstaff reels off a list of the era’s aphrodisiacs: kissing comfits, snow eryngoes (the candied roots of sea holly), and potatoes. Once rare ingredients such as cinnamon, cloves, marmalade, rice and pepper have likewise lost their sexy status.

The second largest umbrella group of chewable aphrodisiacs is based on the crude logic that if something looks like your nasty bits, it’ll undoubtedly put your prospective partner in the mood. Thus, scheming Lotharios and temptresses have long relied on the amorous offering of edible flowers and roots. In the British Isles, wake robin (Arum maculatum) was once valued as a thickener for puddings, a starch for Elizabethan neck ruffs, and for its phallic bloom, which earned the plant a reputation as an aphrodisiac and spawned over 20 suggestive folk names, including Adam and Eve, lords and ladies, devils and angels, stallions and mares, and dog’s dick. On a similar note, the word “orchid” is derived from the ancient Greek word for testicle. Pliny the Elder recommended bulbous orchid tubers as an aphrodisiac, and the Romans called orchids “satyrion” because legend had it that the phallic roots grew from the spilled semen of a satyr.

The tribes of Mexico preferred not the root but the flower. The Totonoc Indians believed that the orchid Vanilla planifolia sprang from the blood of a goddess, and the Aztecs named it tlilxochitl, or black flower. Vanilla planifolia is an inherently romantic plant: its small blossoms open in the morning and are exclusively pollinated by hummingbirds and melipone bees. The dirty-minded Conquistadors noted the pod’s resemblance to female genitalia, and gave the plant the name vanilla, which derived from the Latin for sheath. Europeans soon prized vanilla as an aphrodisiac; wild stories circulated that vanilla could transform the ordinary man into an astonishing lover. Elizabeth I is said to have been especially fond of vanilla pudding.

Oysters and clams have had a lewd reputation since history’s dawn. The Roman author Juvenal (a nasty misogynist) uses oysters to complete his portrait of a slut partying away the night: “When she knows not one member from another, eats giant oysters at midnight, pours foaming unguents into her unmixed Falernian, and drinks out of perfume-bowls, while the roof spins dizzily round, the table dances, and every light shows double!” In keeping with the Roman talent for using food to call attention to those ultimate aphrodisiacs — wealth and power — emperors and aristocrats turned their noses up at local oysters and sent away to the British Isles for a superior variety. The association between oysters and strumpets would have staying power: As Rebecca Stott points out in her book “Oyster,” “Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the woman oyster seller was used in poetry as a figure of erotic play, something like the oyster, to be consumed, part of the sensuous fruit of the street for the male urban voyeur.” In 19th century America, underground oyster saloons catered to base instincts — guests could slurp back dozens of oysters while cavorting with good-time girls and prostitutes; some of the seedier joints offered private rooms. A few decades later and a few hundred miles south, scantily clad ladies would shimmy in a popular striptease act called the oyster dance. In the 1940s, Kitty West (a cousin of Elvis Presley) danced on Bourbon street as “Evangeline the Oyster Girl”; to open her act, she stepped with aplomb from a giant half shell.

But food and sex also play an entwined role in more “respectable” culture. If we look at the big picture, we see food at the heart of every human ritual. As Lionel Tiger points out in “The Pursuit of Pleasure”: “The exchange of mates between families was the only process more significant for human evolution than food sharing. But it was also wholly associated with it; the wedding dinner established a circle of implication and meaning.” The Tzteltal Indians of Chiapas, Mexico, take it to the next level: in traditional families, a young married couple lives with the girl’s parents. For the first 15 days of marriage the bride and groom don’t speak to each other or sleep together. Their sole means of communication is through food. Every evening, the wife cooks a meal for her husband. If all is well on the 15th day, the couple will sleep together that night. These people clearly know their foreplay.

Our literary masters have made much of the sensual significance of food. Eve parting her lips for the fruit of knowledge may mark the most infamous sexy food metaphor, but it is by no means the only time food and sex intersect in the Bible. Half the lyric beauty of “Solomon’s Song” stems from food metaphors: “I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste”; “thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits.” Some phrases draw a direct correlation between eating and love: Food is a gift for the beloved, and the space where the lovers meet is made more beautiful by spices and fruit: “He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.” Certain passages hint that food is part of the path to the boudoir: “The mandrakes gives a smell, and at our gates are all manner of pleasant fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for thee, O my beloved.” Mandrake, a poisonous root from the nightshade family, was a popular aphrodisiac during ancient times. “Solomon’s Song” also references other more tasty aphrodisiacs of the day: cinnamon, saffron, figs and pomegranates.

Food scholars and scientists tend to ignore and/or ridicule the idea of a food that functions like Viagra. The Western world’s most popular edible aphrodisiacs, chocolate and oysters, do actually create a sexy hormone rush, but generally only when they are eaten in gross quantities. As food writer Amy Reiley notes, “You’re more likely to go into a diabetic coma than get that rush because you’d have to eat so much chocolate to get the effect.” Revered food historian Alan Davidson sums it up best in “The Oxford Companion to Food”: “In short, the concept of a truly aphrodisiac food is on par with that of finding a crock of gold at the end of a rainbow.”

So why the proffered carrots and the bowl of sparrow’s tongues? Perhaps because our entwined pair, food and sex, is really a threesome: food, sex and superstition. The human libido is both excitable and fragile, easy to titillate yet just as easy to destroy. So much of sexuality is subject to the vagaries of nature and the whim of another, it’s no wonder humans have sought to control the situation by relying on witch doctors, poisonous roots, dubious elixirs and our old fallback, food, a substance that we viscerally know to be the staff of life.

Or maybe we persist in the belief that specific foods can lead to sex because there’s something to it. According to anthropologist Robin Fox, food leads to sex because a male’s ability to provide food plays into the female’s need to reproduce with a mate who will help nurture their young: “a male’s willingness to provide food becomes an important index of his suitability as a mate. Above all, it suggests his willingness to ‘invest’ in the female’s offspring.” No doubt there’s something to it, but we prefer a less clinical explanation: The act of procuring or preparing a special food can be sexy in itself. We associate food with comfort, and cooking is an act of love. By creating or acquiring a special food or beverage for a potential lover, we are creating at least the illusion of love and security, which is generally conducive to sex. In his excellent book “Heat,” Bill Buford convincingly describes the concept of cooking with love: cooking as a singularly intimate act of love one performs for friends, family and lovers. He also writes of cooking to be loved: “The premise of a romantic meal is that by stimulating and satisfying one appetite another will be analogously stimulated as well.” If you’ve ever factored a date’s restaurant choice or cooking skills into your decision to put out, you’ve experienced the aphrodisiacal qualities of food.

Maybe it’s the Jersey. Tom’s dad was a New York cop, and his mom worked full-time as a nurse, yet somehow found the time to give four boys a good Catholic upbringing. “It was different in the city,” Tom remembers. “We were surrounded by family and other people who had tons of kids. Childcare was not an issue.” When Tom was 9 the family moved from the city to River Edge, N.J., where they lived in a close-knit neighborhood Tom describes as “very Irish and Italian, with some token Protestants.”

Listening to Tom talk about his family is like watching a nostalgic movie about growing up on the East Coast — one of those films that begins with a rueful voice-over as the camera pans in on the old neighborhood. Tom is not sure when his ancestors emigrated from Ireland to New York: “We don’t know. My father’s generation was the first generation that was literate. No one could read. I don’t think anyone kept track.” He describes his family as close; they ate dinner around the table every night (classic stuff: meatloaf, spaghetti with meatballs, roasted chicken), watched the game together and took care of their own, no questions asked. When I ask Tom if he can pinpoint a family philosophy, he answers immediately: “The philosophy of my family is family,” he says, and laughs a little as he unloads a shopping bag full of onions and canned tomatoes.

Tom’s chicken Parmesan recipe comes from his great aunt Rosie, who caused a huge family scandal when she married Tom’s great uncle Frank in 1914. Frank was 16 and Rosie was only 14, but the scandal had nothing to do with age. Tom’s densely Irish family disapproved of Frank marrying an Italian. “Their generation was, of course, very bigoted,” Tom remarks, rolling an onion onto the cutting board. “By the time my father’s generation rolled around, it was much more common. Some of my dad’s best friends married Italian women and nobody cared. But back in Rosie’s day, it was different, it was a huge deal. Until they got married — then you couldn’t say anything.”

Rosie and Frank moved into an apartment above Frank’s brother’s funeral parlor in Gramercy Park, where they would live for the next 70 years. As soon as Frank married and the family realized they were stuck with Rosie, everyone shut up about the Italian issue. “As a matter of fact,” Tom says, “she became like the most popular person in the entire family. I mean everybody loved Aunt Rosie. She was very gregarious. She was very opinionated. She liked to complain a lot, but in a funny way.” When I ask him what she looked like he says, in his thick Jersey accent, “She looked very stereotypical. She had a wide nose and hair like steel wool. Very sad eyes, kinda baggy, like some kind of basset hound or something like that. She liked to eat,” he adds, slapping his gut. He remembers Rosie pinching the kids’ cheeks, drinking Seven and Seven and “a fair amount of wine,” and cooking constantly, until her classic Italian-American recipes were adopted by every household in a proudly Irish family. In fact, half of Tom’s favorite family recipes are Italian-American.

To make Rosie’s chicken Parmesan, Tom starts with the sauce. He shows me a neat way to peel a large quantity of garlic cloves: Put the unpeeled cloves in a lidded cook pot and shake vigorously.  I’m amazed to see that half the cloves are peeled in the first rough shake; after a second session, all the cloves are skinless. He throws the garlic in with the onion, which is already sautéing in a cast iron pan. “This is about how you want them to look,” Tom remarks, gesturing to the pan full of translucent golden onions. He dumps two cans of whole tomatoes into the pot and mashes at the mixture with a potato masher.

Despite making a huge mess in the kitchen, Tom is not a haphazard cook. He takes his time as he slices each chicken breast into cutlets, and then dips the meat in eggs and bread crumbs. He’s a more precise cook than I am — his every motion betrays the typical New York obsession with exact culinary tradition.  When I suggest we could use a preexisting bag of panko to coat the chicken filets for the Parmesan, he looks horrified. “No,” he says decisively. “We need the cheap stuff.”

While he’s making the Parmesan, he’s instructing me on how to make another family specialty, Uncle Frank’s meatballs. When I start rolling the mixture of pork, beef, eggs, panko and spices, he views my handiwork with a dubious expression — it’s clear that my meatballs are neither small enough nor round enough for Tom’s taste. When I later offer to help fry the chicken fillets for the Parmesan, Tom doesn’t allow me to bread the cutlets myself — he does it for me, and then hovers behind the stove to make sure I’m letting the cutlets get crispy enough before I flip them.

Tom’s concern doesn’t come across as fussy — he’s just the type of guy who likes to do things right. It makes me think about the difference between East Coast and West Coast culinary culture. I come from a culinary tradition that is primarily focused on innovation and substitution. “Sure, that’s good, but how can I make it with nettles?” Tom’s background is more old school — recipes were passed down from generation to generation, and changing things up was more likely to be viewed with horror than with admiration.

But Tom’s family story isn’t all about staying the same. During the course of our conversation, Tom affectionately describes his family as square and later says his parents were “straight as a pin.” The same could hardly be said for Tom: He says he always felt a little different, never liked suburbia or really bought into the whole Jesus thing. When I ask him how he “was led astray,” he laughs and answers: “rock ‘n’ roll”. After a deadhead phase, Tom moved to Seattle, where he fell in with a group of friends that reads like a who’s who of the grunge era. His family back home didn’t know much about his Seattle life. “They never saw my tattoos for years,” he says, taking a sip of beer and meditatively stirring the red sauce. “In those days I only went home for Thanksgiving, and I always wore long-sleeved shirts. I didn’t know how long I could keep it going, but I always figured as long as I could keep it going for that Thanksgiving, I’d be fine,” he laughs. “But then I got real sick with pneumonia — it was around 1998, and my lungs stopped working. I was in a coma. My parents flew out. They thought I was dying. That’s when they first saw my tattoos — I’m lying in a hospital bed, totally inked, and they’re like ‘what the hell?’ But I never got a lick of shit for it, because I lived — suddenly me having tattoos didn’t seem too important to anybody. Never any discussion about it — to the point when my mom eventually even started thinking she wanted a tattoo herself.”

Despite their dramatic tattoos and stereotypically West Coast behaviors (Tom manages the recycling program for the city of Seattle, his wife Becky eats organic) Tom and his wife are pillars within their East Coast family: In the summertime the entire extended family vacations in the Adirondacks, where Tom and Becky’s son Jack runs wild with his Jersey cousins.  I hear shades of Aunt Rosie in Tom’s story, and both tales remind me of something that’s been on my mind lately: When we are forced to accept Italian Aunt Rosie or tattooed Uncle Tom or gay cousin Doug, we become a little less likely to jump to conclusions and, more often than not, our realities are enriched in untold ways. (In a best case scenario, this enrichment appears in the form of cheese-coated chicken cutlets.) On a grander scale, the way we are forced to evolve as families plays out in the way we see the world and the way we change as a nation.

But perhaps I’m getting too high-minded — when I’m sitting in the glow of candlelight spooning Aunt Rosie’s chicken Parmesan onto my plate, I’m just happy. The sauce is tangy and simple, the chicken is crunchy and coated in gooey cheese, and the company is solid. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Aunt Rosie’s Chicken Parmesan (Serves 6)

As a general rule, I do not like doughnuts, but I make an exception once a winter. I’ve been attending the annual Kinney doughnut party since I was a kid. But it’s not just nostalgia that compels me to eat Kinney doughnuts — the powdered confections are piping hot, with a texture that is at once pillowy and chewy. I wash down a chocolate-filled doughnut hole with a French75, and the winter months ahead seem to promise cozy cheer instead of dreary gloom. As Jan’s granddaughter Opal chases past me, I think of parties in this house when I was little, of eating doughnuts till I was sick, and of the year it actually snowed and a fantastic wooden toboggan materialized. I remember, as I often do, Jan’s son Japhy, who was two months older than me and a hero of my childhood.

A few days after the party, Jan and I meet so that she can tell me more about the doughnut recipe’s background, about her grandparents, who migrated west in a Model T Ford loaded with all their earthly possessions. The plan is to walk while we talk. We drive to Jan’s favorite hiking spot in my car, a decrepit ’92 Honda Civic with no exhaust system to speak of. I’m a little embarrassed because Jan is a neat and orderly and extremely functional person, and the car is anything but. I’ve cleaned it up a little in her honor, but it’s beyond hope — the floor is covered in a thick layer of pine needles and dust. Jan is not surprised, of course. She’s known me all my life and views my foibles with a wry and expectant eye.

We park at the foot of a logging road. As expected, Jan exclaims about my inappropriate shoes and my hatlessness. Her concern is not unfounded — rain smatters the steep gravel road. As we ascend into a windy forest of giant firs, Jan recalls her grandparents’ relocation from Kansas to Oregon. 1931 was a hard year for the family: Jan’s grandfather Paul was out of work and his wife, Opal, had just lost a child. “An 18-month old girl,” Jan remembers with a precision that hurts. Opal didn’t want to leave their tight-knit German community, but Paul decided to go west. He’d heard there was work in Oregon. Opal acquiesced.

“There were two kids and two adults and she was massively pregnant with a third kid,” Jan says. “They packed the family and all their stuff into a Model T Ford, and they did not have a trailer. When they came to the mountains they just couldn’t make it up the roads. They had to offload stuff. But even then, the carburetor didn’t work going at a slant and there were areas when they had to put the car in reverse and go up the mountain in backwards. It was just epic. They were like the Joads — you know, from ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’”

Jan remembers her grandmother as neither severe nor especially sweet. “I always look at Grandma as someone who had so much to give to the world. And how could she do that within the constraints of the society at that time is really interesting to me,” Jan says. When I ask her about the basic tenets of Opal’s character, she answers right off the bat: “Opal? Safety, security, order. She was a classic German housefrau in that her house was always clean and orderly and it was important to her that it be that way … But at the same time she was very creative, which I think is why she was a good cook,” Jan muses. Opal made a point of bringing the kids together for an annual winter doughnut party, an old family tradition. “Always my grandmother’s kitchen,” Jan muses. “For me it was always about safety and security and warmth and acceptance. She liked cooking. She loved the presentation — the doughnuts were always about presentation, and that came through in how they were cooked. It wasn’t a chaotic scene when we were making doughnuts at her house.”

Jan’s own parents were young and eccentric, sometimes chaotic. Jan was an orderly little girl with a heavy sense of responsibility for her younger siblings. She saw her grandmother Opal as a haven. Although she is thankful that her artistic mother gifted her with an abiding curiosity and a love for reading, Jan looked to Opal for security. She remembers her grandmother bringing the family together through food: making sauerkraut, baking bread, fixing summer dinners bright with garden vegetables, frying perfect doughnuts.

The wind picks up and roils the branches of the great firs. Somewhere in the woods, a branch cracks. A blur crosses our path with the sound of wings beating air. Jan pauses in her story. “For the record,” Jan says, “that was a grouse.” A native of western Oregon, Jan has lived in the Oregon Coast Range for most of her life. She married at age 17 and she and her husband, Ray, moved out to the woods to start a family.

“You know, we moved to Deadwood with the intent of creating and being part of a larger community,” Jan says. She sees parallels between her rural community in Oregon and the community Opal left behind in Kansas. This surprises me because Deadwood, Ore., is an infamous enclave of hippies and rednecks, and Opal came from solid German Lutheran stock. As the forest opens up for a view of the adjacent mountains, Jan illuminates the similarities: Although her grandparents were Lutheran, Jan thinks that to them church was really about community, a gathering spot much like Deadwood’s community center and fire hall. “Their kids grew up with a neighborhood,” Jan says. “The parents remained lifelong friends. Cooking and eating was always at the center of social events. You knew people’s foibles and strengths. You accepted them for whatever, loved them even. There were no secrets, which keeps us accountable …” Jan now sees Deadwood as an extension of her own family, which is why she includes the community in the doughnut tradition that was once intended for the immediate family.

After Opal moved to Oregon from Kansas, she managed to get a job at the cannery in Eugene. After that she worked as a housekeeper until she was well into her 60s. Even though she was always busy, she took the time to cook and bake from scratch.  From Opal, Jan learned to see cooking as a manifestation of love. She thinks Opal’s fixation with maintaining culinary traditions stems in equal measures from the security of her Kansas community and the uncertainty of her childhood home life.

“She had an insecurity,” Jan says. “When she was 4 or 5, her mother was five months pregnant with her second child, and she developed encephalitis and she died. So grandma lost her mother. Her father couldn’t cope with his wife’s death or with his little daughter, and he farmed her out to his parents. He remarried and eventually took Opal back, but as the much older sibling, she became a caregiver to her father and stepmother’s nine children.” Jan remembers Opal saying that her family never emphasized that she was the half-sister and not her stepmother’s biological daughter.

“So she wasn’t made to feel different?” I ask.

“I think she was, because she said she wasn’t,” Jan says definitely. “Why did she even talk about it if it wasn’t an issue?”

Opal’s story makes me think how our positive aspects are so often shaped in reaction to loss and hardship. In order to survive the vagaries of life, we mimic the people and activities that represent islands of solace. “I think one of the reasons that our family really centered on her traditions was that she was always determined to be the secure, safe person — and nobody was going to feel left out or abandoned,” Jan says. Opal created the sense of family and security she missed as a child, and Jan continued the tradition.

Jan’s family has now weathered the death of her son Japhy, her own battle with cancer, her husband Ray’s back problems and the rewarding but tumultuous experience of generational cohabitation: Jan and Ray now share their home with their grown daughter Mizu, her husband, Lou, their three little girls, and Jan’s mother, Margie. Food is still an important part of family life. Margie is a master gardener, so they are able to maintain Opal’s tradition of garden vegetables. Jan believes in making things from scratch, and every weekend, she bakes enough bread for the entire family. Like Opal, she struggles to find time for everything:  After starting out as a young general assistant at a local clinic, she has worked her way up from the bottom to become Director of Quality at a hospital, a job that requires a two-hour commute daily. “Director of Quality” is a pretty apt title for Jan.

When I ask Jan her secret for surviving the long hours and the tumult of a large family, she says that her tongue is calloused from biting it, but then admits that her son-in-law probably feels the same way. This year they argued over the doughnut party. Lou wanted to serve cocktails and other types of fried food such as deep-fried cheese curds and calamari. Jan was resistant to modifying her family tradition. Now she concedes that Lou’s idea wasn’t so bad. “Isn’t that how traditions always are? Don’t they always change? For me the nucleus of the doughnuts is the family. And what that family looks like and when it happens … that’s where all the change happens.”

Opal’s Doughnuts (makes 18)