1 The Foods of Love and Lust
I
s it possible to contemplate an oyster, and fail to give a thought to its carnal reputation?
That’s when dining, of course. At other times its famed aphrodisiacal qualities may well go unnoticed. (We both lived for some dozen years in a quaint house whose yard extended into a tidal bay. Oysters grew in almost obscene quantities there and, tide permitting, we could go down with hammer and chisel and chip them off the exposed wall. Occasionally poor workmanship would leave an upper shell removed, so the oyster must be eaten on the spot, else left for the greedy seagulls. At such times, ankle-deep and sand-fly-bitten in mud with oyster knife in a grit-smeared hand, romantic notions of ‘extra lead in the pencil’ didn’t really rate...)
She got around, did Aphrodite. Got a name for it and developed street cred in all the right quarters. Ended up bequeathing her name to the foods of love and lust. In Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus (it’s a good thing the sexy foodstuffs were named for her Greek not her Roman persona — where an “aphrodisiac” will have you gagging for it, a “venusiac” would likely just leave you gagging.) Anyway, in that famous old daub by the old Renaissance master, she rises naked from the waters, on a shell. Okay, to be fair, it’s a scallop shell — got the nod over the oyster no doubt through its symmetry and regular crenulations. Certainly no-one has ever extolled the seductive virtues of the scallop, and we’re not about to.
Against the nacre of their shells they shimmer wetly, plump and yielding. A squeeze of lemon, and see them squirm and raise their skirts. Positively wanton!
Since that false start, the painto-genic nature of the oyster has been captured by its share of artists, not least the Dutch still-lifers of the 17th Century. And what oysters they were, what visions to set the juices flowing. How their fleshiness of tone, the whites and creams and honey-pale variations, grabs the eye (among other things). Against the nacre of their shells they shimmer wetly, plump and yielding. A squeeze of lemon, and see them squirm and raise their skirts. Positively wanton!
It’s not for nothing that Rebecca Stott in her book “Oyster”, surely the first and last word on the subject, it’s not for nothing that she reflects how this unique dish appears “at the same time like an open wound and sexual organs.”
“Have you never tried these?”
Ben is on his fourth oyster,
devouring it as the others before, with no trace of the messy gracelessness
Cassandra feels she must show if she tries, like that, straight from the shell.
He pauses, another one nearly
to his mouth — awaiting her answer.
“No … I…”
“Then you must, mustn’t you.” With
no inflection.
“What if I don’t like it?”
Her artlessness would be
disarming to anyone else. When she looks up his gaze is merely insistent and she
drops her glance as quickly. Leaving room to imagine for herself a glimmer of
indulgence there.
He speaks again, softly this
time. She looks up once more. He speaks no louder, and she must lean towards
him to hear.
“I’d thought you’d be the sort
to give yourself over to new appetites, enjoy what you’ve never enjoyed before…”
He raises the oyster he had
taken for himself, holds it to her lips. Still leaning forward she tips back
her head, swallows. Ben folds the empty shell into his palm but a finger
remains outstretched, a single drop of oyster juice hanging from its end. Only
the slightest hesitation before she dabs at it with her tongue.
In the mind games of love the oyster may serve as no more than a statement of intent, but this in itself is sometimes sufficient.
But, since Casanova was ever the pimp and roué and mischievous to boot — did he play on the “oyster as aphrodisiac” myth, or rather lend his name and reputation to boost the oyster’s?
Casanova was never a man to overlook the rough-and-tumble aspects of love. He bragged (almost his only means of speaking), and his brag was upwards of sixty oysters a day. But, since Casanova was ever the pimp and roué and mischievous to boot — did he play on the “oyster as aphrodisiac” myth, or rather lend his name and reputation to boost the oyster’s? Another skilled and prodigious lover, the famed dancer Isadora Duncan, claimed her virtuosity begun in the womb, through her pregnant mother living on nothing but oysters, washed down with champagne. (A favorite pornographic journal of the day was called, what else, The Oyster, and its sister publication The Pearl. Just the kind of smirking, self-conscious symbolism you’d expect from such a repressed lot as the Victorians.)
Oysters are reputed to stiffen male potency, and bring to flower the female fertility. Is there any scientific validity to this?
Oysters are reputed to stiffen male potency, and bring to flower the female fertility. Is there any scientific validity to this? Some base the claim on the extremely high zinc content of the oyster. And it’s true that zinc is a metabolic element that depletes with frequent … shall we say emissions. But as evidence goes this seems a vain attempt to co-opt science to shore up a belief that is irresistible. And unnecessary, because the irresistibility is, of course, the point. Myths this insistent have a tendency to become self-fulfilling prophecies.
So a plate of oysters set between dining companions so inclined should augur well for later success, when the lights are low. But not if one party can’t abide them.
Finn is coming over a little
drunk. Two cocktails before dinner, and this his second glass of wine. Unusual
for him, and a not-unpleasant sensation — but one he doesn’t yet feel safe to
relax into.
He’s been so determined that
tonight will work. He chose not to eat a thing all day, so as to relish each
morsel (of food and drink, conversation and attention) with the savor that only
an appetite born of want brings out.
Their first courses have been
some time coming. To be expected, he supposes — it was they who’d been
late. Or, more precisely, James had
been, and so they had been sat down late at their table. Their food will arrive
shortly, he’s sure.
He looks again at the bread
he’s been served. Its fresh aroma sets him salivating. He has denied himself
even this till now — it seemed a cheapening of the day’s self-imposed denial,
best wait for the real food to come.
“Are you going to eat that?”
James is talking to him. “I said, do you want your bread?”
“No, I … It’s fine, Jay. You take it.”
“Aren’t you hungry? It’s
incredible bread, best I’ve ever eaten.”
Finn had had difficulty
choosing his meal. The choice of restaurant, that had (he hopes) a clear
significance — but other choices should not signal old habits, but new
beginnings. He looks about, hoping to see a waiter bringing plates that must be
theirs.
“At last, I’m starved.” James
talks on to the waiter. Finn sidles back in his chair to make room for the
plate being placed before him.
James watches after the waiter
as he leaves, not remotely surreptitious.
“Jesus, Jay …” Who simply
shrugs. “Well, I’m sure he’s straight.”
“You mark me. She won’t die
curious.”
“Don’t be such a…”
Wagging a finger. “Watch what
you say next.”
“Just don’t be.”
James has begun to eat. “This
quail is sensational. You really should have ordered this.” He makes a face at
Finn’s oysters, gestures dismissively. “I don’t know how you can. They turn my
stomach, just looking at them turns my stomach. Don’t expect me to kiss you
later, tasting of those.”
“I wasn’t expecting anything.”
“And that’s supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” When he wants to
say, there are things he’d hoped he could take for granted.
The aphrodisiac... primes expectation and urges the body on...
The aphrodisiac is a kind of self-reinvigorating placebo — operating by the power of suggestion on the suggestibility of those who want to believe. It primes expectation and urges the body on. And in keeping with the objective at hand, it’s not without its foreplay…
“The proper way to eat a fig, in society…” says Alan Bates, over a picnic table groaning with abundant delicacies, while a deliciously young and unspoilt Glenda Jackson looks on. This is Ken Russell’s film of D H Lawrence’s “Women in Love” (and Glenda’s first Oscar)…
“The proper way to eat a fig, in
society,
Is to split it in four, holding it
by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a
glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower…”
The lines are, in fact, not from
the novel but from a poem of
Cut yourself a fresh fig. Better still, go to some fine establishment
where they’ll cut it for you, and serve it with
Anyway, take your fresh cut fig, and consider what it’s saying to you, what resemblance it whispers, or what your own private associations project there…
While in a filmic fig mood, one of
our favorite films (that is to say, the favorite film of one of us) is
“I wouldn’t eat those figs if I were you. No, see, they’re aphrodisiacs… and you don’t look like you’re up to it to me…”
The Emperor Augustus was, it seems,
assassinated by his wife Livia, using poisoned figs. Brian Dennehy — as
Peta’s
toying with the entrée that’s just been set before her. The figs, cut like
flowers, are beautiful to look at, though strangely sinister all the same.
She’s
lost the train of Vanessa’s story — distracted by a loud conversation at the
table of three opposite. Or not so much by the conversation as by the man who
appears to be leading it — well dressed, fiftyish but well-preserved… and
looking at her. She can’t follow what he’s saying but is struck by how he holds
her eye, deliberately though never missing a beat in holding forth to his fellows. She drops her own gaze at a laugh from the
table. That’s Tori, then Vanessa…
“Peta,
you’re not listening.”
“I was… I mean, I’m sorry… What were you saying?”
“I’d
finished. Bella was saying… go on,
Bella, say it again…”
“It
won’t be funny the second time.”
“Well,
Peta didn’t hear it, so it’s first time for her.”
“Oh,
alright. I said,” and Bella gestures to
Peta’s plate of figs, “I said, I hope you’re seeing Carl later on…”
“What…?”
“When
those kick in. You know what they say
about figs. And looking at those, I’m
inclined to believe them.”
Peta
says something the others can’t pick up.
“What
hon?”
This
time she enunciates her words over-deliberately.
“I
said, we’ve split up.”
There’s
a suitable, and suitably shocked, silence while this sinks in.
Bella
waves to a passing waiter, points to their wine and orders “another of
those”. Then to the table, “This just
went way beyond a two bottle night.”
Vanessa,
raised with the notion that food is salve to all life’s ills (and the more
indulgent the better), tops a blini with crème fraiche and caviar, and holds it
towards Peta, “Here you go, cheer up and forget about him and live a little
with this…It’s as good as it gets.”
If “The Belly of an Architect” is Greenaway’s most accessible film, “The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover” is certainly his best known and most controversial. In it, French actor Richard Bohringer plays the Cook, and at one point explains his idiosyncratic approach to pricing menu items — “I charge a lot for anything black… People like to remind themselves of Death. Eating black food is like consuming Death. Like saying, ‘heh, heh… [and you have to hear the Gallic fatalism in your mind as you imagine that laugh] Death, I’m eating you’. Black truffles are the most expensive. Caviar. Death and birth. The end and the beginning. Don’t you think it’s appropriate that the most expensive items are black?”
After all, money and sex have always been enthusiastic bedfellows
In cuisine, as in all else, decadence sells. Those foodstuffs that titillate come at a premium. But is it their arousing reputation that brings with it the high price? Or rather that the priciest tidbits, by dint of their exclusivity, take on eroticism as a part of their cachet? After all, money and sex have always been enthusiastic bedfellows, into each other like the serpent and its tail.
But what of the libido that has slipped below sight? Can any amount of expense and fancy foods revive its fortunes?
Literature’s most infamous decadent
(according to that well-practiced debauchee, Oscar Wilde) is the character of
Des Esseintes from J K Huysmans’ “A Rebours” (generally given as “Against
Nature”). In a nod to the inextricability of sex and death he held a black
feast, in which all foods consumed, olives and caviar and black puddings and
so, were black. They were to be washed down with only the darkest and most impe
That’s not the way for our tables this evening. Still, a sense of loss is no stranger to dining. And its causes might be many things besides a sagging libido…
(JOIN US ON JULY 7 for the next episode — The Four Faces of Taste. We meet our table of advertising lads, as Bo ‘the Man’ expounds at length on the marketing of “good taste”. )
SOURCES
Rebecca Stott, Oyster, Reaktion Books,
Women
in Love, Directed by Ken Russell, Written and Produced by Larry Kramer,
1969
D H
The
Belly of an Architect, Written and Directed by Peter Greenaway, Produced by
Colin Callender and Walter Donohue, 1987
The
Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover, Written and Directed by Peter
Greenaway, Produced by Kees Kassender, 1989
J K Huysmans, Against Nature (A Rebours), Penguin Classics,
