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In the Realm of the Senses, Part 1: Taste (or more on Food & Sex)
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In the Realm of the Senses, Part 1: Taste (or more on Food & Sex) For me, sensuality is an aliveness, an openness, a curiosity, a heightened sensitivity to life and love and eros... a generosity of spirit, a caring touch, the arousal of all the senses, an embrace of art and beauty...an attunement to the rhythms of life, its music, its poetry...a capacity to sense the soul through the body, the spirit through the flesh, and desire in a look, a caress, a kiss.... It's listening with sensitivity to words, the body, our moods.... it's reading each others mind and needs and desires through the simplest, slightest expressions....it's being in the zone, the flow...responsive to each other mentally, emotionally, physically....it's being graceful and gracious...and it's taking vibrant delight in the realm of our senses. For a set of five blogs, I want to draw upon a wonderful book for lovers by Elizabeth Nair entitled Plaisirs d'Amour: An Erotic Guide to the Senses. Nash gives us in this book cultural, literary and artistic expressions of erotic pleasure through the particular lens of each of our five senses. I hope her writings will provoke readers of this post to share their own reflections, poems, photos, or images associated with the eroticism of each of our senses. From Plaisirs d'Amour, on Taste: With lips and tongue, the moist suction of our mouths, we can both give and receive enormous pleasure. The concentration of sensitive nerve endings which respond to touch and temperature, and taste buds which can detect salt, sour, sweet and itter essences, make the mouth a uniquely gifted lover: a Casanova and a Cleopatra..... Gastronomy competes with sex in the number of senses it stimulates. In addition to pleasing the eye and nose, food should stimulate the mouth with interesting shapes and textures. The Japanese passion for raw fish is as much to do with the enormous variety of texture provided by dseafood as with its taste. In a well-planned menu a sequence of tastes in which each new arrival contrasts pleasantly with the last is the ideal. Temperatures can be contrasted in the same way. A meal then becomes similar to a musical composition, with a series of structured crescendos. The intimate links between sex and eating--based upon complicated associations involving all the senses--turn the dining table into a bed, and the bed into a dining table. Seafood is sexy. Shellfish in particular seem to have been designed by an erotomaniac with an interest in surrealism. Mussels expose themselves to us in a steamy sauna tureens and day-trippers put vinegar on cockle clitorises by the seaside. While nibbling a scallop nipple, or slipping a lobster claw between our lips, we should remember that aeons ago we came from the sea. That is why our most intimate secretions are salty, smelling and tasting of the ocean, and why fruits de mer is such a sensual--and sexual--treat. Foods which are popularly regarded as 'aphrodisiacs' often rely upon the conscious and unconscious associations we make between sex and food. Asparagus is phallic in shape and has a pungent evocative aroma. The eating of asparagus--a sort of symbolic fellatio--may either stir unconsciuos erotic thoughts, or conscious sexual jokes. In either case bed is one step nearer. Nature is a lascivious old paner who has provided our larder with innumerable phallic fruits and vegetables from the mushroom to the cucumber. Aphrodisiacs whihc mimic female sexual organs in the endlessly fecund human imagination are also numberous. Pomegranates were burst open at Chinese weddings and eaten at Dionysiac orgies in ancient Greece. Figs and watermelons have the same erotic associations. In Classical times sex was never far from the table. Worshippers of Aphrodite in Syracuse baked vulva-shaped bread, while the ever-erect Priapus was celebrated with the phallic loaves which French boulangers still make today.  |
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5/5/2010 7:33 pm |
The Spanish film 'Like Water For Chocolate' beautifully combines all of what you're discussed. It's an older film now, but as relevant and poingant now as ever. Scarlet
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5/5/2010 7:30 pm |
Of all the scenes of movies where food gets associated with sex, I think the eating scene in Tom Jones is my favorite, in part because it is also such a wonderful, lovely adaptation of the novel...perhaps my favorite film adaptation of an 18th or 19th century novel. I love your embrace of messiness. I think fastidiousness in the bedroom can be so off-putting: We need to delight in the tastes, touches, feels, smells of sex.... with all of its juices and tartness and tanginess, etc. I think some of the vegetarian or health food emphasis takes too much of the pleasure out of eating: Choice of food is framed as a health and moral issue, and I'm ok with that, but it that framing should not eliminate an embrace of food as pleasure (and sometimes it does). You have me more interested than ever in the pomegranate. I love the Persian dish of Fesenjan, where chicken is served in a rich, wonderful pomegranate sauce.
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5/5/2010 9:23 am |
Yes, good wine, fruits, cheeses (I love the smelly ones like gorgonzola and the oozy ones like brie), and hearty breads. For me, just add a salad during the summer (and berries for dessert) and a good soup in the winter.
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Moscato d'Asti. My favorite wine. Let's not forget port. Some ports taste a bit as if honey and a bottle of wine had offspring. I like that sort.  MT     
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5/4/2010 2:01 pm |
Then, there is wine ... I'm thrilled that one of our big Washington wineries is releasing affordable wines cultivated and bottled according the French ideals of terroir -- which is the bottled result of the yield of a particular grape or grapes grown in a particular micro-climate on a particular piece of land in a particular soil. From year to year, the wine changes. Some years are better than others, but the French don't fear the difference as much as Americans and Australians do in their vineyards. It's not that these single place wines always taste "better," instead, they are like reliving a particular year through wine. There is absolutely nothing wrong with blending wines from across a region, but how very interesting to experience an abstraction of a particular year in a particular place within a bottle of wine! You can taste and smell and feel the difference that a sunny year makes versus a rainy one, a cool one versus a hot one. Those differences are often lost in most American wines, when some viniculturist makes decisions after harvest to make a palatable, marketable wine by blending from far and wide. Of course, there are many wonderfully interesting wines that result ... ... but the year-to-year tracking of the difference in a wine is lost, since the components of blends never come from the same place from year to year. Three years ago, during the summer, I had to go home to take care of my mother during an illness. It was a dryer year that year, and oh my god! The fruits and vegetables were so amazingly voluptuous! The dryer conditions concentrated the flavors wonderfully. We ate meat only twice the entire two weeks I was there, and that was fresh seafood. The best peaches I've ever had in my life, I had that summer. We were gluttons for fruits and veggies! Thank you. You always make me think, supplement, add or revise, and you make just writing about wine (or looking at a photograph of a garden) a source of joy and inspiration for eros. I had not been in Europe in ages till I took a 2-3 week trip to Spain and Portugal in May 2008. What I loved about each country, among many other things, was what is so obvious to them but different for us: how each locality had its own wine, its own cheese, even its own olives. Quickly, I got "crushed" by both countries: The food and wine helped open up my senses, and travel to some place new does that to all the senses. Let me quote from Plaisirs d'Amour on wine (from a section of the chapter on Taste that followed the author's discussion of food): Sine Baccho et Cerere frigescit Venus--"without Bacchus (the vine) and Ceres (the harvest) Venus (love) is cold." Wine is a sensual pleasure, one as old as civilization. Just as Bacchus often kept company with Pan and his libidinous satyrs, so wine and love make a perfect match. Champagne is often the choice of lovers, and with good reason. It is a lively, esxciting wine: its bubbles thrill lips, mouth and tongue, and then carry its alcohol quickly into the bloodstream. It is always drunk chilled, and the kisses of champagne--cold lips on warm flesh are erotic 'coups de rapier.' Soft, round, red wines--like the apotheosis of Valpolicella, amarone; or Zinfandel or the spicy shiraz of Australian wine makers--are ideal for winter lovemaking in front of the fire. But the most erotic wines are those made from the muscat grape. A journalist visiting a cellar in Moravia, stuck for words, asked the old cellarman how he would describe one particularly sensuous muscat. Without hesitation this grinning Silenus told him to recall the scent of a sexually excited woman: a description as perfect as it was difficult for the earnest translator! Muscat grapes are made into an extraordinary variety of quite different wines, all retaining the unique perfume. In Alsace, muscat grapes become a delicate, dry appertif wine; in Beaumes de Venise, a second, sweet dessert wine; in Italy delicious sparkling Moscato d'Asti. Sensualists and romantics in search of the ultimate erotic wine--erotic in self and the perfect drink for lovers--should try Hungarian Tokay. This is the legendary wine of kings and emperors, a precious nectar so pure it is reputed to last for centuries.
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Then, there is wine ... I'm thrilled that one of our big Washington wineries is releasing affordable wines cultivated and bottled according the French ideals of terroir -- which is the bottled result of the yield of a particular grape or grapes grown in a particular micro-climate on a particular piece of land in a particular soil. From year to year, the wine changes. Some years are better than others, but the French don't fear the difference as much as Americans and Australians do in their vineyards. It's not that these single place wines always taste "better," instead, they are like reliving a particular year through wine. There is absolutely nothing wrong with blending wines from across a region, but how very interesting to experience an abstraction of a particular year in a particular place within a bottle of wine! You can taste and smell and feel the difference that a sunny year makes versus a rainy one, a cool one versus a hot one. Those differences are often lost in most American wines, when some viniculturist makes decisions after harvest to make a palatable, marketable wine by blending from far and wide. Of course, there are many wonderfully interesting wines that result ... ... but the year-to-year tracking of the difference in a wine is lost, since the components of blends never come from the same place from year to year. Three years ago, during the summer, I had to go home to take care of my mother during an illness. It was a dryer year that year, and oh my god! The fruits and vegetables were so amazingly voluptuous! The dryer conditions concentrated the flavors wonderfully. We ate meat only twice the entire two weeks I was there, and that was fresh seafood. The best peaches I've ever had in my life, I had that summer. We were gluttons for fruits and veggies! Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies. For vilest things Become themselves in her, that the holy priests Bless her when she is riggish. ~~ from Antony & Cleopatra
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I think part of what either works or does not work in the food as sex organ (female sex organ specifically) relates to messiness. Abandonment of proper manners, cleanliness. The association of moisture and excess. I think of that scene in Tom Jones where Albert Finny (that's who it was, right? I didn't google this) eats the turkey leg. Obviously, Fielding knew what he was doing when he selected the consumption of a big, greasy, meaty piece of flesh. I also think this reflects a specific mindset related to the time of Fielding that we don't share today, in the world of vegetarianism, low fat diets, and photography capturing such moments and therefore rendering most people a bit timid about appearing terribly hedonistic. But hell, most of the time I think that is too hard to pull off - the greasy meat = sexy not gross, thing, I mean. Sweets, fruits, these are so much the safer food choice. I love the picture of the apple. Very O'Keefe. LOL Do you know she once said "I don't paint vaginas." Or something to that effect. I think she was brilliant and complex and meant that, although she also was full of shit, at the same time. Know what I mean? I believe I have told you, my all-time favorite myth (if I had to choose) is that of Persephone. Part of that is definitely about the visceral relationship between the pomegranate and the pussy. What's interesting is that (at least in the part of the US where I live) these fruits are so hard to find outside of a specific 2-3 week span of time. Perhaps part of their appeal for me is in the specialness of that. But no, as a kid I don't even remember my mom splurging on one of these, and yet I remember since an early age self-identifying with the character of Persephone. Even before I had tried one for myself. And they are SO trendy now. LOL I wonder how much more people would want the juice if they considered it like a kind of pussy potion? I wonder if anyone would cease buying and drinking it, for the same reason? Market research! MT
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The Spanish film 'Like Water For Chocolate' beautifully combines all of what you're discussed. It's an older film now, but as relevant and poingant now as ever. Scarlet
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