By Matthew Gray © – 
Matthew Gray is the Chef, Owner & Founder of Hawaii Food Tours. He’s a former food writer and Restaurant Reviewer, and a long-time talk-radio host and presenter. Matthew may be reached via email – Contact Matthew Gray — Matthew@HawaiiFoodTours.com
I’m at the rear of a walk-up flat, my friend, in a rather downscale kitchen.
Gravel-voiced blues sift from an old box radio on the counter. There is a cracked linoleum floor, a Formica table, two dinette chairs, and a bottle of Chianti. The light’s not soft, just weird, a strange luminous haze that I assume is Spanish Fly flurrying down, left over, like ozone in the atmosphere, from the stormy fantasies of a million lovelorn boys, each crying out in the night, howling at the moon.
A woman occupies one of the chairs. Not just any woman, but a voluptuous, sloe-eyed goddess, the handmaiden of lust. She seems to sprawl in her chair in a sort of narcotic fog. Her dishevelment seems to have an eternal source, a secret engine. She’s not falling apart, she’s undergoing a metamorphosis. Unbrushed to wanton perfection is her auburn hair. Her lips are painted crimson, and she wears a necklace of fat pearls at her throat, where the skin appears flushed with preprandial heat. Her blouse is loosely buttoned, her cleavage a bit frightening, deep, no place for babies.
And, bless her heart, she has a tongue that can tie a knot in the stem of a cherry. Her chair is pulled close to the table so that you know she feels its hard edge as a bar of pressure across her abdomen, but you can’t see, unless you stand back, how her knees have angled apart or how high her silky red skirt has hiked up her electric thighs, revealing the tops of her stockings, the flowered clasps of a garter belt, and beyond, farther up in the sinewy confluence of flesh, a glimpse of the Lithuanian national flag, triangled, obscured in a blur of steam.
I have come to understand that her underthings are meant to be a forecast of the evening’s bill of fare. Oh dear, I say to myself, taking the empty chair, I wonder what she has in mind.
“I have something special,” she says, “just for you.”
As you might imagine, she’s breathing heavily, and I’m holding my breath. Her hands snake under the table; I can’t tell you where they’ve gone exactly or why she throws her head back and makes little yelps of pleasure. All I know is that I’ve been invited for dinner and I am a hungry, hungry man.
I clear my throat and dare to ask what’s cooking. Last time around it was roast squab in currant jelly; the time before, braised turbot with vermouth.
She moans with a slight tone of frustration and straightens up, takes a second to refocus her inchoate eyes. I don’t know how it got there — this is a surprise – but suddenly she’s holding a potato, and the thing is smoldering as though it’s about to blow up.
My disappointment is, I’m afraid, apparent. A woman who believes in the amorous properties of potatoes shouldn’t be difficult to please, but frankly I don’t recall any mention of starchy foods in the Kama Sutra.
Common sense tells me that not many of us, male or female, tend to be sexually aroused by spuds. They champion neither evocative shape nor aesthetic lure, have a taste only a bad poet would bother to describe, are conceived in subterranean ignorance of passion, quickly mature to frumpy ordinariness, and connote the long pedestrian haul of love rather than the wild lather of its overture. What pitiful son-of-a-bitch has ever locked upon a lump of mashed potatoes, then raised a wolfish gaze to the coquette responsible for the lump, put two and two together and concluded, “Good God, I must have my way with her! I must!”?
On second thought, however, I decide better a potato than an apple. Given their track record in the history of lovemaking, apples are not to be trusted. Our sexual past thunders with the consequences of their blinding aphrodisiac effect. They cost us Paradise and provoked the Trojan War. Plus there’s that film clip of Marilyn Monroe rolling an apple around her bosom, wearing a pair of big, dorky white cotton panties that make her look absolutely nunnish. Apples are a sexual jinx, an emblem of entrapment, and when I say that women who have served me a prim and matriarchal apple pie as a means of encouraging my affection have invariably chilled my hormones.
I swear I am serious. If a pie is to be employed in my seduction, I much prefer a dark, oozy slice of blackberry, a more savory inspiration, and if the topping is a ballistic spurt of whipped but unsweetened cream, I won’t complain.
But I might as well come right out and say it: Is this slippery business of aphrodisiacs a joke or not? I don’t understand them or their vanities, although I admit to an appreciation of the bawdy, pampering decadence they engender, the gastro-sexual trail that leads to those shimmering, phosphorescent erotic dinners choreographed by soon-to-be-lovers.
I understand what an excellent bottle of red wine or bubbling champagne means (I love it and I’ll drink it and then I’ll do anything), but what gives with Asian men, with their shark fins and ambergris, monkey parts, and obscene powders of rhino horn? Isn’t sushi sexy enough? Where did they get this Neolithic sense of sexual prowess? What failings are they trying to compensate for? Are Eastern orgasms so elusive as to require such voodoo and coercion?
Or is stamina — rather, the lack thereof — a universal problem that I’ve so far been spared? (brag, brag, brag) Even my pal PJ confesses that on his honeymoon he invested heavily in buffalo steak, as if rich and wild meat were an erection’s insurance policy. Forever, it seems, that’s what men have thought. When virility was the question, game was the answer, consumed in a ritual of mock cannibalism, in which power is gained not from devouring an enemy but from eating what is most admired, transferring its desirable traits to ourselves. Pheasants and pigeons, for instance, have been prized by self-styled Casanovas because these birds court with such robust determination.
On the other side of the equation, if the point is to get those girlies poised to abandon themselves to passion, the accepted gastronomic tactic is glandular inflammation, spicing them up to a level of high squirm. Thank you, Marco Polo, for carrying home these deceptive agents of lust — pepper, pimento, cinnamon, nutmeg, chives, saffron, vanilla, and ginger — and immersing them in the lives of housewives. It makes you wonder about Betty Crocker. Really nice girls stay away from sugar and spice.
As you can see, there’s a problem with our received knowledge of aphrodisiacs, a popular but deluded mythology at times so simplified as to constitute culinary smut. The most stereotypically perceived feature of an aphrodisiac, its anatomical shape, is also the most primitive, which as a metaphor does indeed raise some eyebrows but in practice gets to be a bit heavy-handed. If giving a child a toy car foreshadows his future ownership of the real thing, so it must follow that the more lewdly shaped shellfish and vegetables operate on the same premise. Yet if shape were innately potent, and not merely unsubtle, lovers everywhere would insist on hot dogs nestled in the warm, yeasty folds of buns, though they’d likely end up in the ballpark, not the bedroom, regressing to a state of prepubescence.
When what’s on the table seems too graphic or deliberate, shamelessly contrived to harden your Johnson, then the art is lost and the pornography of food is all too obvious, clinical and, finally boring.
The hope of love is to discover the right catalysts that help us reveal ourselves to one another — tender revelation, not lurid exposure — and the gastronomic role in this complex affair is a paradox of intimacy, suggesting sensual associations and unexpected wonders that illuminate, even as we bare ourselves, a delicious sense of mystery. Call it passion, whatever, it can’t be sated, it can’t be overfed; it can only be starved out to forage in the solitude of obsession. That’s when you find yourself tearing the horn
from the head of a rhinoceros, poor bugger.
Back in the goddess’s funky kitchen, I’m still waiting for the air to crackle with erotic tension, but I’m fast losing confidence in the goddess’s skill. If she’s trying to appeal to my Baltic heritage, I’d prefer that she ply me with vodka. Maybe my most ancient ancestors were round-bellied, weighty-jowled studs in the notoriously horny Clan of the Latke, and the goddess wants to connect me with my primal self. But it’s not working: I’m registering no measurable dilation of faraway capillaries, no vascular glow; I hear no wolves begin to howl from the hilltops of lust.
“Goddess,” I confess, “you’ve stumped me with your spud.” Sighing, she stretches languorously to give me the modest tuber. Her voice is like a hand on my crotch. “Remember that girl,” she asks, “long ago? When every secret taste and smell drove you crazy?”
That still happens, I confide, but I don’t know what girl she’s talking about. I think the goddess is kidding (but she’s not) when she next commands, rather vulgarly, I think, “Scratch and sniff,” unleashing a lurid set of magazine images on my imagination. She gashes the skin of the potato with a harlot’s fingernail and bids me to lower my proboscis.
I humor her and take a cautious whiff, with little faith in the promiscuity of the lowly pomme de terre, but I lift my head in awe, blinking, having inhaled a memory that penetrates far back into the erotic residues of experience. I feel my face reddening, for the goddess is an absolute mistress of the realm of sensuality, and under her gastronomic manipulation, I eventually gets the message that our libido has a menu of its own.
Years ago, and embarrassingly callow, I knew a virginal beauty who granted me full olfactory rights to her body. Her skin, I soon discovered, emanated an essence that made a terrific impression on me, a fragrance not especially fecund but fresh and loamy, and when I caught scent of it, I was so mystified I stopped in the middle of this ecstatic reconnaissance to declare “Hey, you smell like potatoes!” — candor, as it so often does, winning out over romance. These ghosts of taste and smell and touch, how good they are to have nearby.
One thing about the goddess, I can’t fool around with her. I have to eat what she fixes and get out of there fast. On my way home, with my morale sky-high, I can’t resist the impulse to pick up a ten-pound bag of Idaho Desirees.
What can I tell you? I have friends here in Honolulu who think cornflakes are an aphrodisiac. And Zippy’s chili. And the spicy pork at Gina’s Korean BBQ. What food turns you on?