Eating is a sensual pleasure which starts when we are no more than a roaring digestive system needing oceans of warm milk to fill our hungry void. As adults we still remember our beginnings. We talk about food when we talk about L O V E.
“YOU’RE DELICIOUS” “I LOVE YOU SO MUCH I COULD EAT YOU” (and sometimes we proceed to prove it.) Did you know that not long ago a sexy woman was called a tomato? A girl can be known as a chick, even the heart is sweet and we call our sweethearts food-love names like ‘Honey’ ‘Sweety Pie’ or if you’re very unlucky… ‘Lamb Chop’. Breasts are melons (or in some cases raisins… or even fried eggs!) lips are like strawberries, LOVE is intoxicating, it’s delectable and delicious!

“If you don’t like my peaches” says the blues lyric “then don’t shake my tree.” “It must be jelly” sings another “cause jam don’t shake like that” and the stoned Stones sang about some “brown sugar”.

AJ Lieling described Lilian Russell, a lucious woman from a time when more was better (she weighed over 200 pounds) as – “A butterscotch sundae of a woman, as beautiful as a tulip of beer with a high white collar”

LOVE has it’s seasons. There is a time for laughter and a time for absentmindedness. There is the need to say the others name out loud, to give LOVE ‘presence’ by speaking it’s magic word. There is a moment for first sharing the same spoon and there’s also a time for discovering shared memories of food. What JOY! Obviously they were predestined to find each other, two souls in this whirling world whose passion remains hokey pokey ice cream with caramel sauce… (ok, ok, so that’s MY favorite)

Hokey-Pokey from the land of the long white icecream

 

In a world where sophistication can be measured by what books one keeps in their bathroom or the brand of water that is sipped with lunch, lovers bring the greatest innocence to the discovery that they share the same lusts – not only for each other, but also for food.

WEDDING CAKES

 Wedding cakes go far back in the history of celebrations. Wheat has always been a symbol of LOVE and fertility (bummer for all those ceoliacs out there) and one reason that special bread or cake and not a special meatloaf has been central to our wedding rituals, at least since the Greeks and Romans.
 

Greek brides baked cakes to give to their grooms. Later roman couples offered wheat cakes to Jupiter. The priest who served the God, burned the cake over a flame and this sacrifice symbolized that the woman was now under the jurisdiction and protection of her husband (old skool jargon) it also demonstrated that the marriage was both legal and sacred.

At Roman weddings the bride carried wheat as a good luck charm. At medieval weddings grains of wheat were thrown at the happy couple with exactly the same wishes – Luck, LOVE and fertility – as today’s rice and confetti.

So we’ve gone from chucking bread rolls at the happy couple to the ‘coeliac friendly’ version of gluten free rice or recycled paper confetti (how very modern)

The Anglo Saxons went one better and crumbled small cakes (bread or oatcakes) over the brides head to foretell fertility to follow (or to disguise a bad case of dandruff on that special day).

Romans eventually took to making their flour and water wedding cakes a little easier to swallow and there became less wastage and more eating (now that’s what i like to hear!) Spices and flavourings were added and before long the cakes were topped with white sugar and bitter almonds, chosen to represent the pleasures and pains that would inevitably follow.

Today the wedding cake is resplendent. It’s fragrant heart is sometimes covered in swirls of white icing, on top are tiny replicas of the bride and groom or more modestly a bed of flowers or some other such creation. It is, to the last crumb, a delicious physiological symbol.

FOOD IS LOVING, COOKING IS FOREPLAY AND EATING IS MAKING LOVE.

Poem…

“Honeysuckle Rose” by Fats Waller and Andy Razaf

I don’t buy sugar
You just have to touch my cup

You’re my sugar

 It’s sweet when you stir it up
When I’m taking sips from your tasty lips
Then the honey fairly drips
You’re confection, goodness knows

Honeysuckle Rose