Feeding the Hungry Ghost (8 page)

Over time, the two-liter bottles of Diet Coke from my bad old days became shrouded with dust. By the time I opened one for a visiting friend, it had gone flat and fizzless.

I’ve been soda-free for years now and don’t miss it at all. In fact, the thought of it, all sweet and foamy in my mouth, is just weird. Am I happier? Healthier? Richer? More famous? Well, I’m healthier. I have fewer colds, more stamina, glowier skin, and nails that actually grow. And I’m pretty happy. And I owe it all to literature. My own.

SOWING
the
SEEDS
of
LOVE,
or
APHRODISIACS
and
OTHER ADDITIVES

Saint Valentine was martyred sometime back in the third century, so the guy’s bona fides are sketchy. The truth, as best we know, is the Romans jailed him, and while behind bars, Valentine would send word out by letter to his fans, saying buck up, all is well, don’t lose heart. And thus the greeting card was born.

A couple millennia later, we in America celebrate Valentine’s Day with a sharp uptick in card, rose, and chocolate sales. I will tell you this, though you may not believe me — these will not solve every romantic problem. They will not guarantee you a hookup with your obsession du jour or smooth over a rough patch with your honey. Nor is bling necessarily the answer. If it’s a must-have gadget, it’s obsolete already. Diamonds may be forever, but they often fund African warlords, and do you really want that on your head?

I’m a cheap date for Valentine’s Day — or any day. This is, in part, why my husband, Benjamin, married me. Another reason, he says, is I have the biggest heart of anyone he knows. I think it is his nice way of saying I’m a sucker, a softie, and he is going
to have to pick up the wet, gloppy chunks of my heart when it breaks yet again. I never developed a thick emotional skin. In that regard, I am like a lobster.

I never much considered the lobster (sorry, David Foster Wallace), other than noting the obvious — they are butt-ugly. (And to put such creatures in your mouths and eat them is desirable? Really?) Then I took a trip to Maine, where I learned about shedders.

From time to time, lobsters molt. Stands to reason when you think about it. If you’ve reached a certain size, you’re going to bump up against the inside of your exoskeleton, and what then? Molt or be crushed by your very skin. So lobsters shed. Then they are still butt-ugly, on top of which they are vulnerable.

That’s the downside of being in love — it turns you into a shedder. Sure, the world turns up its colors, and the secrets of the universe whisper to you and tell you how hot you are. On the other hand, your carefully constructed life splits open, crashes, and falls away. In time, you will grow another crust around yourself, but in the meantime, you are naked, bro, and out in the open waters, where anything can get you.

On the other hand, going through life with your carapace in place cuts down on your fun. So I have tried to be selective, discerning in my love interests.

I put out in the kitchen but do not do so for just anyone. I have to like you.

And you can bet the end result will be good. Or at least thought through, mused over, mentally and even physically caressed and massaged until I have the thing I feel will give you the most pleasure.

Nothing is more intimate than feeding someone. The question is, what does love taste like? What are the flavors of affection,
desire, comfort, seduction, flirtation? It depends on the one — or ones — you’re feeding. Of course it’s complicated. With dinner, as with life, what we think we want isn’t necessarily what we want. Or need. The trick is divining that deeper, primal desire or absence. That hunger.

Feeding people I love — or even like — should not be my default. I have other talents. Being able to recite “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in its entirety. Pole dancing. Okay, I’m a lousy pole dancer. But I’ve been feeding people since I was a kid. My early forays into the kitchen were praised by my mother, who’d been shooed out of the kitchen by her own mother, and by my father, who had — and has — a sweet tooth and hoped to cultivate a source of endless brownies. He got it.

Baking brownies for Daddy and making dinner to seduce someone have at their root the same desire, a wish to please on a primal level. However, the difference is ripe with possibility. This became apparent to me at fifteen when I decided to have an orgy for my friends.

They were seniors — two years older than me and about twenty years more sophisticated. Except for one thing. They talked extensively about sex but didn’t have it. Oh, there was longing, all right. Some of us pined terribly for others who were, as is the way of adolescence, clueless (about a lot of things, including, in one case, sexual identity, but that’s another story).

Um, the sex thing? I
had
had it, and with the conviction of the newly converted, concluded it would do my friends a world of good, too. With a terrible teen logic, I decided we should have sex with each other. We’d be each other’s initiating experience and set each other free.

Of course, there was the lust/disinhibition issue. This group wasn’t prone to ripping off their clothes or anyone else’s. Some
intervention, some assistance, was going to be necessary. So I invited everyone over for dinner. And laced the food with an aphrodisiac.

Okay, this strikes me as forty kinds of wrong now, but at the time, what I worried about was which sex stimulant and how to score it. Had I applied myself to my studies with the same determination, I’d have been valedictorian. But I was more interested in sex. In an altruistic way — you want the best for your friends.

To me, a novice recreational drug user, date-rape drugs and Spanish fly seemed both crass and iffy. However, dittany of Crete, a variety of oregano, has some historical precedent as an amatory aid, plus it has a pretty pink flower. It is, however, indigenous only to Crete. As in: Greece. As in: some six thousand miles from Miami. And me without even a driver’s license yet. Dittany of Crete was not gettable in Miami back then, at least through mainstream channels and with my babysitting money. Cardamom was easier to get my hands on. Like its kin, ginger, it’s a warming spice and has been warming up folks for centuries. Characters sucked on cardamom seeds in
Tales of a Thousand and One Nights.
Promising.

Even more promising, my parents would be away for the weekend. They knew my friends. Hanging out at our house and sucking everything out of the fridge is what they always did. This time, though, the eats would be different.

I took to the kitchen. I substituted regular oregano for the dittany of Crete and made — I couldn’t tell you why now — a moussaka. Moussaka, that Greek mélange of layered eggplant, potatoes, zucchini, tomatoes, onions, and melting béchamel, may be classic, but it evokes a bent Greek grandmother with sensible black shoes and a whisper of a mustache. It is not sexy. Plus it requires a hell of a lot of chopping and stirring, and dirtying every pot in the kitchen. By the time I’d assembled it, I was ready
to call the whole thing off. But I added a final handful of oregano and hoped for the best.

The night of the dinner, my friends arrived, innocent, unknowing, hungry. I wore a red dress which had the effect of shoving my breasts up to my chin. To paraphrase M. F. K. Fisher, I served it forth.

The moussaka was oregano-intense, all right — so much so, it had a bitter finish. But what did we know? We were teens, not food critics. Everyone ate with abandon — except for one friend who’d decided to go on a diet and left deconstructed bits of moussaka all over his plate. Too bad — of all of us, he needed to get laid the most. But big appetite or small, if the oregano was turning us on, the effect was dead subtle.

Desperate, I brought out dessert. Apple crumble. Okay, it was lacking in the looks department. It was, as crumbles are, brown and lumpy. But you couldn’t miss the fragrance of the cardamom, dark, sweet, peppery. At the first bite, all talking stopped. The crumbly topping melted on the tongue (thank you, butter), the apples achieved that perfect balance of firmness and yield, with the Granny Smiths adding that soupçon of tartness to offset the sweeter Cortlands. And the cardamom — slightly honeyed, slightly dusky — struck a low note, back in the throat, deep in the viscera. It seemed to dirty-dance with our tongues.

Ahh, I thought, here we go. With cardamom, we might be on to something. I sat back, looked around, smiled, and waited.

We ate the crumble down to crumbs. But it was the only thing that got ravished. No one became touchy-feely. They did not flush, twitch, or get that happy-stupid look of hormone-revved lust. My red dress stayed on; likewise everyone else’s clothes. I have never made or eaten moussaka again.

I learned my lesson — let my friends have sex in their own
time with people of their own choosing. I gave up on the idea of orgies. But not on aphrodisiacs.

The best aphrodisiac isn’t in a powder or a plant; it’s — eureka — in each person, something alchemical waiting to be summoned.

It took a while for me to get it right. I started in college with a guy with dark, liquid eyes and a cleft chin — the first one I ever saw on someone who wasn’t Cary Grant. He had a resonant voice and a broody manner, which struck me as wildly romantic and now just seems like a pain in the ass. But I was young and foolish and smitten — smitten to the point I clamped my jaw shut every time we met, sure if I said more than hello, I would start babbling like an idiot. Perhaps he thought I was mute at first.

We circled each other for weeks, leaving vapor trails of pheromones. By this time, I’d shown myself capable of speech and potentially more. He asked me out. I countered by offering to make him dinner.

Burgers and beer would have been the safe choice, but I’m not a beer-and-burger sort of girl; and besides, that kind of food just weighs you down. Heavy was not the effect I was going for. Vegetarian but not vegan at that time, I chose cheese soufflé. Soufflés are cheap to make and so wonderfully hopeful. They inflate, they rise, they aspire. And I never had one go wrong since the first one I baked at the age of nine (I was an unusual child).

With it, I poured champagne (okay, it was cheap California
méthode champenoise
— I was on a student budget) and served a salad of soft, pale baby greens with fennel and grapefruit — pink grapefruit for that boudoir blush — dressed with a light, bright vinaigrette, the texture and acidity a nice foil for the melting unctuousness of the soufflé. For dessert, fresh raspberries. It is a meal that leaves you light. And full of longing.

Funny, I do not remember what I wore, but I remember setting the table. There were candles, of course, and flowers — daisies, not roses (again the impoverished-student issue), but they looked charming against the dark blue table linens. Blue-and-white plates made a nice contrast to the golden puff of soufflé, which, may I say, was spectacular, its crust yielding to the determined downward thrust of the serving spoon, revealing a trembling tumble of tangy, cheddary goodness within. The green salad leaves and pink grapefruit glistened with vinaigrette; slim flutes of straw-colored champagne trailed a whisper of bubbles.

Pink Grapefruit and Fennel Salad

Both grapefruit and fennel are loaded with vitamin C, antioxidants, potassium, and fiber. And walnuts are crazy with omega-3s. But what do you care about that when you just want to get laid? Well, this palatedazzling winter salad works that angle too.

You can toss it together in a bowl, but for extra points, make a composed salad. It allows for visual seduction and is much easier than it sounds. Just mound the arugula on individual plates or a platter, scatter chopped fennel on top, and fan out the grapefruit pieces. Sprinkle with toasted nuts and freshly ground pepper.

Serves 4 to 6. Making it for a date with your potential beloved? Just halve the recipe.

1 pink grapefruit

1 fennel bulb

½ cup walnuts

¼ cup walnut oil

2 tablespoons Dijon mustard

2 tablespoons mirin

1 tablespoon agave nectar or honey

1 teaspoon fennel seeds, crushed

4 cups arugula

Freshly ground pepper

Peel the grapefruit and cut the sections into bite-size pieces. Remove and discard the seeds and trim away bitter membranes and pith. Place the grapefruit pieces in a large bowl.

Halve the fennel bulb and slice it very thinly. Add it to the grapefruit.

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Coarsely chop the walnuts and pour into a shallow baking pan. Bake until they’re golden brown and have a wonderful buttery smell, about 10 minutes. Set aside to cool.

In a small bowl, whisk together the walnut oil, mustard, mirin, agave nectar, and fennel seeds. Pour the mixture over the grapefruit and fennel, toss gently, and let marinate at room temperature for 30 minutes or in the refrigerator for up to 4 hours.

Gently toss the arugula with the grapefruit and fennel. Top with the chopped walnuts and a grind or two of pepper.