In the past, food was closely linked to eroticism. With a pinch of imagination and realism, it’s important to say that cuisine and voluptuousness were born in the same breath and on the same burner, just when man put aside raw food and started enjoying the taste of the a good cooked helping.

Until then, the female members of our Paleolithic ancestors used to engage in the sublime act of living, without needing further amorous compliments or fantasies. Together, they were running into the adventures of a desolate scenery and cashing in on fruits, roots and other natural products in an effort to get by in the midst of a baffling environment.

Little by little, the burning flame made them put their feet on the ground and eventually turned them into couch potatoes engaged in a restless search for new flavors. Women harbor secrets and prodigious enchantments that are whipped, under the tremors of voluptuousness, into other shapes and forms of appetite, two instincts man will never ever do without since they rise from within his inner, basic world.

It’s therefore easy to believe that in the face of such a frightening discovery, man found himself out in the cold. And with those ways of eating, he can never be pitted against a women on an even keel. On his quest to make her succumb to his pleasures or just to the dream of making his race last for the longest time, the whims of the female partner show up.

And as the hunter he is, he turns to his many strategies of passion or material enticement. One of them is to bring sensitivity onto the table in order to stir the tastes. Since the dawn of the human race, man has also laid his hands on other resources to flex his muscles and show off his virilito to the untamed femmes. Like filters of love, there have been magic potions, amulets, patchoulis, ground rhino horns and stewed goat testicles. In all civilizations, that chimerical and magic world is commonplace.

As Manuel Martinez Llopis put it in his delicious book on the history of eroticism and cuisine, one of man’s deepest aspirations as he grows older and sees full of anguish how his venereal appetite begins to fade out, is to find a particular element, a prodigious technique armed with the capability to rekindle that fire that starts to flicker.

Egged on by that hope, mankind has for ages stepped up research in a bid to ferret out whatever connection might exist between food intake and sexual strength, a bondage Plato hinted at when he talked about the beginning of love, conceived by Penia after the huge banquet the gods held to celebrate the birth of Aphrodite.

For Eastern people, there’s always been an aphrodisiacal concern in hope to recharge energies through the intake of spices, like pepper, rhizome or other botanical species, let alone products of animal origin like male sparrow brains, believed to take oomph to the utmost.

That’s how the Chinese used many seeds –it’s been too long since they were gone- coupled with complex techniques to make their own recipes with that purpose in mind. Some of those dishes were extremely delicate, based on magnolia petals and peach flowers, lotus seeds, crane eggs, jellyfish, orange or lemon blossom, and shark fins.

Even in this civilization with so many millenniums of human experience under its belt, people trust in salanga’s nest soup, gingerbread pastries and gentian, not to mention some seaweeds that could be used to chimerically renew the dying moxie within.

In a few restaurants around Bangkok, patrons order monkeys or macaques wrapped in cloth and only with their heads uncovered. The apes’ heads are then inserted in a hole in the table, cut off with sharpened knives while the critters are still alive, and their jumping brains eaten by the customers who dip the pieces in a Creole sauce. For people in this part of Asia, that’s one of the finest and most sex-driving dishes money can actually buy.

I’m very much afraid that despite the obsession of mavens and philosophers, this story of sexual arousal getting unmistakably spiked by food has only traveled halfway between legend and reality. Prodigy derives from the sensitivity of the beholder, the way we look at the loved one. And when hunting time comes, sharing food that might awaken that kind of appetite is the name of the game. But the importance of the ambience and the atmosphere is paramount. That, too, takes the art of spiritual education.

The safest loving filter is the woman herself. Her shapes, the tone of her voice and her hidden grace are indeed the prodigious influences. In consequence, both the sexual foreplay and the cooking of root vegetables need a considerable chunk of imagination. That’s the key to success. We transform imagination in dreamland into a prodigious and exceptional being.

In that lab called kitchen, any ingredient gets a life of its own to become delicious delicacies as soon as the sense of art and sensitivity expression kick in. Sitting at the table, all women irradiate their delicacy when eating, when tasting a stimulating appetizer, when choosing the main courses. In a word, when reveling in that moment. That’s where their real magic and strength actually lie. Feeling the smell of a truffle soup wafting in the air, a shellfish salad, an aromatic hare civet sprinkled with red wine and bay leaves, or just a chicken al tendori served with gingerbread, garlic, cumin, cardamom and cinnamon are things that really pack a punch for the senses, especially when you eat one of those next to the women you love.

Thus, eroticism lies in imagination and the discreet enjoyment of good cuisine and wine. Filters like exciting spices and stimulating spirits are just legends. And this leads us to the philosophical reflections made by Jusan de Mesones, head cook of Her Majesty the Queen (1597): “When the righteous man sees he can’t satisfy Violante, Dorotea or Lorenza because he has lost part of his carnal skills, he must then have light meals based on three or tour fresh and soft egg yolks, dates, truffle, acorns dipped in hot water and that herb people call satyr’s grass.

Wouldn’t all that do the trick, he must then make do with a weighty bean soup, a schooner of good red wine, flee from the unease and find shelter in that old, big love flame that still burns in his heart.”