Hannah Gersen surveys the cookbooks she’s loved reading. One favorite? 1952’s Venus in the Kitchen, or Love’s Cookery Book:
This is a cookbook of aphrodisiac recipes. I would be surprised if anyone has ever cooked from it, and even more surprised if they derived aphrodisiac benefits from the entrees, which includes a large number of recipes for brains and kidneys. It is the most literary of cookbooks and the most bizarre. Many recipes begin with declarative, faintly poetic instructions such as: “Feed your snails for a fortnight on milk”; “Boil the meat until it is practically cooked into rags”; or, my favorite, “Take some pig guts.” Many recipes end abruptly with a vague opinion: “Rather banal, I venture to think” or “Not everybody cares to treat oysters in this fashion.” If Evelyn Waugh and Edward Gorey collaborated on a cookbook, it might look something like this one.
In 2002, The Guardian excerpted some of the book’s recipes for a Valentine’s Day meal plan, advising sparrows’ brains for the entrée:
Sparrows have always been praised as stimulants. Aristotle has written: Propter nimium coitum, vix tertium annum elabuntur. Recommended also by the school of Salerno.
Whoever wants to test this should take several brains of male sparrows and half quantity of the brains of pigeons which have not yet begun to fly. Take a turnip and a carrot and boil them in chick-pea broth. Cut in little slices the turnip and carrot, and put them in a deep pan with half a glass of goat’s milk, and boil till the milk is almost absorbed. Now put in the brains and sprinkle them with powdered clover seeds. Take off from the fire as soon as they come to the boil, and serve hot.
The Dish 