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The Joy of Cooking (the Joy of Sex)
I love feeding my friends. For a recent dinner for eight, I prepared one of my favorite starters, roasted beets and goat cheese, followed by Boeuf Bourguignon with papparadelle noodles, and dessert of individual warm chocolate cake and ice cream. When I mention to married girlfriends with children that cooking relaxes me, they stare at me blankly, as if I’m speaking in a foreign tongue. I’ve never had to fix meals for a husband and family, so I don’t see it as a chore, but rather a pleasure, more in line with a hobby. And I’ve wondered if there’s a similar mindset at play, when it comes to sex.
Cooking and sex go way back, according to Richard Wrangham in his new book, Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human. In the chapter, “The Married Cook,” Wrangham traces the relationship between cooking and mating in primitive societies, and how it happened, anthropologically speaking, that women got stuck over a hot stove.
Wrangham also describes courtship and marriage rites of hunter-gatherer societies such as the Mbuti Pygmies of the Congo and the Bonerif tribe of New Guinea.
Among the Mbuti Pygmies, an unmarried woman who offers food to a man is effectively flirting, if not offering betrothal. Male anthropologists have to be aware of this to avoid embarrassment in such societies. Co-feeding is often the only marriage ceremony, such that if an unmarried pair are seen eating together, they are henceforward regarded as married. In New Guinea, Bonerif hunter-gatherers rely on the sago palm tree for their staple food year-round. If a woman prepares her own sago meal and gives it to a man, she is considered wed to him.
Just for the record, the lavish meal I described earlier was served to some married couples and a few single gay men, so I don’t think my skill will result in a wedding. At least not my own.
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I feel so blessed that I was able to partake of this incredible meal that you described. Who needs sex when there are molten chocolate cakes to devour?