Wedding Tackle

This recipe gives new meaning to the phrase “fruit of your loins.”

Victoria and Albert

Clearly the Matrimony Balls hark after the tradition of celebrating a marriage with fruit cake, the fruit symbolizing the children to come from the union. Initially, there were two cakes; a Bride’s Cake which consisted of plain cake with white icing symbolizing purity and fertility, and the Groom’s Cake, a smaller rich fruit cake. Eventually the two combined, and the tradition of the newlyweds cutting it together stems from the need for strength, as the solid icing needed to hold the layers up was hard to break. This icing became known as “royal icing” after Queen Victoria used it at her wedding, where it reflected her grand white dress — an unusual decision which has been copied ever since.

Even older traditions include building a tower of buns over which the Bride and Groom would kiss. The French retain this in the Croquembouche, a tower of profiteroles stuck together with spun sugar, which often serves as the top layer of the wedding cake.

Croquembouche 

Croque en bouche means “crunch in the mouth.” This is very likely what happens when one eats a Matrimony Ball.

Candies and Bonbons and How to Make Them, Marion Harris Neil, 1913

Also from this book: Matinée Idols and Nymphos, Feeding the Ever-Burning Flame, Pink Nut Kisses, Jack-in-the-box

Sugared Plums (Ouch)

The Christmas season is a bad time for a gentleman’s testicles.

Chances are pretty good that at some point they will be forced to attend the ballet, for one thing. This ballet will be called “The Nutcracker,” a word that sends chills up a man’s spine and pulls his own nuts right up into his body cavity for safe-keeping. This ballet features lots of mice and candy and children. Its most famous dance is performed by a fairy.

This would be the Sugar Plum Fairy, named for a vintage confection popular back when the Nutcracker was written. As you can see from this recipe, it asks you to “boil your plums.” No fellow wants to do this. Boiling sugar is combustibly scalding hot. Suggest to a man that he boil his plums “till they have cast their juice” is to castrate him with cruel words indeed.

 While the balls get skewered, the rest of a man’s wedding tackle gets to bask in the prevalence of people wanting to suck on candy canes.

Cooks and Confectioner’s Dictionary, John Nott, 1723

Also from this book: Blood Pudding, Tits, Mead, Scurvy, Scourge Of The Seas, Quackery, Gastropub / Gastropig: Eating High on the Hog, Take Your Lumps, Pigeon à la Française, This Little Piggy...

Prairie Oysters

In Season One of the TV show Dallas, THE MOST GLORIOUS SOAP OPERA THERE EVER WAS, JR Ewing fixes himself a Prairie Oyster the morning after a bender. This is because he is woefully hung-over and needs to get himself into shape so that he can go to the office downtown to conduct dastardly business deals of dubious legality and perhaps get it on with one of his secretaries.

The Prairie Oyster is so-named because the raw egg it contains resembles both visually and texturally, a raw oyster. Oysters have long been considered aphrodisiacs, in part due to their slipperiness in the mouth, something the raw egg would appear to approximate. The Prairie Oyster, however, is one of the many names given to bull’s testicles which are breaded, fried and eaten. Eggs are also obviously an essential component of reproduction. The ingestion of another animal’s sexual equipment has also long been an apocryphal method of increasing one’s own sexual prowess. Drinking a Prairie Oyster, then, would constitute a triple-whammy.

Actually downing a glass of brandy and Worcestershire Sauce in which floats a raw egg when hung-over is a challenge only the most steel-stomached drunkard can achieve, meaning that one has to have a rather large set of huevos in the first place.

In the TV show Dallas, THE MOST GLORIOUS SOAP OPERA THERE EVER WAS, the list of principal characters arranged by the size of their cojones (from most to least) is:

Jock Ewing

JR Ewing

Cliff Barnes

Ray Krebbes

Miss Ellie

Lucy Ewing Cooper

Sue Ellen Ewing

Pamela Barnes Ewing

Bobby Ewing

Ray Krebbes, the soft-spoken super-sexy illegitimate son of Jock Ewing, is a cattle rancher, and therefore the only character who is likely to have had experience of actually procuring bull’s testicles, which elevates him far higher on the list than his little brother Bobby, whose name alone implies a child-like innocence and purity in keeping with his role as perpetual underdog.

In case you're wondering why Lucy figures so high on this list, check out this scene, which was part of the storyline where she sleeps with Ray, who turns out later to be her uncle. Also for Pam's gratuitous bum-wiggling shot. 

The House of Calvert Party Encyclopedia, Calvert Distillers Company, 1960


Also from this book: Better Than Anything