Pink Nut Kisses

Is your marriage suffering from the blahs? 

Has it been forever since your husband noticed you? 

Do you have a boyfriend who seems unable or unwilling to commit? 

Perhaps you’ve had a blazing row about politics or money and need to find a way to make up without having to surrender your position, or have been harboring a simmering resentment for decades that just needs to be quenched. 

Maybe your anniversary is fast approaching and you’d like to do something special this year so that you have the upper hand if he forgets. 

It could be that you need to break some joyful news about an unexpected pregnancy and have been putting it off and putting it off until he’s made subtle suggestions you go on a diet. 

Sometimes, accidents happen, and priceless, irreplaceable heirlooms get broken, misplaced, or accidentally donated to the Salvation Army and it’s about time you came clean. 

Ditto, beloved pets. 

It’s entirely possible that in a drunken stupor you mistakenly re-negged on your vows with an acquaintance of his, or even his brother, and must disclose this before someone else finds out. 

Or it could be that in a crisis of profligate and wanton spending you indulged yourself online using the joint account and know that any minute now the boxes will start to arrive.

If you are facing any of the lamentable situations above and need to renew, affirm, or pre-emptively re-dedicate yourself to your relationship, then give your man some Pink Nut Kisses. Most men only dream of a partner who surprises them when they come home with Pink Nut Kisses, but you can make his dreams come true! Offer them as soon as he walks in the door to maximize his surprise and delight! Soon enough, you might find he’ll request Pink Nut Kisses all the time. 

Go on – with your track record, it’s wise to indulge! 

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

Also from this book: Matinee Idols and Nymphos, Wedding Tackle, Feeding the Ever-Burning Flame, 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...

The Poetry of Wanton Gastronomy

A Seven-Eleven in Pennsylvania

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Auguste Escoffier, for I drove down Main Street under the stars with a heartache self-conscious looking for a convenience store.

In my heavy fatigue, and in need of sugar, I went into the neon Seven-Eleven, dreaming of your concoctions!

What chips and what candy! Whole carloads of teenagers shopping at night! Aisles full of sophomores! Girlfriends in the popcorn, their sisters in the jellybeans! — and you, Nicolas Appert, what were you doing down by the day old donuts?

I saw you, Escoffier, peerless, lonely old genius, poking among the sodas in the refrigerator and eyeing the cashier.

I heard you asking questions of each: Quelle est cette de Coca-Cola? Combien coûte la Mountain Dew?

I wandered in and out of the perilous stacks of cans shadowing you, and watched on the CCTV by the manager.

We strode down the well-lit aisles together in our solitary adventure tasting Jujubes, grabbing every frozen novelty, and never passing the register.

Where are we going, Auguste Escoffier? The doors never close here. Which way does your knife point tonight?

(I touch your book and dream of our ramble in the market and feel absurd.)

Will we drive all night on these empty highways? The streetlights add glow to moonlight, no-one left in the bars, we’ll both be lonely.

Will we roll on dreaming of the lost America of my youth past blue cars in driveways, home to our quiet kitchens?

Ah, dear father, chef, solitary old craft-master, what Paris did you have when Carême quit stoking his coals and you stepped out on a smoky pavement and stood watching his blackened ghost disappear in the rain?

* Thanks to Allen Ginsberg

More Favorite Brand Name Recipes Cookbook, Publications International, Inc., 1984