The first French restaurants served restorative broths, an “elixir intended to reinvigorate the drooping male”. The cosy-sounding soupeuse was a lady who traded sex for supper. Soup, so often associated with childhood nostalgia, gets a racy rewrite in Rachel Hope Cleves’s Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex. Another title for this delightful book could have been From Soup to Nuts.
Lustful Appetites limits itself to the past two centuries of Anglo-America and France. Paris in the 1800s might have been swimming in oysters and sex of all stripes, but the period was also a heyday of Anglo-American morality. Indeed, Cleves argues, Victorian virtue provided the friction necessary for lasciviousness to flourish. Take the demure uniforms sported by the waitresses at restaurants like Harvey House, their white aprons an “irresistible invitation to despoilment”.
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To write provocatively takes restraint, and Cleves’s style is crisp and wry. About a young MFK Fisher describing French food as “so rich, yet fresh and juicy”, Cleves comments, “Her appetites had been awakened; her powers of description had not yet quite caught up.” Our curiosity is whetted for figures such as bisexual, olive-licking memoirist Mary MacClane, who “didn’t just hammer a final nail into Victorianism’s coffin, she danced on its lid.” Oscar Wilde, a gourmet of many joys, hovers as a benevolent father, encouraging young bohemians, many women, to bloom. One quibble is that Cleves should have included more black chefs, writers, and entertainers, whose impact was indelible. Where is burlesque legend Josephine Baker and her banana skirt?
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Cleves also navigates morally ambiguous territory, skating through, but not past, the seamier sides of food and sex. The practice of locking the door of a restaurant’s private room often resulted in rape; the culinary giant James Beard had a habit of exposing himself to handsome young men. Her deft handling of the disquiet inherent in pleasure is exemplified by her treatment of writer and food sophisticate Norman Wallace.
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Wallace, the subject of Cleves’s previous book Unspeakable, was a generous mentor to Irish food writer Theodora Fitzgibbon. He had also fled to France for “sexual abuse of a prepubescent girl, an exception to his usual fondness for 14-year old boys”. Ultimately, much enjoyment is tainted by exploitation, and what tastes sweet often verges on rot. Cleves’s capacity to chronicle, rather than judge, such complications gives us a lens through which we can scrutinise all that is delectable in the world.
