The Seducer’s Cookbook: A Vintage Guide to the Lost Art of Seduction

“Seduction … is becoming as much of a lost art as hand-caning and bookbinding. But while those two crafts can be replaced by machine work, seduction, if it is not done ‘by hand,’ will not be done at all.”

As a lover of unusual cookbooks and inventive recipes — from The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook to Modern Art Desserts to the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook to Patti Smith’s lettuce soup for starving artists — I was delighted to come upon The Seducer’s Cookbook (public library). This amusing 1962 gem by legendary food critic Mimi Sheraton, which falls somewhere between Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts and The Art of Kissing, presents a collection of “helpful and hilarious hints for situations into which men may lure women and vice versa,” including drink and dining menus, décor, dress, and dialogue. Gracing the book’s pages are illustrations by the great Paul Coker, who contributed to iconic counterculture magazine MAD and illustrated the wonderful 1968 volume MAD Better or Verse.

Sheraton sets the scene:

What we are concerned with here is the delectable and subtle art of luring, tempting, enticing, leading someone into going to bed with you in the most delightful way possible. For if the seduction is planned artfully, it can whet your sexual appetite in the same way that a piquant hor d’oeuvre prepares your palate for the main course to come.

Though it is true people are getting into bed with each other every day, seduction, as opposed to pushing, pulling, pleading and promising, is becoming as much of a lost art in America as hand-caning and bookbinding. But while those two crafts can be replaced by machine work, seduction, if it is not done “by hand,” will not be done at all.

She enumerates her three main goals:

I am for the game — as much fun, and often more, than the prize; hence this book for the following reasons:

1. To enable men to get the answer they want — Yes.
2. To give women a better reason for saying it.
3. To keep America from becoming, sexually, a have-not nation.

But behind this amusingly lewd and seemingly superficial premise lies a deeper meditation on gender politics and women’s empowerment in the Mad Men era — published months before The Feminine Mystique turned the tide and a decade before the second wave of feminism was in full swing. Sheraton challenges the era’s assumptions in a wonderfully heartening way:

The first question to be answered if we are to get anywhere is: Just exactly who is seducing whom? If we are to believe the editors (male) of the American College Dictionary we must assume that only men seduce women, else why the definition “to induce (a woman) to surrender her chastity”? Even masculine vanity in its most extreme form should permit the editors’ minds to allow as how sometimes a man is seduced — perhaps even to the extent of adding the definition “to induce (a man) to lead (a woman) astray.”

She argues for seduction as a gender-blind art, but one the mastery of which is as intricate as it is fruitful:

The whole thing becomes a kind of round robin, and if it is hard to tell the seducer from the seduced (everyone wants to be both), it is important for all of us to be on our toes, to develop our seductive proficiencies so we can play our roles properly should the need arise.

Sheraton even flips certain gender-perception conventions around to give the stereotypical pop-culture male more dimension, arguing against the idea that getting laid is his only consideration:

He has his ego, and nothing deflates it more than the thought that a woman’s sole interest in him is sexual. This may not sound plausible, but it’s one of the best-kept male secrets. Just let a man think any woman he’s at all interested in would have gone to bed with any other presentable male who chanced by, and he is enraged and starts competing. He will immediately begin to turn hand-springs on her lawn (intellectually and even physically), trying to convince her he’s really a pretty special guy — out of bed as well as in. This is where his talents as a seducer will stand him in good deal.

But what makes the relationship between food and sex so compelling, after all? Sheraton writes:

The urge to eat and the urge to procreate are basic, natural and deliciously intertwined … and certainly no other method of seduction is as healthful or nourishing. No matter what else may go wrong, at least you’ve had a good meal.

It may be worth noting here the three sorts of appetite described by Dumas père in his Dictionary of Cuisine — as applicable to sexual hunger as to gastronomic.

1. Appetite that comes from hunger. It makes no fuss over the food that satisfies it. If it is great enough, a piece of raw meat will appease it as easily as a roasted pheasant or a woodcock.
2. Appetite aroused, hunger or no hunger, by a succulent dish appearing at the right moment, illustrating the proverb that hunger comes with eating.
3. The type of appetite that is roused at the end of a meal when after normal hunger has been satisfied by the main courses, and the guest is truly ready to rise without regret, a delicious dish holds him to the table with a final tempting of his sensuality.

Sheraton goes on to offer several menus for various occasions and scenarios — from morning-after breakfast to seduction outside marriage to dumping someone by serving leftovers. Here’s a sampling from a menu for seducing young lovers:

STRAWBERRIES CHANTILLY

Wash ½ pint strawberries, drain on paper toweling, hull them and cut lengthwise into quarters. Leave 2 of the nicest berries uncut. Sprinkle with 1 tablespoon Cointreau, and a little sugar if they are sour, and chill them for ½ hour. Beat ½ cup heavy sweet cream until it is stiff, adding ¼ teaspoon sugar and the tiniest drop of rose water to it halfway through the whipping. Fold berries into the cream, pile into two individual serving dishes and top each with a whole strawberry. Chill for 1 hour before serving.

The Seducer’s Cookbook is delectable and diverting from cover to cover. Pair it with this fascinating read on ancient aphrodisiacs and anti-aphrodisiacs.

Thanks, Kaye

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Ways of Seeing: John Berger’s Classic 1972 BBC Critique of Consumer Culture

Gender roles, the elusive promises of advertising, and what oil painting has to do with the publicity machine.

Forty years ago this year, BBC premiered a series of four 30-minute films written and anchored by art critic and author John Berger. Soon adapted into a book, Ways of Seeing (public library) went on to become a landmark postmodernist critique of Western cultural aesthetics, exploring not only how visual culture came to dominate society but also how ideologies are created and transmitted via images — a subject of pressing timeliness in that golden age of photography.

In the third episode of the series, Berger looks at oil painting and its formative role in the creation of consumer culture, showing that paintings are, before anything else, objects to be bought and sold, and admonishing that “we should be somewhat wary of a love of art”:

Berger writes in the book:

Publicity is the culture of the consumer society. It propagates through images that society’s belief in itself. There are several reasons why these images use the language of oil painting.

Oil painting, before it was anything else, was a celebration of private property. As an art-form it derived from the principle that you are what you have. It is a mistake to think of publicity supplanting the visual art of post-Renaissance Europe; it is the last moribund form of that art.

The final installment in the series explores the world of advertising and its perpetual promise of an even-elusive alternative way of life, depicted through a language of words and images that never cease to seduce us.

This series began by considering the tradition of the European oil painting. It has ended by us looking at publicity images today. Because I believe that, in many respects, these images continue that tradition. I’ve been critical of many things in that tradition, of our culture, of some of the values which it celebrates, and I’ve illustrated my arguments by using the modern means of reproduction. But, finally, what I’ve show and what I’ve said, like everything else that is shown or said through these means of reproduction, must be judged against your own experience.

But one of Berger’s most memorable and lasting contributions is the discussion of how media culture shapes gender politics and woman as object. Though the series was produced four decades ago — shortly after the Good Girls Revolt, a time of tectonic shifts for women’s rights — and much has changed since, it remains a priceless piece of cultural anthropology, as well as a stark reminder of how deep-seated some of our cultural conditioning is, and how much more is still to change if we are to transcend those burdensome bequests:

To be born a woman has to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women is developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another….One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

Ways of Seeing is part The Century of the Self, part Christ to Coke: How Image Became Icon, and wholly recommended in its entirety.

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Anti-Suffragette Postcards from the Early 20th Century

A brief pictorial history of socially sanctioned sexism.

Among February’s vintage Valentine’s Day postcards from the early 1900s was some anti-suffragette propaganda. That brand of misogynist messaging, it turns out, wasn’t reserved just for Cupid’s favorite holiday — in fact, as the suffrage movement swelled into a groundswell in the early 20th century, the picture postcard industry was enlisted in producing propaganda that discredited and denigrated women fighting for the vote. Here are a few more anti-suffragette postcards from the period, a reminder at once amusing and appalling of our culture’s history of socially sanctioned bigotry. (No doubt, Tea Party signage on marriage rights and immigration will appear in similar contexts in the cultural criticism of tomorrow.)

If this wasn’t amusingly appalling enough for you, up the ante with this Victorian list of don’ts for female cyclists, but then lift your spirits with a look at how the bicycle actually emancipated women.

History Extra @matthiasrascher

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Women in Science: Einstein’s Advice to a Little Girl Who Wants to Be a Scientist

On what matters and what doesn’t.

Earlier today, we witnessed the gender imbalance in philosophy — an imbalance arguably more pronounced in science than in any other field. It’s a systemic problem solved not simply by putting more women in the Science section of the bookstore or on the TED stage or on the science faculties of higher education, but by encouraging more little girls to become scientists in the first place. But, how?

From the delightful Dear Professor Einstein: Albert Einstein’s Letters to and from Children (public library) comes the following exchange between Einstein and a bright, witty South African girl named Tyfanny, who reminded Einstein of his own granddaughter and with whom he exchanged several letters despite being at the height of his career and cultural prominence.

In a letter dated September 19, 1946, Tyfanny writes:

I forgot to tell you, in my last letter, that I was a girl. I mean I am a girl. I have always regretted this a great deal, but by now I have become more or less resigned to the fact. Anyway, I hate dresses and dances and all the kind of rot girls usually like. I much prefer horses and riding. Long ago, before I wanted to become a scientist, I wanted to b e a jockey and ride horses in races. But that was ages ago, now. I hope you will not think any the less of me for being a girl!

Sometime between September and October 1946 — a snappy response time by the day’s standards — Einstein replies:

I do not mind that you are a girl, but the main thing is that you yourself do not mind. There is no reason for it.

Complement Dear Professor Einstein, which is a delight in its entirety, with Einstein on the secret of learning anything and why we’re alive.

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