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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
We take the edible trappings of flirtation for granted: chocolate covered strawberries and romance, oysters on the half shell and desire, the eggplant emoji and a suggestive wink. But why does it feel so natural for us to link food and sexual pleasure? Rachel Hope Cleves explores the long association between indulging in good food and an appetite for naughty sex, from the development of the Parisian restaurant as a place for men to meet with prostitutes and mistresses, to the role of sexual outlaws like bohemians, new women, lesbians and gay men in creating epicurean culture in Britain and the United States. Taking readers on a gastronomic journey from Paris and London to New York, Chicago and San Francisco, Lustful Appetites reveals how this preoccupation changed the ways we eat and the ways we are intimate―while also creating stigmas that persist well into our own twenty-first century.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Good Food, Wicked Sex
From Puritans to foodies
Notes
1 The Pleasures of the Table
Cabinets particuliers
La cuisine d’amour
Turning tricks
Grandes horizontales at the Grand Seize
Notes
2 Innocents Abroad
Dames de comptoir
Feeding the appetites
Women’s appetites
Nightlife guides
Notes
3 Perverted Appetites
Moral diets
Perverted appetites
The ladies were supposed only to nibble
Notes
4 Private Rooms and Rooms Private
Private rooms
Sex on the menu
Stag restaurants
The culinary desert of England
Feminine appetites
The end of private rooms
Notes
5 Pretty Waiter Girls
Waiter girl saloons
Personating a woman
Brasseries à femmes
Waitresses
Notes
6 Dinners in Bohemia
The Parisification of New York
Beyond New York
Manly sympathy
Notes
7 Greedy Women
The virtue of gluttony
The Lesbian Left Bank
A rapture for cooking
Notes
8 Mistresses of Gastropornography
The pleasures of French food
Writing about love and the hunger for it
Rapturous food porn
Notes
9 Gay Gourmets
The brotherhood of bachelor cooks
The rise of the gay food world
Queer cookbooks
All the waiters are dead
Notes
10 Foodies
Recipes for seduction
Straight food
Dude food
Notes
Epilogue: Good Sex, Bad Food
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Figures
Chapter 1
A gentleman amorously clutches a woman on a divan in a luxurious room meant to …
A dissolute young man wastes his fortune over amorous crawfish dinners in a cabi…
Two images of soupeuses, French sex workers who specialized in dining in cabinets…
The only surviving photograph of the Grand Seize, by Jean Barry, 1913, captures th…
Chapter 2
Thomas Rowlandson’s 1814 hand-colored etching “Madame Very, Restaurateur…
Louis Marie Yves Queverdo’s “Milord Bouffi payant sa carte à madame Véri,” satir…
An unattractive Englishwoman grabs her startled husband by the ear as he follows a…
Chapter 4
A menu illustration for San Francisco’s Poodle Dog restaurant features a black…
Chapter 5
The Gaieties, a Broadway concert saloon, drew repeated attention to its pretty waite…
Pretty waiter girls service male customers in a New York City saloon. The girls wea…
Chapter 6
Frank Bellew diptych showing the “Bohemians as they were said to be by a kn…
Chapter 7
“Isadora Duncan,” photographed by Arnold Genthe during her visit to t…
Chapter 9
An ashtray from “Le Matelot,” a 1950s restaurant run by London psy…
Chapter 10
An illustration from the opening pages of Louise Bennett Weaver and Helen Cowles…
The front cover of The Playboy Gourmet (1961) promoted a new ideal of the straigh…
The front cover of Bridget’s Diet Cookbook (1972), which satirizes American…
The title pages for Lionel H. Braun and William Adams’s Fanny Hill’s Cook…
A June 1980 comic strip from Playboy magazine captures the transition from the hi…
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Good Food, Wicked Sex
Begin Reading
Epilogue: Good Sex, Bad Food
Index
End User License Agreement
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LUSTFUL APPETITES
An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex
Rachel Hope Cleves
polity
Copyright © Rachel Hope Cleves 2025
The right of Rachel Hope Cleves to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5364-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024938463
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Dedication
For all my fellow hungry greedy people. Bien vivre et mourir gras!
Acknowledgments
I don’t even know where to begin. This book has been so long in the cooking that I can’t possibly recall all the hands that took a turn stirring the pot.
The project began during a sabbatical year in Paris, during 2013‒2014, when I thought I was working on a book about Americans who learned to cook in France only to keep coming across sex in the sources. During that year, on some of my archive visits, I had the company of Natasha Lehrer, a great reader, writer, cook, and friend, who is reason enough for me to keep engineering research projects that bring to me Paris until I can’t swallow one more single bite of foie gras (never!).
Despite the newness of my project, in 2015 the team at Notches blog, including Gill Frank and Justin Bengry, invited me to guest-edit a series of blog posts on the theme of food and sex. The wonderful submissions that came in, from Benjamin Carp, Gustavo Corral, Robert Gamble, Christopher Hommerding, Scott Larson, and Laika Nevalainen, persuaded me that this new direction in my research had legs.
I took further encouragement from travel grants that I received from the Schlesinger Library, which allowed me to read through the papers of Julia Child, Elizabeth David, and M. F. K. Fisher, and from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, which allowed me to read the papers of Sylvia Beach and Sybille Bedford. The research for this book would not have been possible without the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), which funded a multi-year project I called “Parmesan and Pleasure.” I didn’t realize just how many years it would take to turn that project into a book. I blame Norman Douglas, who distracted me and demanded that his own book take precedence.
With the support of SSHRC, I was able to employ a series of wonderful research assistants who combed through sources including magazines, newspapers, and diaries, with enthusiasm and dedication. Thank you to Katey Flechl, Alexie Glover, Lauren Irvine, Jamey Jesperson, Michelle Snidal, and Sal Wiltshire. The book gained immeasurably in depth and richness from your contributions. Thanks also to my adored friend and occasional research assistant Amy Glemann.
Thank you to all the editors and anonymous peer reviewers ‒ yes, even you, reader B ‒ who helped me hone my arguments in article and chapter form: Tracey Deutsch, Anne Ewbank, Craig Friend, Heidi Gengenbach, Lorri Glover, Amanda Herbert, Frank Jacob, Alex Lichtenstein, Wilhelm Meusburger, Shauna Sweeney, and Vanessa Warne. Thank you, thank you to Emily Contois, who generously provided feedback on my work on Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche while she was publishing her own article on the topic. A true act of scholarly commensality. The book also benefited enormously from the feedback I received at talks, delivered everywhere from community centers, to classrooms, to libraries, to international conferences.
Thank you to all the archivists who make the work of historians possible ‒ this includes the keepers of family archives, like David Marchasani who shared scans of his aunt Thelma Wood’s dog-eared cookbooks. Thanks also to Jonathan Ned Katz for talking with me about his aunt, Cecily Brownstone.
Thank you to the commentators on the blog I kept during my year in Paris, and to the community of hungry people who engaged my tweets during the good years when I was constantly posting my discoveries in the archives. You persuaded me that one day there would be an audience for this book.
Special shout-out to the following tweeps: Celia Sack, owner of Omnivore Books on Food, who allowed me to use her amazing San Francisco bookstore as an archive of rare cookbooks; Guillaume Coatalen, who helped with my French when I was working on my Vocabula Amatoria scholarship; and Bri Watson and Robert Davis, who pointed me to fun sources. Thanks to all the people on all the platforms who came up with creative titles for the book. I have saved you, gentle reader, from so many bad puns.
Thanks to the many food writers and scholars I’ve had the good fortune to communicate with ‒ even briefly! ‒ while working on the book: Annabel Abbs, Ken Albala, John Birdsall, Aaron Bobrow-Strain, Emily Contois, Adam Federman, Julieta Flores Jurado, Jonathan Kauffman, Alex Ketchum, Rachel Laudan, Joy Hui Lin, Sylvia Lovegren, Amanda Moniz, Zachary Nowak, Lisa Jordan Powell, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Helen Zoe Veit, Stephen Vider, and Ashley Rose Young. It’s easy to feel isolated when working from a tree house on Vancouver Island, but you made me feel like part of a larger community.
A few truly generous souls read the full book in draft form and gave me detailed feedback. Thank you to Jamey Jesperson, Adam Shprintzen, and Masha Zager. Thank you to Pascal Porcheron for inviting me to publish with Polity, and thank you to Julia Davies for taking over the reins, with assistance from Helena Heaton and Maddie Tyler. To all the friends who helped me in the important process of choosing the best book cover: I think we nailed it.
How can I possibly thank all the people who cooked me wonderful sensuous meals and fed my appetites? Top of that list is Tim Cleves. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the love along the journey. My parents deserve better than the quick dismissal they get in the introduction. It wasn’t their fault they worked full time! They still managed to fill my belly with many delicious meals. As a child, I particularly loved my mom’s Chinese spare ribs and my stepmother’s manicotti. I would like to pretend to have loved my father’s peanut butter, bacon, and banana sandwiches but I just can’t. What a delight it is to now be the mother of two adult children who love to cook. They should move back to Victoria so they can cook for me and fatten me up (you especially, Maya).
I’ve eaten so many wonderful meals with friends over the past decade. I am thankful to each and every person in every kitchen, domestic and commercial, who has fed me. It is my greatest aspiration that this book will generate many more dinner invitations in the future. Please feed me! I eat everything and I’m happy to wash up afterwards.
Introduction: Good Food, Wicked Sex
In the beginning, according to a familiar story, a single, delectable, irresistibly ripe piece of fruit plucked fresh from the branch awakened humanity’s sexual appetite. Scholars may debate whether the fruit was an apple or a fig or an apricot or a pomegranate, but who doubts that biting into a fruit’s taut, sun-warmed, sweet flesh could make Adam’s and Eve’s juices flow? As Milton describes the scene in Paradise Lost, when Adam and Eve ate from the fruit, “carnal desire enflaming, hee on Eve/Began to cast lascivious Eyes, she him/As wantonly repaid.” Adam and Eve progress from eating the fruit of temptation to burning in lust in a few short lines.1
If you need persuasion that eating fruit might enflame the passions, just watch Alan Bates devour a fig in the 1969 film adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. At a summer picnic table in the verdant English countryside, the handsome, dark-haired, dark-eyed Bates grabs a purple fig from the fruit bowl, pushes his thumbs into its ripe center until it splits open, and presses his mouth directly to the red flesh inside. Bates tells the others that the Italians say the fig stands for “the female part, the fig-fruit; the fissure, the yoni, the wonderful moist conductivity toward the centre.” He then lifts his juicy fingers to his lips and describes the smell to the table. Several of his dining companions are swooning by the scene’s end.2 Or, for a more recent example, consider Timothée Chalamet’s lustful interlude with a peach, followed by Armie Hammer’s hungry bite from the same peach, in the 2017 film Call Me by Your Name.3
The link between food and sex is a story told and retold in many times and places. In ancient Chinese poetry, hunger serves as a symbol for sexual appetite. The Shijing, a collection of folk songs and verse dating to the fourth or fifth century BCE, includes a poem that describes a girl starving for a boy who does not consummate their attraction: “There is a pelican on the bridge./It does not wet its beak./That boy there/does not consummate his coition./Oh, dense! Oh, lush!/The morning rainbow on South Mountain./Oh, pretty! Oh, lovely!/This young girl is starving.”4 The fourth-century BCE Chinese philosopher Gaozi said “appetite for food and sex is nature.” But the anthropologist Judith Farquhar, who studies modern China, challenges Gaozi, arguing that appetites for food and sex “are far from natural ‒ in the sense of being ineluctable, everywhere the same, or determined outside of human history.” Food and sex may have an “inherent comradeship,” but their comradeship takes different forms across historical contexts.5
Like their Chinese counterparts, fourth-century BCE Athenians associated fish and lust in their poetry and treatises, but they applied their own distinct spin. For the Greeks, fish was not an appropriate sacrificial offering; it represented an indulgence that could only be justified by love for pleasure. Fish were considered irresistible, like sex itself, and gifts of fish were an instrument of seduction. Despite the rich Athenian discourse about food and sex, the topics have received little attention from classicists. The widely shared belief that food and sex are connected by nature has led scholars to neglect the topic as one requiring no explanation.6
The oversight can also be attributed to moral anxieties that date back to the classical era. Proper control of the alimentary and sexual appetites was a central concern of classical philosophy.7 Ancient philosophers and medical authorities warned that luxurious foods stimulated dangerous lustful appetites. That concern shaped early Christian philosophy, and continues to feed a widespread unease today, contributing to ongoing neglect of the topic.8
This book traces the history of our modern belief system linking good food to wicked sex, from the invention of the restaurant in late eighteenth-century France through the emergence of the foodie in late twentieth-century Great Britain and the United States. The book ends where this research journey began for me. I was born in New York City in the mid-1970s and raised by parents who worked full-time jobs and had neither the time nor the inclination for performing great feats in the kitchen. Good food held little importance at the tables of my childhood. The first “gourmets” I met were my stepmother’s first cousin, David, and his lover, Jerry, who loved to bake and would bring rich desserts to holiday meals. My stepmother’s parents were old-school Jewish Marxists who came of age during the Great Depression. They reused tea bags and stocked a dusty case of off-brand soda in their garage, which no one would drink, which meant they never had to restock. At holidays, my step-grandfather would put out a teiglach, an inedible pile of hard little pastry nuggets stuck together with tooth-breaking honey syrup. One bite was all it took to abandon any thought of ever eating teiglach again, which inspired the theory that my step-grandfather brought the same inedible teiglach to every holiday, offering up the food equivalent of his undrinkable soda. Jerry’s decadent desserts opened my eyes to a queer world where food’s pleasure mattered more than its convenience or economy.
My childhood impression that all gay men were gourmets was reinforced by my favorite television show, Three’s Company, about a cooking-school student named Jack Tripper who fools his landlord into letting him live with his two female roommates by pretending to be gay. In an earlier treatment for the series, the main character is a chef in a French restaurant.9 In both versions, the character’s gourmet cooking establishes his homosexual alibi, even as the show’s humor depends on treating this association as an outdated stereotype. One of the most popular bestsellers of my childhood, Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche (1982) by Bruce Feirstein, negotiated the same tension, its humor hinging on the association between gourmet French food and homosexuality, even as it implicitly made fun of that stereotype. In short, I came of age in a world where good food was still very gay, but there was a strong sense that times were changing.
I became a beneficiary of that change in the late 1980s when my mother started living with a man who loved to cook French food. Then I met my future husband, who set about trying to seduce me with his cooking (it worked). He made me a brook trout with lemons the first time I went to his apartment; the Athenians would have approved. Today, my students, born in the twenty-first century for the most part, don’t associate gay men and gourmet food. They may not associate indulgent food with any of the varieties of illicit sexuality that I explore in this history ‒ including prostitution, libertinism, lesbianism, and promiscuity.10 But the social pressure my female students feel not to eat too much or too richly on first dates suggests that the belief system lingers on.11 The popularity of the hashtag #foodporn on TikTok (more than 41 billion views!) reveals how this historic association survives in the English language. By unpeeling the onion and revealing the historical logic behind the often-unspoken rules that continue to influence our attitudes toward food and sex today, I hope this book will starve our moral discourses of some of their power and free readers to feed their appetites with less worry.
From Puritans to foodies
In the decade that I’ve spent researching the history of food and sex, I’ve frequently fielded skeptical questions from people who want to know how I can possibly squeeze such a vast topic into a single book. I can’t, of course. I’ve limited myself to making a sweeping argument that covers two centuries and two continents. Briefly, Lustful Appetites argues that the emergence of the restaurant in late eighteenth-century France, and its popularity as a site for prostitution and adultery, prompted middle-class moralists in Britain and the United States during the nineteenth century to fixate on the dangerous link between French food ‒ then the standard for good food ‒ and immoral sex. Anglo-American Victorianism rejected the pleasures of the table as sexually suspect, especially for women. That attitude created the conditions for late nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexual outlaws, like bohemians, lesbians, and gay men, to claim a taste for good food as an identity marker. If loving good food made a person sexually suspect, then men and women who resisted sexual orthodoxy could claim their identity by indulging at the table. The first half of the book focuses on restaurants and sex work in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the second half of the book focuses on epicureanism and sexual rule-breakers in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Not until the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s did this Anglo-American system of beliefs, or “alimentary-sexual regime,” begin to fall apart.12 In the late twentieth century, straight men and women claimed the new identity of the foodie, decoupling a taste for good food from sexual immorality. Even today, Anglo-Americans have a reputation for being “puritanical” about food and sex. By opening in the late eighteenth century, however, Lustful Appetites challenges the idea that the actual Puritans were to blame for this rejection of pleasure.
Victorian precepts against alimentary indulgence drew on a deep well of beliefs, dating back to ancient Greek and early Christian medicine and philosophy.13 The fourth-century desert fathers tried to temper their lusts by fasting, even by giving up salt. Evagrius of Pontus (345‒399 CE) warned that “gluttony is the mother of lust, the nourishment of evil thoughts.”14 Saint Basil (330‒379 CE) believed that “through the sense of touch in tasting – which is always seducing toward gluttony by swallowing, the body, fattened up and titillated by the soft humors bubbling uncontrollably inside, is carried in a frenzy toward the touch of sexual intercourse.” Similar beliefs circulated within medieval Catholicism, which defined gluttony as one of the seven deadly sins. Thomas à Kempis, the fifteenth-century author of The Imitation of Christ, the most widely read devotional book of the late medieval era, warned that “[w]hen the belly is full to bursting with food and drink, debauchery knocks at the door.”15
Anglo-American culture began to develop a distinctive aversion to luxurious food during the early modern period. The Protestant Reformation rejected the Catholic practice of alternating feasting with fasting in favor of a new steady daily regime of plain food.16 The slave trade, which justified enslavement, in part, by characterizing Black people as orally and sexually indulgent, contributed to a new ideal of slender, white female embodiment.17 Later, the growing availability of food for the working classes during the Industrial Revolution led elites to distinguish themselves not by eating more than the poor, but by eating with greater refinement and delicacy.18
It’s true that when the Puritans came to power in mid-seventeenth-century England, they attacked gluttony and feasting, which were associated with whoredom and adultery in English culture.19 In 1645, the Puritan-dominated Long Parliament forbade the celebration of Christmas, a ban that lasted for fifteen years until the Restoration of the monarchy. The ban extended to mince pies, a traditional holiday food. Defenders of the feast day complained loudly. A 1646 pamphlet ridiculed the Puritans, complaining that in previous years Father Christmas could be found in every house, surrounded by “roaste Beefe and Mutton, Pies and Plum-porrige, and all manners of delicates,” but the Parliament had locked him in prison where he became “much wasted, so that he hath looked very thin and ill.”20 Even after the Restoration, the Puritans’ enemies continued to make fun of the mince pie ban. Samuel Butler’s mock-heroic poem Hudibras scorned the Puritans as men who “quarrel with minc’d Pies, and disparage/Their best and dearest friend Plum-Porridge;/Fat Pig and Goose it self oppose./And blaspheme Custardthrough the Nose.”21 Butler’s poem helped fix the reputation of the Puritans as haters of good food.
The Puritans who settled New England not only attacked gluttony, they linked it directly to illicit sexual behaviors. In a 1674 execution sermon delivered at the hanging of a seventeen-year-old boy caught committing bestiality with a mare, Puritan minister Samuel Danforth warned the community to “Beware of Fulnes of Bread, i.e., Gluttony and Drunkenness, This was another of the sins of Sodom, and it is the very fodder and the fuel of the sin of uncleanness.” Danforth expanded on this theme in typical Puritan fashion by citing a large number of biblical passages linking excessive eating to sexual uncleanness: chapter 5, verse 7, from Jeremiah, about how the backsliding people of Jerusalem had fed to the full and then committed adultery; Book 2 of Peter, chapter 2, verses 13 and 14, about unclean people who feasted with their eyes full of adultery; Luke, chapter 21, verse 34, in which Jesus warned his followers not to let their hearts be overcharged by eating or drinking to excess. Danforth summed up these passages’ moral lesson in his own distinctive phrase: “’Tis a lamentable thing to see Christians Belly-gods.”22
Even after the Puritan era came to a close, their eighteenth-century descendants, New England Congregationalists and Presbyterians, continued to attack gluttony. One of the most frequently cited scriptural passages in New England between 1690 and 1740 was the warning against “eating and drinking unworthily” from Book 1 Corinthians, 11:29.23 During the early eighteenth century, “there was a growing sense that an excess of food and nourishment was a vice.” Revivalist ministers warned their flocks that “surfeiting,” or consuming food to excess, would make them susceptible to lusts and passions.24
Unsurprisingly, many modern epicures, like André Simon the founder of the Wine & Food Society, complained that “the Puritans were responsible for the destruction of what sound gastronomic traditions existed” in England and the United States.25 The Puritan hypothesis has had its defenders among food historians, but there are strong counterpoints against this seemingly logical argument.26 In the first place, modern scholarship has complicated the Puritans’ image as a people haunted “by the fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” in H. L. Mencken’s famous axiom. In fact, New England Puritans enthusiastically defended sexual pleasure within marriage, and they ate diverse diets that exploited the rich oceans and lands where they settled.27 Neither sex nor food under the Puritans was as bland as they are depicted in the popular imagination.
In the second place, non-Puritans attacked the alimentary appetites in terms just as strenuous as their Puritan counterparts. In his Manuall of Daily Prayers (1655), Jeremy Taylor, an opponent to Puritanism, included a prayer to “Let my appetites be changed into spiritual desires, that I may hunger after the food of Angels … Lord let me eat and drink so, that my food may not become a temptation.”28 The Catholic priest Thomas Wright wrote in his book The Passions of the Mind in General (1601) that gluttony was “the forechamber of lust” and “great repasts swim under the froath of lust.”29 Similar sentiments can be found in non-religious seventeenth-century English texts. The playwright Thomas Middleton wrote, “if gluttony be the meat, lechery is the porridge; they’re both boiled together.”30 In short, anti-gastronomic discourse was widespread in seventeenth-century Anglo culture, not confined to the Puritans.
A third weakness of the Puritan hypothesis is that there were similar currents of religious thought condemning gluttony in France, but they didn’t lead to a lasting antagonism against eating for pleasure in French culture. In the sixteenth century, both French Protestants and French Catholics joined in the condemnation of gluttonous appetites, but eating well became a positive virtue in France by the seventeenth century, regardless of those critiques.31
The fourth and final problem with the Puritan hypothesis is that arguments that “food, like sex, is something necessary, but definitely not to be enjoyed by the virtuous,” were far more common in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English texts than in their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors.32 Between the early 1800s and the 1960s, the dominant middle-class Protestant culture in Britain and the United States ratcheted its hostility against the enjoyment of good food to unprecedented extremes. Although men also experienced its effects, this anathema fell particularly harshly on women.
Nothing was quite so distasteful, in the eyes of polite Victorian society, as the sight of a woman enthusiastically enjoying the taste of her food. In 1859, the American cookbook author Eliza Leslie advised ladies never to pour butter sauce over their fish, never to ask for food in a conspicuous voice, never to bite into a bread roll but to tear it into little bits, never to gnaw a bone, never to eat an orange except with a teaspoon, never to bite corn from the cob, never to drink two glasses of champagne, and never ever to utter the word stomach at table.33 Even these guidelines were insufficient for the truly persnickety.34 “A woman should never be seen eating or drinking,” Lord Byron insisted, “unless it be lobster salad and champagne, the only truly feminine and becoming viands.”35 That even a notorious immoralist like Lord Byron shared his culture’s revulsion for women’s appetites points to the power this alimentary-sexual regime held.
In short, the roots of Anglo-American antipathy to the appetites stretched millennia deep, but the tree didn’t reach full fruit until the early 1800s. Apple, pomegranate, apricot, or fig, the tree of temptation simultaneously haunted and enticed Anglo-American culture during the next two centuries. Only recently have we stepped out from beneath its shadowed branches. Even now, the fruit’s sweet and poisonous taste lingers in our mouths.
Notes
1.
John Milton,
Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books
(London: Miles Flesher, 1688), 250‒1.
2.
Women in Love
, dir. Ken Russell (United Kingdom: United Artists, 1969). The dialogue comes from “Figs,” D. H. Lawrence,
Birds, Beasts and Flowers: Poems
(London: Martin Secker, 1923), 18‒21.
3.
Call Me by Your Name
, dir. Luca Guadagnino (Sony Pictures Classics, 2017).
4.
Paul R. Goldin,
The Culture of Sex in Ancient China
(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 8.
5.
Judith Farquhar,
Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 1, 28. William Reddy argues that medieval Bengali and Japanese cultures did not have equivalent notions connecting the appetite and sexuality; William M. Reddy,
The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900‒1200 CE
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
6.
James N. Davidson,
Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 8, 17, 310.
7.
Veronika Grimm, “The Good Things that Lay at Hand: Tastes of Ancient Greece and Rome,” in Paul Freedman (ed.),
Food: The History of Taste
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 71, 83.
8.
The editor of food studies journal
Gastronomica
recently acknowledged that “sex rarely pops up explicitly” in its pages; James Farrer, “Editor’s Letter, Spring 2023,”
Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture
23(1) (March 6, 2023). A few important exceptions of scholars whose work combines these lines of inquiry include Philippa Pullar,
Consuming Passions: Being an Historic Inquiry into Certain English Appetites
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1970); Stephen Vider, “‘Oh Hell, May, Why Don’t You People Have a Cookbook?’: Camp Humor and Gay Domesticity,”
American Quarterly
65(4) (December, 2013); Lola Gonzalez-Quijano, “‘La chère et la chair’: gastronomie et prostitution dans les grands restaurants des boulevards au xix siècle,”
Genre, sexualité & société
10 (Autumn, 2013); Katharina Vester,
A Taste of Power: Food and American Identities
, ed. Darra Goldstein. California Studies in Food and Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015). See also John Birdsall, “America, Your Food Is So Gay: The Story of How Three Gay Men ‒ James Beard, Richard Olney, and Craig Claiborne ‒ Became Architects of America’s Modern Food Culture,”
Lucky Peach
8 (September 27, 2013); John Birdsall,
The Man who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2020).
9.
“Three’s Company,”
ABC Wiki
.
https://abc.fandom.com/wiki/Three%27s_Company/
10.
This book brings together a diverse range of sexual expressions that are often treated separately by historians, who frame histories of sexuality from the viewpoint of present categories of sexual identity. Critics have argued that these categories are anachronistic, and that even the idea of “sexuality” as a principle of personal individuation is a modern invention. David Halperin, “Is there a History of Sexuality?,”
History and Theory
28(3) (October 1989): 271; Jeffrey Weeks, “Sexuality and History Revisited,” in Kim Phillips and Barry Reay (eds.),
Sexualities in History
(New York: Routledge, 2002); Kim M. Phillips and Barry Reay,
Sex before Sexuality: A Premodern History
(Cambridge: Polity, 2011). Using food as a lens opens the possibility for a historicist approach to embodied appetites that is structured by past frameworks rather than present categories.
11.
Dana E. Amiraian and Jeffery Sobal, “Dating and Eating: Beliefs about Dating Foods among University Students,”
Appetite
53 (2009): 226‒32.
12.
Elspeth Probyn credits the term “alimentary-sexual regime,” which refers to specific historical belief systems linking food and sex, to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work
A Thousand Plateaus
(1987), in Elspeth Probyn, “Beyond Food/Sex: Eating and an Ethics of Existence,”
Theory, Culture & Society
16(2) (1999): 224. This book answers Probyn’s call to scholars to “follow the line of sex as it intersects with that of food,” which she argues can expose “the limits of sex as the sole optic through which to elaborate an ethics of existence.” See also Elspeth Probyn,
Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities
(London: Routledge, 2000).
13.
Teresa M. Shaw,
The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998).
14.
William Ian Miller, “Gluttony,”
Representations
60 (Autumn, 1997); Shaw,
The Burden
, 130.
15.
Francine Prose,
Gluttony: The Seven Deadly Sins
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 19.
16.
Rachel Laudan,
Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 207‒47.
17.
Sabrina Strings,
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
(New York: New York University Press, 2019), 122‒46. Also Doris Witt,
Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of US Identity
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 183‒210; Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “‘Everything ’cept Eat Us’: The Antebellum Black Body Portrayed as Edible Body,”
Callaloo
30(1) (2007): 202; Kyla Wazana Tompkins,
Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century
(New York: New York University Press, 2012).
18.
Stephen Mennell, “On the Civilizing of Appetite,”
Theory, Culture & Society
4 (1987).
19.
Laura Gowing,
Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 91.
20.
The Arraignment, Conviction, and Imprisoning, of Christmas: on St. Thomas Day Last.
(London: Simon Minc’d Pye, for Cissely Plum-Porridge, 1646).
21.
Quotes in Pullar,
Consuming Passions
, 126.
22.
Samuel Danforth,
The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into; upon Occasion of the Arraignment and Condemnation of Benjamin Goad, for his Prodigious Villany
(Cambridge, MA: Marmaduke Johnson, 1674).
23.
Douglas L. Winiarski,
Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England
(Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill Williamsburg, VA, 2017), 464.
24.
Elaine G. Breslaw,
Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic: Health Care in Early America
(New York: New York University Press, 2012), 69; David Judson,
Timely Warning, against Surfeiting and Drunkenness
(New York: Henry De Foreest, 1752).
25.
Louis Golding and André L. Simon (eds.),
We Shall Eat and Drink Again: A Wine & Food Anthology
(London: Hutchinson, 1944), 134‒5. Also David Strauss,
Setting the Table for Julia Child: Gourmet Dining in America, 1934‒1961
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
26.
Pullar,
Consuming Passions
, 118‒30; David Hackett Fisher,
Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 135; Jean-Pierre Poulain, “French Gastronomy, French Gastronomies,” in D. Goldstein and K. Merkele (eds.),
Culinary Cultures of Europe: Identity, Diversity and Dialogue
(Strasbourg, France: Council of Europe Publishing, 2005).
27.
Richard Godbeer,
Sexual Revolution in Early America
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, “Plainness and Virtue in New England Cooking,” in Susan R. Friedland (ed.),
Food and Morality: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2007
(Blackawton, UK: Prospect Books, 2008).
28.
Jeremy Taylor,
The Golden Grove, or, a Manuall of Daily Prayers and Letanies, Fitted to the Dayes of the Week Containing a Short Summary of What Is to Be Believed, Practised, Desired
(London: Printed by R. Norton for Richard Royston, 1655).
29.
Thomas Wright,
The Passions of the Mind
(London: Valentine Simmes, 1601), 128.
30.
Swapan Chakravorty,
Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 185.
31.
Jean-Robert Pitte,
French Gastronomy: The History and Geography of a Passion
, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
32.
Stephen Mennell,
All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present
(Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 106. Astrid Franke similarly argues against “Puritanism” as the explanation for American anti-alcohol sentiment; Astrid Franke, “Drinking and Democracy in the Early Republic,” in Christa Buschendorf and Astrid Franke (eds.),
Civilizing and Decivilizing Processes: Figurational Approaches to American Culture
(Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 63.
33.
Eliza Leslie,
Miss Leslie’s Behavior Book: A Guide and Manual for Ladies
(Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Brothers, 1859), 120‒32.
34.
Byron’s objections were commented upon by contemporaries, like John Sanderson, “The French and English Kitchen,”
Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book
, 1844: 18‒21.
35.
John Murray (ed.),
Lord Byron’s Correspondence, Chiefly with Lady Melbourne, Mr. Hobhouse, the Hon. Douglas Kinnaird, and P. B. Shelley
, 2 vols., vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1922), 84.
ONEThe Pleasures of the Table
On a blustery chill day in the winter of 1947, a broken-hearted English woman sat down at her writing desk in a lonely hotel room in Ross-on-Wye under the watchful eye of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, whose image was stamped on a frail white jug she had purchased at a local antique shop. Disconsolate about the hotel’s rations-limited menu of flour-and-water soup, and rissoles made of bread and gristle, she dreamed of the flavorful Mediterranean food she had eaten in Egypt, where she spent the war years. In “a furious revolt” against the “terrible, cheerless, heartless food” served at the hotel, she wrote “words like apricot, olives and butter, rice and lemons, oil and almonds.” The words acted like a ray of sun breaking through the grey skies that had flooded the West Country since her arrival, warming her skin and assuaging her grief. Looking back years later, Elizabeth David realized, “those were dirty words that I was putting down.”1 John Wesley would have agreed.
In the mid-eighteenth century, John Wesley published a popular diet book that prescribed exactly the sort of flavorless cuisine David mournfully encountered on her return to England. His 1751 Primitive Physick mixed the health teachings of the doctor and early vegetarian advocate George Cheyne with a Protestant religious message. Wesley warned his followers against the moral injury not only of meat eating, but of eating “pickled or smoked or salted food,” or in fact any “high-season’d” dishes.2 Physical and moral health, according to Wesley, depended on sticking to a plain diet. Primitive Physick’s impact reached far beyond the confines of Methodism, becoming a powerful gospel within Anglo-Protestantism writ large.
The Anglican minister and popular essayist Vicesimus Knox, for example, echoed Wesley in his writings, warning readers against the “pleasures of the table.” Any person who ate beyond the point of moderation, like a “voracious and impure animal,” according to Knox, should be grouped with “the loose, the profligate, the libidinous, [and] the drunkard.”3Benjamin Franklin, who published Wesley’s sermons in the colonies, translated this Anglo-Protestant consensus into a pithy aphorism for American readers of his Poor Richard’s Almanack: “a full Belly is the mother of all evil.” During his youth, Franklin had fallen under the influence of another early vegetarian, the mystic Thomas Tryon, who believed that human passions had to be tamed through avoidance of meat. A lover of fine food and women (fine or otherwise), Franklin often strayed from his own best intentions, but his alter ego Poor Richard enthusiastically spread the gospel of “a sober diet” which “mitigates the Passions and Affections” and “allays the Heat of Lust.”4Poor Richard’s Almanack was one of the most popular books of the colonial era, selling up to ten thousand copies a year. Franklin’s bestseller turned Tryon’s esoteric advice into common sense for white, Protestant, middling-class Americans.
After the Revolution, America’s leading physician, Benjamin Rush, recommended a sober diet for combating venereal desire and promoting wellbeing.5 An Enlightenment thinker, Rush did not condemn pleasure as impure. He argued that embodied pleasures were designed by “a wise and good Being” to promote human health. But, he warned, pleasure in excess was a “frequent cause of disease.” According to Rush, “riotous eaters of flesh” suffered liver obstructions, dropsy, low fevers, and unslakable thirst. When it came to diet, he recommended simplicity: one substantial meal a day, featuring a single plain dish.6 Rush enshrined dietary temperance as a republican virtue, a contrast to the aristocratic gluttony of the old world.7 A citizen’s capacity for participating in self-governance was indicated by his regulation of his body. “A simplicity in diet, whether it be considered with reference to the happiness of individuals or the prosperity of a nation, is of more consequence than we are apt to imagine,” the Massachusetts poet Joel Barlow wrote in the preface to his 1793 mock heroic, “Hasty Pudding,” which celebrated New England’s common cornmeal mush.8 It was a dish often ridiculed by Europeans, who denigrated maize as animal feed, which in turn inspired American nationalists to elevate hasty pudding as a symbol of patriotic resistance. For citizens in the new United States, plain food became not simply a moral imperative but a nationalist commitment.9
Nothing represented excessive eating to Anglo-Americans more than French food. Over the course of the long eighteenth century, in the context of repeated wars fought between Britain and France for global domination, British identity coalesced around its distinctions from French culture. This process of cultural self-differentiation took hold in Britain’s North American colonies as well as in the British Isles. British identity at home and abroad focused on Protestantism, as distinct from French Catholicism; around the parliamentary system, as distinct from French absolutism; and around plain food, as distinct from French gastronomy.10
Anglo complaints about French “licentiousness of eating” first appeared in the early eighteenth century. Eliza Smith’s 1727 cookbook The Compleat Housewife, originally published in London and the first cookbook to be printed in the American colonies, proudly compiled “wholesome” recipes for “English palates” and rejected “French messes,” or French food. She made a few exceptions when it came to baking, including recipes for French bread and French cake.11 Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), also popular in the colonies, voiced a similar bias against the fashion for French cooking and held up the “good English cook!” for admiration.12 If most readers of Smith and Glasse were women, men encountered the same sentiments in popular periodicals like the London Magazine and the Spectator, both of which circulated in North America.13 In sum, more than a century of war between France and Britain stigmatized French food as licentious and elevated a taste for plain cooking into a key facet of Anglo-American identity.14
For a brief window during the Revolution, patriotic pushback against British cultural dominance led Americans to re-evaluate the prejudice against French food. When American diplomats were posted to France following the 1778 military alliance, several discovered a taste for French cuisine. Thomas Jefferson’s epicureanism is well known and entirely in keeping with his general spendthrift love for luxuries of all sorts. But his more dour colleague John Adams also enjoyed French food during his diplomatic posting to Paris, writing back to Abigail Adams in 1779 that “the cookery and the manner of living here, which you know Americans were taught by their former absurd masters to dislike, is more agreeable to me than you can imagine.”15 This window of rapprochement shut, however, after the French Revolution’s violent turn during the Reign of Terror. A new wave of Francophobia in the United States renewed longstanding suspicions of the licentiousness of French cuisine and strengthened the republican argument for the virtue of plain food.16
Cabinets particuliers
The guillotine scared many Americans and Britons off French politics, but another French invention turned their opinions against French cuisine: the restaurant. The problem was not that the food served in restaurants was bad. The problem was that the sex served alongside it was very, very wicked. The development of an eroticized French gastronomic culture in the late eighteenth century was the grain of sand, or irritant, around which the pearl of a new Anglo-American alimentary-sexual regime took shape in the nineteenth century.
To a purist, the kitchen might seem like the most important room in a restaurant, but to the impurists who frequented restaurants in their early days, the cabinet particulier held that distinction. The cabinet particulier was a small private room, typically furnished with a table, chairs, and a couch, where a man could dine in the company of a woman who was not his wife. Cabinets particuliers could be luxurious, like the infamous upstairs rooms at Lapérouse, on Paris’s Left Bank, where women tested the diamonds they received from lovers by scratching the stones’ facets against the mirrored walls.17 Or they could be basic cribs, just four walls and a couch. Sumptuous or stark, cabinets particuliers were as common in nineteenth-century French restaurants as wine cellars. For many male diners ‒ and during the nineteenth century most diners-out were male ‒ the restaurant was a place to have sex, as much as a place to eat.
Sex figured prominently in conceptions of the restaurant from the beginning. The word restaurant originated in the mid-eighteenth century as a French term for a meat bouillon sold in Paris eateries to refined gentlemen who supposedly required delicate foods to restore their sensitive constitutions.18 The restaurant was an elixir intended to reinvigorate the drooping male. This treatment was supported by classical Galenic physiology, which linked hot and humid foods, like meat broth, to spermatic production and increased virility.19 Women also consumed restaurants, but with less frequency than men, whose needs and appetites drove the expanding trade.20 In a satirical etching from 1782 titled “Le Restaurant,” a man is shown amorously clutching a woman on a settee, while a maid servant hovers nearby holding a bowl of broth on a serving platter. The man’s sword is propped against a chair, pointing upwards. The setting is a cabinet particulier, although it could easily be mistaken for a bedroom.21
A gentleman amorously clutches a woman on a divan in a luxurious room meant to represent a cabinet particulier, while a maid servant serves a bowl of restaurant. “Le Restaurant,” 1782. Jeanne Deny or Martial Deny after Niclas Lafrensen II (Nicolas Lavreince). Widener Collection. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
The word “restaurant” soon shifted from describing a type of broth to the type of place that served the broth. Restaurants were distinct from other public eating places at the time, like the communal tables d’hôte in hotels, because they permitted a diner to enter at any time, sit at a private table, and order from a menu that priced each dish individually.22Tables d’hôte, on the other hand, had set mealtimes, prices fixed per meal, and public tables. In the late eighteenth century, restaurateurs expanded their menus beyond broths to offer other delicate foods. The first grand restaurants in the city opened in the 1780s in the Palais-Royal, a popular cruising ground for sex workers. Male pleasure-seekers could satisfy both their alimentary and sexual appetites in a single visit. The connection between restaurants and sex workers became even more entangled after the Revolution when new restaurants emerged along the grand boulevards of Paris’s Right Bank. Many of these luxurious establishments, decorated with immense mirrors and smokeless oil lamps, also included cabinets particuliers where men could bring prostitutes and mistresses. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Parisian bourgeois men would not bring their wives to restaurants with private rooms.23
The rise of restaurants in France coincided with the emergence of a new genre of “gastronomic” literature that celebrated pleasurable eating as a social good.24 This literature departed from traditional Christian doctrines that regarded eating for pleasure as morally problematic. According to those teachings, eating for the purpose of sustaining the body was ethically good; eating for the purpose of self-pleasuring was ethically wrong because it was a conduit for lust. Stigmatization of the unbridled appetite for indulgent cuisine persisted in France during the early decades of the Enlightenment but later loosened.25 In the late eighteenth century, the secular turn of the French Revolution toppled the last religious proscriptions on eating for pleasure.
The writer Joseph de Berchoux captured this shifting sensibility in an 1801 poem titled “La Gastronomie”, coining a new term for the art and science of eating for pleasure, freed from the imputations of sinfulness that clung to the old term gourmanderie (gluttony).26 “Gastronomy” celebrated the interconnections between food and sex. An early edition of Berchoux’s popular poem included a frontispiece depicting a man having his cup filled at a café by a pretty waitress whom he is clinching lasciviously.27 The verses that followed continued in the same erotic vein, for example describing an old man gazing at his favorite dish with “an amorous leer.”28
The word “gastronomy” soon spread among French food writers. The most famous food writer of the early nineteenth century, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, subtitled his Physiologie du Gout, “méditations de gastronomie transcendante.”29 Like the restaurant, gastronomy had as much to do with sex as food from the outset. Writers could not resist incorporating erotic themes in their food writing, and few things absorbed their attention as much as the pleasures of the cabinet particulier.
According to the nineteenth-century writers Francisque Michel and Édouard Fournier, authors of Histoire des Hôtelliers, Cabarets, Hôtels Garnis, Restaurants et Cafés (1851), the first Paris establishment to offer customers a cabinet particulier was a seventeenth-century cabaret named L’Écharpe, in the Place Royale (the Place des Vosges today). Michel and Fournier drew their information from a 1635 book by Charles Sorel that recommended L’Écharpe as a place where men could pay the proprietor to rent “the prettiest room in the house” and drink sweet wines with their mistresses without being troubled or cheated by anyone.30 This genealogy was repeated in a history of cafés and cabarets by Alfred Delvau, a nineteenth-century Paris journalist famous for his accounts of daily life in the French capital, and in another history of cabarets by Albert de La Fizelière, a friend of Baudelaire. Delvau called the cabinet particulier a diabolical invention, the pitfall of virtues and fortunes ‒ but considering his fascination with the Paris underworld, it’s hard to take him too seriously as a moralist.31
In the 1800s, cabinets particuliers became commonplace in Paris.32 The journalist Georges Touchard-Lafosse wrote in 1821 that for several years past, all the restaurants in Paris had painted the words “cabinets particuliers” prominently on their signs.33 This included many of the city’s earliest restaurants, including La Galiote, which dated back to the Revolution. The number of restaurants that had private rooms expanded over the course of the century and reached a peak of popularity during the Second Empire, 1852‒70. By 1861, Pierre Larousse, the famous dictionary writer and encyclopedist, insisted that cabinets particuliers were “the principal attraction of renowned restaurants” in Paris, including the Café Anglais, the Maison Dorée, and the Café Riche, which were frequented by aristocrats and the very wealthy.34
Private rooms were famous for their waiters’ discretion. In a one-act French vaudeville titled Les Cabinets Particuliers (1832), a waiter tells the restaurateur that he thinks a young man and a woman dining in one of the rooms must be lovers, but the restaurateur forbids him from making any such interpretations, telling him a waiter must be deaf and mute. Later, when confronted by a suspicious husband searching for his wife, the restaurateur refuses to say where she is, insisting that it’s his professional obligation to be discreet.35 The waiters were to keep their eyes averted from anything they shouldn’t see in the private rooms, and after serving dessert, they wouldn’t enter the room again without first loudly announcing their arrival. To protect the diners’ privacy, the rooms could even be locked from the inside, preventing any possible interruption of the guests’ enjoyment. The lock also allowed men to trap their female guests. Unsurprisingly, the private rooms were notorious for sexual coercion.
Georges Touchard-Lafosse reported eavesdropping on a seduction taking place in the private room next to his own on a visit to La Galiote. The man began by saying “You defend yourself in vain, you must cede, the moment has arrived,” to which the woman replied “Don’t demand it; I swore I wouldn’t.” After a little more back and forth, including the woman’s confession that she had betrayed similar oaths twelve times since she was fifteen years old, the woman acknowledged her weakness and gave way.36 In Touchard-Lafosse’s dialogue, the coercion is part of the flirtation, but other sources acknowledged the violence that such encounters could entail. In an otherwise humorous book titled Mémoires d’un Cabinet Particulier (1863), a private room recalled its varied guests, including a serial rapist. The unpleasant man arrived each time with a different modestly dressed working-class girl who hardly dared to lift her eyes. After the food was served, the man would slip the waiter a five-franc piece and tell him not to come in, no matter what he heard. Several months later, the girl would return, this time dressed in silks and makeup, and always on the arm of a different man. To the author, the rapes were a catalyst for the women’s greater misfortune, their descent into prostitution.37 A similar scene is described in Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation Sentimentale (1869), when Rosanette, a courtesan, tells the story of how her mother sold her virginity to a married man who took her to a cabinet particulier and raped her on the divan after the waiter had plied her with wine.38
The waiters who served the cabinets particuliers may have been discreet when it came to the occupants’ sexual encounters, but that’s not to say they were disinterested. In addition to hosting liaisons, the cabinets particuliers were used for literary salons, business meetings, and political gatherings, all of which could generate conversation of interest to the state. According to Larousse, during the waning days of the July Monarchy (1830‒1848), conspirators gathered in private rooms in restaurants to plan their coups while the waiters, in the pay of the police, eavesdropped avidly. Never, Larousse wrote, had the expression “the walls have ears” been truer.39 The government also paid informants to listen in on the amorous encounters transacted within the private rooms. Keeping track of the sexual peccadillos of powerful men could prove just as useful as listening in on their political loose talk.40 During the Second Empire, the Paris police surveilled both the moral and political goings-on in the cabinets.41
In a book about policing, Gustave-Placide Macé, commander of the Sûreté, or investigative bureau of the Paris police, from 1879 to 1884, wrote that “wine, gambling, girls, disease, and adultery” were the foundations of the cabinet particulier. The rooms varied in luxury and cost. At the lower end of the economic scale, wine-sellers furnished rooms with bare cots and served marked-up bad wines to men enjoying the company of dishevelled and dirty prostitutes. At the high end, the grand restaurateurs of the boulevards provided luxurious rooms and sold overpriced weak champagne to wealthy men in the company of finely made-up courtesans. Differences in accommodations, however, could not disguise the fundamental commonalities across the economic spectrum. In all the rooms, according to Macé, bestiality and brutishness reigned supreme. Even in the finest restaurants, the courtesans carved obscene pictures into the mirrors with the diamonds they were gifted and left piles of dirty dishes stacked on the pianos.42
La cuisine d’amour
The menus offered in the cabinets particuliers tended toward lighter fare. The authors of Paris-Restaurants, one of fifty short illustrated volumes on Parisian life from 1854, ridiculed the food served in private rooms, such as small morsels pickled in vinegar, fried peaches, cucumbers in oil, and pineapple sauce. The rooms were not intended for serious eating but for canoodling. What did it matter if the truffles were losing their scent or the wines were bad, as long as there were two burning hearts and a bottle of champagne on ice? “Le divan est le plat de résistance du cabinet particulier,” they explained. The couch was the dish of choice.43 A later article on the “decline of French cooking” echoed this complaint. The young men who patronized the city’s prostitutes were “not gourmets, and when they order dinners in those private rooms which every Parisian restaurant must have, they often regard the divan as the plat de résistance.” As a result of their bad influence, the city’s restaurants had been taken over by unartistic cooking and economical sauces.44
This assessment was overly harsh. While it was “understood that the cabinet particulier
