FoodSexLit

Sex makes you hungry.  This is just a fact.

Quibble with me.  Go ahead.  I dare you.  But you know how sometimes you fall asleep after eating an inordinate amount of food and then wake up ravenous?  That’s the feeling I’m talking about.  You shouldn’t be hungry, but you are, and the emptiness in your belly is so deep that you ache.

It’s that feeling of sudden, unwarranted hunger that makes me want to write about SexFood—the food you make to sate yourself and your lover.

And I’ve wanted to write about the sexiest sexfood I’ve ever been fed by a lover—Roasted Sweet Potatoes—for a very long time.

Yes, I said sweet potatoes.

Dear readers, now is the time to write about sex and sweet potatoes.  Go with me on this journey.

It might be time because I’ve been listening to a lot of Kool Keith— right now Sex Style: The Unreleased Archives by Kutmasta Kurt is playing on my iPod— and “Sex Style” (the original version) has been stuck in my head for weeks.

It also might be time because I just bought a copy of Rocco Gets Real: Cook at Home, Every Day, which I bought because Rocco DiSpirito’s face is on my new box of Morton’s Coarse Kosher Salt.  I watched The Resturant, Rocco’s show on NBC, for a while because he was/is so hot, but it didn’t leave me with any sort of impression about his food.  Then I read Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl: her chapter on eating at his restaurant, Union Pacific, should have been titled something like “Notes on a Foodgasm.”

Garlic and Sapphires is a good read, and not just for that chapter.  Check it out.

Rocco’s cookbooks are also good reads, and I always come away with some solid info about technique (like heating your pans really, really, really hot), but he relies a bit too much on processed foods for my taste.  However, he has a section in Real on romantic food for Valentine’s Day— featured recipe?  Whole Boiled Lobster.

Don’t worry— I’m done writing about lobster for a while.  What I want to talk about is what he paired the Whole Boiled Lobster with—Roasted Sweet Potatoes.

Keep in mind I’m not talking romance here.  This is not making love.  I’m talking about sex.  The kind of acrobatic, “let’s-try-as-many-positions-as-we-can-for-as-long-as-we-can” sex.  The kind of sex that sort of feels like a yoga practice because you’re not only using muscle groups you don’t typically engage, but because you have to be totally focused on what your bodies are doing together.  The kind of sex that leaves you sweaty, totally relaxed, and maybe a little sore.

The kind of sex that makes you hungry.

It was winter a few years ago, just before Christmas.  We met for drinks at a local bar first.  He bought me lots of champagne because he already knew from experience that sparkling wines and I mix well.  Then we went back to his place through the back door, which happened to lead straight into his kitchen.  The fragrance hit me as soon as we walked in—sweet potatoes, when scrubbed and roasted in their jackets, smell savory and sweet at the same time, with an undertone of musk from the slightly charred skin.

“I put these in before I left for the bar,” he said.  “Do you want one?”

I didn’t, actually.  I wasn’t hungry.

But he was, so he pulled out the baking tray he had covered with foil first, the two plump round brown sweet potatoes surrounded by little pools of blackened sugar.  He took one, split it down the middle, and then nestled a cold cut of butter inside it to melt.  Then he sprinkled it with salt and pepper, took a fork, and mashed it all inside the skin.

“Want a bite?” he asked.

I did.  And then another.  And another.  We ate the sweet potato in his kitchen, bite by bite, while we took off our clothes: first my shirt, then his, then my bra, then his jeans . . . until the potato was gone and we were both naked.

He prepared the second potato the same way, and we took it with us to his bedroom.  He placed it carefully by the bed, then draped a brown and orange scarf over the lamp and lit a candle.  In between positions, he fed me spoonfuls of its salty-sweet, buttery flesh.

Before the relationship ended, I got the recipe.  For a few weeks after we broke up, I made roasted sweet potatoes mashed with butter and salt.  My addition was to fresh-crack the pepper, as I can’t stand that pre-ground shit.  I like my pepper coarse-ground into large flakes for both fragrance and heat.

Perhaps it’s my pepper snobbery, but I’ve never been able to replicate the way his sweet potatoes tasted that night.

Arguments about cheap pre-ground pepper aside, I think there was something about the moment that made those sweet potatoes so satiating: coming in from the cold, cheeks flushed from wine and the winter air; peeling off our winter jackets in the heat of his kitchen and letting them fall to the floor as we kissed; preparing and devouring the first sweet potato.  Then there was that brown scarf and that patchouli candle, our naked bodies reclining in its flickering light.

And of course, the sweet act of feeding each other during sex.  Did I say this wasn’t about romance?

Maybe Rocco knows more about roasted sweet potatoes than I do after all.