Love will be in the air—and in the kitchens and on the tables—at New Haven’s higher-end restaurant scene this Valentine’s Day. A cursory romp through restaurant websites reveals copious offerings that each establishment will serve exclusively on Feb. 14. Chapel Street’s chic Zinc, a so-called “New American” restaurant with a farm-to-table bent, will be serving a roasted red beets salad, lobster and shrimp fra diavolo,[1] ribeye roast, and chocolate mousse, among other things.[2]Just around the corner from Zinc in the Taft Apartments, ROÌA will be offering dishes like a shaved root vegetables appetizer, a “truffled” celeriac risotto entrée, and a pomegranate granita[3] with dark chocolate tuile[4] for dessert.[5] Raw scallops, rocket (arugula), cherry glazed duck breast, brisket with dark-chocolate-chili-dusted carrots, cod, and berry pound cake will be featured on the prix-fixe menu of beloved cheese shop Caseus.[6] What makes these menus special, and why limit them to Valentine’s Day? I wanted to find out.

To an unrefined eye, there is nothing overtly sexual about these dishes, save for Caseus’ erotic dish nomenclature: “Oh Baby I like it Raw…Scallops,” “Artichoke Me Soup,” “Get Duck Naked,” “Cod Piece,” and “Pound Me Berry Good.” Zinc and ROÌA are not so creative, but  those who know a little about food history might pick up on a more subtle connection between alimentation and fornication. Most, if not all, of the aforementioned foods are or were at some point considered aphrodisiacs—foods that enhance one’s sex drive. Root vegetables, chocolate, shellfish, fruits, and meats have all made the list over time of sex-drive inducing edibles.

Food and sex have been intimately intertwined for years as sources of pleasure, fulfillment, desire, anxiety, and taboo. Alcohol has often completed what might be considered a sensory ménage a trois[7]—humans have been drinking the stuff since the Neolithic Period—but that is not a concern of this essay. It should also be noted that aphrodisiacs are often defined as any substance, not just food, that might entail sexual arousal. This definition is the focus of Peter V. Taberner’s seminal work,Aphrodisiacs—The Science and The Myth, perhaps one of the more concentrated academic works on aphrodisiacs, but his focus lies in herbs and other non-edible animal parts rather than food. These non-food substances don’t pique my interest. I want to know what I can get at Elm City Market or Stop and Shop to prep for a fun night in.

Aphrodisiacs as a category have origins in both mythology and medicine. The source of the word “aphrodisiac” comes from Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, who was born from sea foam after Cronus cut Uranus’ peen off and threw it into the ocean.[8] You might picture Aphrodite as coming out of a scallop shell—think Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus—but her sexual aura has been conflated to seafood in general, oysters included.[9] Alas, Aphrodite did not spring from dark-chocolate-chili-dusted carrots.

More comprehensive qualifications for how aphrodisiacs were defined undoubtedly came from the medical spheres of ancient civilizations. Ayurvedic medicine in India used food-based prescriptions for various ailments and stressed the importance of balance of doshas—the elements—in achieving health.[10] Ayurvedic medicine claimed the body used food to manufacture sexual materials like semen or ova and that aphrodisiacs could replenish the loins of any sprayed seed.[11] Along similar lines, Chinese medical dogma claimed that foods had “heating” and “cooling” properties—a yin-yang of balance.

Ancient Greece is to thank for the Western counterpart to a balance-based health regime, as thinkers like Hippocrates and later physicians like Galen developed a system of humors that were believed to dictate one’s temperament.[12] The human body was seen as a microcosm of nature, made up of four constituent humors that affected the health of the individual they composed. Blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile harmoniously existed in each human, but a slight imbalance could cause illness or have an effect on one’s general temperament. True to the microcosm-of-nature metaphor, each humor has an associated element and season—blood: air, spring; phlegm: water, winter; yellow bile: fire, summer; and black bile: earth, autumn. Each humor was some combination of wet, dry, hot, and cold, akin to Chinese conceptions of health and balance.

To treat an imbalance, foods or other treatments associated with a certain humor would be administered to recalibrate the body in a way that would treat the patient of his or her illness. If someone was phlegmatic—too cold or too wet—“heating” foods might be prescribed.[13] Cardamom and other spices were considered hot and dry, and cucumbers were considered wet and moist.[14] Foods that would increase blood or phlegm, like grapes, were thought to be best for lovemaking, so sometimes an intentional imbalance was achieved by eating aphrodisiacs.[15]

This Galenic theory, honed during the second century C.E., made its way east into Arabic texts and literature about health. Humoristic theory was central to medical knowledge in the Arabic world. Greek medicine was “not only borrowed, digested and assimilated, but also expanded and developed.”[16] Arabic texts incorporate reviews of recipes, for example, that would have served as a pre-game to hitting the sack. Arabic sources are generally important to a discussion about aphrodisiacs, since medieval Arabic literature on sexology and erotology (the erotic) is robust and expansive. Arabic sexology drew on both Greek scholarly traditions and Indian medical traditions as well.[17]

One historian’s classification of Arabic sexological texts includes a category for “books dealing with the sexual capacity of men and women; kinds of invigorating food and drugs that keep sexual capacity normal…”[18] Writing within this category in the thirteenth century C.E., one Sultan felt the need to explain that aphrodisiacs and sex were okay to discuss: his rationale was that sex is paramount to procreation, even if procreation is not necessary for sex.[19] (This religious taboo of sex was more relevant to Christianity, as monks were the primary consumers of the aphrodisiac fruits and shellfish—fasting foods with heavenly taste.[20]) The sultan claimed that cucumber, marshmallow, various seeds, spices, pearls, coconut and other ingredients were all remedies for heightened sexual performance, increased sperm, and strengthened potency.[21] Later texts, like The Perfumed Garden, written in the fifteenth century, have plenty of aphrodisiac recipes for use by married men.[22]

It seems like everyone sought to eat their way to good sex, at least to some degree. Byzantine doctors considered eating certain foods a worthy approach to kick-starting sexual arousal. Medical conventional wisdom maintained that birds like cockerels, partridges, and pigeons; fish, octopus, and mollusks; and rocket, turnips, broad beans, and chickpeas were all potent aphrodisiacs and should be consumed prior to sex—all very reminiscent of a meal Caseus.[23] As important as consuming aphrodisiac foods prior to sex was avoiding anaphrodisiac foods, or foods that could stymie sex drive or decrease sperm count.  Lentils were one such anaphrodisiac in the Byzantine context.[24] Compared to chickpeas, lentils aren’t so different, but their potential to cause flatulence was probably enough reason to prevent their aphrodisiac status.[25] Not down.

Most aphrodisiacs are also rare—in the same way a fancy meal today might be reserved for a special night with a special someone. Saffron, the delicate threads of the Crocus flower, makes frequent appearance in scholarship on Byzantine cuisine.[26] “Rare” birds, not just any old bird, might be more qualified to be an aphrodisiac less because of some innate chemical property and more because they are rare.[27] Rarity equals expense, and expensive means attractive. The Sultan’s aforementioned pearls are a rare product of the oyster; the oyster’s aphrodisiac status has another leg to stand on.

The most rare foods—perhaps imaginary, impossible to find—were the foods of the gods, such as nectar and ambrosia. For these, sugar was a suitable stand-in. The connection between food and the divine often paralleled a similar connection between food and sex. What was nectar and ambrosia for the Gods would have godly effects on its human consumers, and “earthly foods that were sweet were believed to mimic these celestial draughts.”[28] To be sure, sugar was an aphrodisiac food in China and India before it became a global commodity. Everywhere else, people were obsessed with honey.[29]

Also godly was cacao to Mesoamerican civilizations like the Aztec and Inca. Most of what we know about pre-Columbian civilization comes from Spanish observers, who saw how some chocolate beverages were considered to have aphrodisiac properties while others were not.[30] Chocolate existed within a greater taxonomy of aphrodisiac plants that were either consumed orally or applied to the genitals. Like the dankest pot brownie, most of these specimens had psychoactive properties.[31] Stories of Aztec emperor Montezuma, drinking chocolate before entering his harem, may have contributed to the popular mythological sexiness that chocolate has today.[32]

One consistent theme among how cultures defined a food’s sexual potency was the degree to which it was physically analogous to human anatomy. From pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas to ancient China, the penis of animals and other dong-shaped foods were thought to embody the masculinity and sexual vigor of their human form. Animal penis in particular was used as a means to “enhance male qualities of strength, virility, and prowess.”[33] Testicles of animals like the hare were consumed in early Byzantium.[34] Crocodile semen, a product of the animal’s genitals, was believed to have a positive effect on sex drive throughout the ancient Americas, Europe, and Asia, along with crocodile eggs and meat.[35] The obvious connection between the physical body part and its effects of consumption is a durable concept in demarcating the aphrodisiac.

Mere visual similarity to the genitals could also qualify a food as sexually stimulating. Herbs and plants were believed to be aphrodisiacs if they resembled genitalia.[36] One reason carrots and other root vegetables are ubiquitous in aphrodisiac literature might be because of their phallic shape.[37] The respective cultivators of mandrakes, mushrooms, and avocados (from the Nahuatl ahuacatl, or “testicle”) all believed these foods to serve some sexual purpose.[38] These comparisons were not limited to the male anatomy, however. Vanilla’s etymology has roots in the word “vagina,” named for the appearance of the plant’s flower.[39] Oysters are of note for their shape, texture, and smell have all been compared to both the vulva and testicle.[40] And with that, we return to our archetypal aphrodisiac.

Oysters have taken on a mythology of their own in popular American culture — one point of interest is an 1891 English court case where a man sued after his daughter was seduced by another man who served her oysters.[41] Additionally, Victorian era doctors claimed the phosphorus content in oysters had an aphrodisiac effect.[42] A union of French oyster growers at the same time commissioned a publicity campaign claiming that oysters were “the spice of love,” with sayings like “an unforgettable night of love with Normandy oysters” emblazoned on the posters, further perpetuating oyster’s coveted aphrodisiac status.[43]The rise of branding and marketing throughout the 19th and 20th centuries could essentially turn any food into an aphrodisiac.

It becomes clear that there’s no hard-and-fast (okay, maybe some hard) rules in determining what an aphrodisiac is. Placebo effect notwithstanding, history tells me that I can get laid if I stick to the foods showcasing this Saturday in New Haven—the rare truffle; the sinful pomegranate; the root veggies; the dark chocolate; the spicy arugula; the seafood that, like Aphrodite, sprang from the sea.