Sex and food

Okay, let's test drive this critter with a little food and sex.

Everybody eats, but not everybody fucks. Considering some of the genetic possibilities, this is probably a good thing. (Lord, please make Ari Fleischer celibate). Recently, though, I began wondering how much one thing (food) has to do with another (sex).

My Princess and I experimented with truffles this week (I'm talking about cooking, now, so don't go all 9 ½ Weeks on me). She convinced me (arm twisting, pleading, tears--well, maybe not literally) to blow the twenty bucks for a not-quite-golfball-sized truffle. I relented, but I have a very good excuse: I'm weak.

For my first effort, I decided to try a roulé of beef tartare, something I'd been wanting to try anyway. I purchased a quarter pound of prime angus filet, pounded it flat, grated a quarter of the truffle into the couple tablespoons of whipped cream cheese, rolled the cheese into the sheet of beef (in a strip of Saran wrap), and stuck the roll in the freezer for about an hour while I prepared the rest of dinner. After the hour (which was not quite long enough to keep the roll from deforming), I took the roll out and sliced it into eighth-inch thick wheels. These I served like carpaccio: drizzled with olive oil and lemon, accompanied with greens and thin croutons.

Princess V and I enjoyed the results. The textures of the cream cheese and pounded filet matched nicely. She suggested the beef should have been pounded a bit thinner, and I agreed. The harmony of flavors, however, was astonishing: rich and assertive without being overpowering. I could taste every element of the roulé and still enjoy the combination.

The reaction of our kids was quite a bit different. Now, before you snort dismissively over my feeding tartare and truffles to a nine-year-old boy and ten-year-old girl, you should understand that they're thoroughly acclimated to the experimental nature of my cooking—especially the girlchild. Both kids enjoy beef carpaccio and rare salmon or tuna. In fact, they both liked the raw beef.

It was the truffles that put them off.

Girlchild picked the beef bits out of the roulé and left the cream cheese behind, complaining that she didn't like the aftertaste. Boychild ate one slice and said it was good, but that something in the cheese smelled funny. I could, I suppose, dismiss his dislike as another example of his dislike for fungi. Boychild turns up his nose at all manner of mushrooms (except for the one I dice into capaletti stuffing or risotto, which he devours in spite of the hated fungi). Girlchild, on the other hand, likes most mushrooms (she doesn't care for the texture of cloud ears), and she didn't like the truffles.

Just to be certain, I let the kids smell the sliced truffle. Sure enough, that was the offending smell.

It was a good truffle. If it had been a little fresher, it would have been stronger, so I know it wasn't the quality of the nodule that put the kids off.

No, I think it's sex.

Truffles taste and smell like sex. The kids have never experienced sex (except as a concept: that icky thing adults like), so they have no frame of reference.

I wonder. When well-to-do French and Italian kids—kids raised on truffled foods—are old enough to have sex for the first time, do they get a severe case of the munchies?