Always at the height of fashion, never eating less than 100 oysters at a time); the
French author Mira beau once dined on 360 oysters; Balzac once downed 100 at his
publisher's expense, "just for starters"; gargantuan Diamond Jim Brady demanded
at least five dozen oysters at Delmonico's before he'd ever consider dinner or
any post prandial exercise; and Casanova himself pronounced the sensuous
shellfish "a spur to the spirit and to love".
Among modern day sexologists even Dr. David Reuben, who doesn't exactly wax
eloquent about aphrodisiacs in his Everything You Always Wanted To Know About
Sex, gives oysters some credit as a sexual stimulant. "In man's eternal quest
for bigger and better (and more frequent) orgasms," he writes, "hundreds of
foods and food combinations have been tried. Some of them depend on a physical
resemblance to the sexual object. For example, oysters ... resemble the
testicles ... The theory, apparently, is 'like breeds like'...." Dr. Reuben
doesn't counsel us, as Juvenal did, that when "lewdly dancing at a midnight
ball," we should "for hot eryngoes and fat oysters call." But several medical
men do specifically recommend the bivalves. One highly respected chief of a
genitourinary clinic in New York advises his impotent patients to "include
plenty of oysters, raw and fried" in their diets. Medical writers have in fact
prescribed phosphorous compounds on their lists of material aphrodisia for
centuries, even recommending the drinking of seawater because of its phosphorous
content and every oyster guzzles some 160 quarts of seawater a day. Better to
enjoy one's phosphorous in something as delicious as an oyster, as Casanova did,
than to take it dangerously neat or drink it from an increasingly polluted sea.
Casanova, we know, generally ate fifty oysters in the raw for breakfast,
sometimes while navigating the waters of his intimate little bathtub built for
two, and he once observed that eating "so delicate a morsel must be a sin in
itself." But the most fabled of lovers found still better uses for the most
fabled of aquatic love foods. Casanova followed the advice of the Oyster
Institute of America centuries before that estimable organization coined its
slogan "Eat Oysters, Love Longer." Out of his bathtub, he even played several
delectable oyster love games, which he recommends to his "Voluptuous readers"
and which are presented here for consideration by our voluptuous readers.
"We amused ourselves in eating oysters after the voluptuous fashion of lovers,"
Casanova writes in describing the first of his oyster "games of tongue," games
he played with two attractive young ladies named Armelline and Emilie. "We then
sucked the oysters in, one by one, after placing them on the other's lips.
Voluptuous readers, try it and tell me whether it is not the nectar of the
gods!"