It’s a dull gray and thoroughly depressing afternoon in New York City, and just looking at this photo, which I snapped before breakfast on Christmas morning, cheers me up. I’m not suggesting that one should attempt to banish depression with booze, but a little booze, a little vitamin C, and maybe a little Blossom Dearie might be worth looking into.

For myself and every other Mimosa-maker I know, the recipe goes like this: pour a little orange juice into a champagne flute and top with champagne (or prosecco, or cava). Not much research on my part revealed that the International Bartenders Association’s official recipe for a Mimosa is 2 parts orange juice to 3 parts champagne. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me, though I’m probably not going to start measuring.

A couple of years ago I learned that what we call a Mimosa in the States and in most of Europe is referred to in the UK as Buck’s Fizz. Ardent Anglophile that I am, I decided this was a much nicer name and wanted desperately to start using it here. This would never work, much as it does no good to ask for a Screwdriver in the UK (where they call it, logically, a Vodka and Orange). And in fact Buck’s Fizz, if you’re playing by the IBA’s rules, is a little different from a Mimosa, containing 2 parts orange juice to 1 part champagne and, sometimes, a splash of grenadine.

The Mimosa is attributed to the Hotel Ritz Paris in 1925. Buck’s Fizz predates it by four years, and was born at Buck’s Club in London when its founder, Captain H. J. Buckmaster, wanted to recreate a champagne-and-peach-juice cocktail he had tasted on the Continent. His barman, Mr. McGarry, substituted orange for peach juice, and the rest is fizzy history. For you P. G. Wodehouse fans: the lively, youthful membership at Buck’s inspired the famous Drones Club. [Wodehouse is a splendid antidepressant.]

There is allegedly a secret third ingredient in Buck’s Fizz known only to club members.

I wonder how I’d look in a cravat.

The Kir Royale might be the most romantic drink ever (she writes after drinking one). There are few things more joyous than champagne, and champagne tinged garnet with blackcurrant liquer has la vie en rose written all over it. It’s named after the once-mayor of Dijon, but don’t worry about it. Pour 1 part crème de cassis into a flute, top up gently with 5 parts champagne, fall in love.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Food often gets me thinking about literature, or history, and vice versa. This happened one afternoon recently as I trotted happily back to my office with a slice of sunny citrus-spiked loaf cake from the staff café at the Met Museum. I found myself humming the nursery song “Oranges and Lemons” and wondering what it was all about.

I spent the rest of my lunch hour investigating. Is St. Clement the patron saint of citrus growers? No; he’s the patron saint of blacksmiths and metalworkers. The rhyme probably refers to Saint Clement Eastcheap, a parish church in the City of London that was close to the wharves where imported fruit was unloaded and carried to the nearby produce markets of Cheapside. The banter of the church bells alludes to activities and trades that were plied in their environs:

Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of St. Clement’s.
You owe me five farthings,
Say the bells of St. Martin’s.
When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey.
When I grow rich,
Say the bells of Shoreditch.
When will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney.
I do not know,
Says the great bell of Bow.

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
Here comes a chopper to chop off you head!

Moneylenders lived near the church of St. Martin Orgar, Old Bailey was close to the debtors’ prison at Newgate, and Shoreditch was a notoriously poor area. The bizarre final couplet may be an allusion to weddings and/or executions, referring figuratively to the loss of one’s maidenhead or, more literally, to the loss of one’s actual head. Chris Roberts, an English librarian and nursery rhyme historian suggests in Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme that this last bit may simply be about the “randomness of fortune, referring to a fate that could bring you good things (light, bed) or bad things (the chopper).” Just a bit of cheerful, child-friendly fun from seventeenth-century England.

But getting back to the cake. A Saint Clement’s cake, I discovered, is any one into which you put both orange and lemon flavors. I experimented with a few recipes and settled one which yields a dense, buttery, golden brown disc with intense citrusy zing. This is also a very sturdy, English sort of cake that you can cut into wedges and dunk into a cup of tea or coffee. You could dress it up with a drizzle of royal icing, but that isn’t necessary. Its beauty is in its simplicity.

Roberts’ book, which promises “the seamy and quirky stories behind favorite nursery rhymes,” is a fast and entertaining read, especially if you share my dark sense of humor. It’s out of print, but used copies are available online for a few dollars. Polish it off in an afternoon or two, preferably with cake.

Saint Clement’s Cake
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
1 cup granulated sugar
3 large eggs
Zest of 1 orange, plus the juice of half an orange
Zest of 1 lemon, plus the juice of half a lemon
1 cup all-purpose flour, sifted (sift before measuring)

Preheat the oven to 325°. Butter an 8-inch round cake pan and line the bottom with a round of baking parchment. Butter the parchment, then dust the bottom and sides of the pan with flour, tapping out excess.

Using an electric hand mixer or stand mixer, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, zest, and juices, and mix well, scraping down the sides of the bowl if necessary. Add the flour and mix until well incorporated.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan. You can rap the pan lightly on your counter to distribute the batter evenly, or smooth it out to the edges with a rubber spatula. Bake about 50 minutes to 1 hour, or until a tester comes out clean. Edges of cake will be browned and will have pulled away from the sides of the pan. The center area will look quite homely.

Cool the cake in its pan for 10 minutes, then invert onto a rack to cool completely.

There are lots of great places to sip a cup of posh hot chocolate in New York City, such as the sleek Chocolate Bar, the jewel-box-like Mariebelle, or one of Jacques Torres’ wonderlands, to name just a few. But to this chocolatarian, City Bakery and its velvety elixir reign supreme.

This year City Bakery celebrates its 17th annual hot chocolate festival for the entire month of February, and features more than twenty flavors in rotation. A few–like vanilla bean (2/10), cinnamon (2/25), and malted milk (2/26)–easily sound like hot chocolate marriages made in heaven, and they are. But my favorites tend to be owner/genius Maury Rubin’s quirkier, more adventurous concoctions. On opening night, I sampled a cup of ginger (very good) and drank much of my companion’s banana peel (brilliant) while he wasn’t looking. And I’ll be returning for a few flavors I’ve never tried before: passion fruit cream (2/11), Arabian Nights (I don’t know what it means, but I hope it’s spicy; 2/12), and bourbon (2/27). Bourbon + chocolate = Thank you, Mr. Rubin.

Check out the full calendar of flavors.

If you can’t get to the festival, you can always make your own.

Update (2/14): City Bakery has changed its calendar of flavors a bit since I wrote this post. Rascals. I swear I didn’t make up the passion fruit cream.

I do this every year, mostly because I love to make fun of them. They have absurd titles like Fork Me, Spoon Me: The Sensual Cookbook, [take a deep breath] Booty Food: A Date By Date, Nibble by Nibble, Course by Course Guide to Cultivating Love and Passion Through Food, and InterCourses: An Aphrodisiac Cookbook, which is apparently such a classic in the field that it was given a 10th anniversary edition in 2007. And the covers, oh the covers. The Seduction Cookbook: Culinary Creations For Lovers by Diane Brown depicts a spoonful of honey being drizzled onto a disturbingly sculpted abdomen of ambiguous gender. But the aforementioned Fork Me, Spoon Me takes the prize in the cover art category: a nude woman (is that the author, Amy Reiley, Master of Gastronomy herself?) sits on the floor before an open fridge, making come-hither eyes at the viewer while nibbling a strawberry. With one leg provocatively raised, she is like a foodie Danaë, waiting to be ravished by Zeus in the form of a golden rain of bubbly.

In the past I’ve rolled my eyes at aphrodisiac cookbooks not out of any prudery, but because the connection between sex and food (both cooking and eating) seems so obvious that one doesn’t need a specialty cookbook to figure it out. Simply put, both satisfy primary physiological drives are intense sensual pleasures. To paraphrase Dr. Ruth Westheimer, who celebrated the publication of her new book last night at Bottlerocket Wine and Spirit in New York: you don’t just guzzle your wine. You savor it, look at it, talk about it, smell it, and you should do the same thing to your partner. The same principle applies to a meal. I suspect that any cookbook on your shelf, and especially one you’ve purchased for yourself, will contain more than one recipe you consider utterly seductive.

I’ve also made fun of aphrodisiac cookbooks because there’s something a little bit gimmicky about them, and I guess I am more than a little bit of a snob. A few years ago, a first edition of InterCourses came to me by…let’s call it inheritance, and I was surprised to find many of the recipes oversimplified and occasionally even boring. I flip through the book from time to time. There are a few gorgeous photos–a pregnant belly emerging from a pool of glistening black beans (a symbol of fecundity), a woman’s torso encrusted in pine nuts–as well as some fun tidbits on aphrodisiac lore and steamy anecdotes from the recipe testers. But the recipes don’t inspire any passion in me to make them.

The fair-minded sprite who sits on my right shoulder and keeps my sinister side in check reminds me that people who aren’t entirely at ease in the kitchen and who don’t consider themselves votaries of Bacchus might appreciate the guidance of a seduction-themed cookbook. I think that all people would be better served by buying a copy each of Joy of Cooking and The Joy of Sex and working diligently through both. The connective tissue will form on its own.

It can’t hurt, of course, to do a little reading up on the long and fabulous history of aphrodisiacs. The source material is juicy. The ancient poet Ovid provides a litany of stimulating foods in The Art of Love, and Casanova has a few ideas about how best to enjoy an oyster. My favorite text on food and love, and one I’ve returned to many times since its publication in 1998, is Isabel Allende’s Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses. Combining a substantial dose of historical research with personal anecdotes, it’s an earthy, funny, and often poetic homage to the subject. Allende explains that it was inspired by a series of erotic dreams about food:

One January night in 1996 I dreamed that I jumped into a swimming pool filled with rice pudding, where I swam with the grace of a porpoise. . . . I dived in, and that delicious creaminess caressed my skin, slipped into all the crevices of my body, filled my mouth.

The book contains a thick section of good recipes–including one for rice pudding–contributed by the author’s mother, Panchita Llona.

Returning to my afternoon stroll at the neighborhood bookstore, I’m sorry to report that there was not a single racy food title on offer. Maybe, I thought, they’ve already been snatched up by eager lovers. More likely, the shop has scaled back its stock in our current economy. I dearly hope that anyone who goes there in search of a recipe to fan the flames of a beloved’s desire will cast eyes over the shelves and find many possibilities.

*The title of this post is borrowed from Norman Douglas’s cookbook of the same name, first published in Great Britain in 1952. The recipes within were first collected “for the private use and benefit of a small group of friends, most of whom, I am sorry to say, are older than they want to be . . . ” I cannot possibly conceive of cooking from it, especially as I don’t much go in for skink or sparrows’ brains, but it’s an amusing read. A recipe for “Hysterical Water” is particularly hysterical.

Hot buttered rum was popular in colonial America, and was believed to help fend off sickness if you’d caught a chill.

Hot Buttered Rum
Makes one drink.
1 oz. rum (dark is best, but I sometimes use golden)
1 teaspoon best-quality maple syrup
1/2 teaspoon brown sugar
Pat of butter, small or large, drinker’s choice
Boiling water (about 3/4 cup)

Put rum, syrup, sugar, and butter into a mug, top up with boiling water, and stir. If you prefer, you can substitute hot apple cider for the water, which is delicious but gets away from the essence of the drink.

If you wish to get really fancy, you can soften a stick of butter in advance and cream it together with about 1/2 teaspoon each of cinnamon and nutmeg, and about 1/4 teaspoon allspice. Press the mixture into a small bowl, cover tightly, and put it back in the fridge to harden. This makes enough for 8-10 servings of hot buttered rum. Use this in the recipe above.

The quintessential Christmas tipple, egg nog is worth a second mention. For the recipe, see Egg Nog For the Neurotic from December ‘06.

The Moscow Mule is a zingy combination of vodka, lime, and ginger beer (gingerale’s spicier, sassier big sister who, like a mule, knows how to kick). It was born in 1941 when three friends–Jack Morgan, a ginger beer producer, John G. Martin, a liquor distributor, and Rudolph Kunett, president of the vodka division of Martin’s company–put their heads together in the bar of New York’s Chatham Hotel. Though it wasn’t conceived as a seasonal drink, I think it’s a nice choice for warm-weather Christmases and the occasionally sultry December day–like the one just passed–here in New York.

Moscow Mule
Makes one drink.
2 oz. vodka
1 oz. fresh lime juice
6 oz. ginger beer

Stir ingredients together and serve over ice. The drink was legendarily served in copper mugs, but who has a set of those? A tumbler or collins glass is the thing.

A perhaps unnecessary word of warning: do not attempt to shake the ingredients together, no matter how festive you’re feeling (I speak from recent experience). Ginger beer is a soft drink and behaves like one when you rile it up.

The Frosty Morning Drink is for making with one eye open and taking back to bed with you on a winter morning when coffee isn’t appropriate because you have every intention of falling back to sleep.

I discovered this beverage in the glorious, hilarious, perverse Eccentric Cookbook by Richard, Earl of Bradford (depicted on the cover wearing a bra-and-garters print apron). The Earl attributes the drink to Mrs. Beeton, famed English cookbook author of the nineteenth century. It appears, however, to originate with Reverend Robert Hunt, a founding member of the first English colony at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 (see Laura Simkins Fitchett’s Beverages and Sauces of Colonial Virginia, 1607-1907).

Reverend Hunt’s recipe calls for curry powder. Unfortunately, these days, many commercially available curry powders–including the three tins in my cupboard–contain decidedly savory ingredients such as garlic and salt. Instead, I used garam masala, a somewhat mellower mixture of cinnamon, ginger, cloves, black pepper, nutmeg, and other fellows you’d likely meet in a spice cookie or fruitcake. Every garam masala is different, as is every curry powder, so read the ingredients on your spice jar before making this lovely concoction.

Frosty Morning Drink
Serves 2.
2 cups milk
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon granulated sugar, or to taste
1 teaspoon garam masala

Bring the milk to a simmer in a small saucepan, then whisk in spice and sugar. Strain into mugs and drink while hot.

In times of stress and heartache I turn up the heat in my cooking. I hadn’t really faced this until recently, when on my third consecutive day of fiery red curry I paused to consider as I rubbed an ice cube over my chile-scorched fingers. Stress and spicy food seem to have a long-term relationship in my life: in high school I carried a tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce in the breast pocket of my coat at all times, as an antidote to angst-ridden lunchtimes. Years later, in the throes of romantic despair, I became a prolific baker of very, very hot pepper-spiked cheddar muffins.

In fact there’s evidence to suggest that when capsaicin–the “hot” component of peppers–hits the tongue, the brain interprets the experience as pain and releases a surge of endorphins to act as pain relievers. The result is a sort of brief euphoria. Capsaicin also turns up in topical analgesics, because in smaller amounts it creates a warming sensation that can actually dull pain.

These days I’m getting my capsaicin fix from Ju’s Curry Noodle Soup and Goan Vindaloo Fish Curry with Lemon Basmati Rice from Nirmala Narine’s In Nirmala’s Kitchen: Everyday World Cuisine. These are spectacular, potentially tear-jerkingly spicy recipes, but this book is not just for pepperheads. Fifteen countries and world regions are represented, each with a complete menu of six recipes, from aperitif to dessert. Narine’s warm, easy writing is as appealing and interesting as the recipe collection, which ranges from Guinness Stout muffins from the author’s Guyanese Aunty Daisy, to Tibetan butter tea (butter in my tea! joy of joys!). A lengthy and beautifully illustrated glossary of exotic ingredients at the back–including twelve types of chile pepper–is great reading in itself.