This afternoon, I prowled the food section of my local bookstore looking for a laugh. More specifically, I had in mind those books that creep from the miscellaneous cooking shelf to show up on seasonal display tables every Valentine’s Day. I mean the sexy cookbooks.

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.