This is a rather odd story that involves Caesar salad and Wallis Simpson, let me explain…. As a result of Mrs. Simpson’s extensive world travels, Caesar Salad was introduced to many of the great European restaurants by her instructing international chefs as they struggled to recreate the dressing to satisfy …
It is all quite busy here at the moment as I am putting the final touches to my new book – A Splendidly Smutty Dictionary of Sex. The book will be unleashed upon the unsuspecting public sometime in January. To give you an idea of what lurks within its pages, …
Well, well, well, it appears the staple of most kitchen cupboards , the eponymous tin of baked beans are not as they seem. They are not baked at all, they are stewed ! Heinz and the rest of the baked bean mafia have been lying to us for years. Most …
The Roman emperor Tacitus, was known for his remarkably austere lifestyle: he ate sparingly, hardly drank and was not interested in the trappings of wealth; hardly the behaviour you would associate with being an emperor. However, it was a different story when it came to lettuce, he would binge on …
Are you aware that during the prohibition years in America , a popular chocolate bar was the “Vegetable Sandwich” which was manufactured by The now defunct Curtiss Company. The “Vegetable Sandwich” consisted of dehydrated sprouts, peas, carrots and cabbage coated in chocolate. Upon the wrapper written in bold letters was …
A lavender marriage is a marriage of convenience in which one or more of the couple are not heterosexual. These “lavender marriages” came about to provide cover for a number of gay and lesbian actors. The 1923 marriage of Rudolph Valentino with lesbian costume and set designer Natacha Rambova disguised …
Nothing sums up the Victorians’wonderfully prudish attitudes to sex as to the the thought that they were aroused by piano legs. Matthew Sweet, in Inventing the Victorians (2002), describes the origin of this story. In 1837, a Captain Frederick Marryat, the author of The Children of the New Forest (1847), …
In the sci-fi obsessed 1950s, for a short time chlorophyll was mooted as the new panacea for all things whiffy. It all started with a fellow called Benjamin Gruskin, who in the 1930s developed a water-soluble form of chlorophyll, now known as chlorophyllin. Gruskin tested his chlorophyllin on everything …
Richard Vonn Krafft-Ebbing (1840 -1902) was one of the early pioneers in the study of sexual psychology. In his Pschopathia Sexualis, published after his death in 1947, there are over two hundred case-studies ranging from the hilarious to the downright disturbing. Incidentally, the Latin title of the book was deliberately …
I am not particularly fond of cabbage and I have found four people who agree with me Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), which starts with the brilliant “I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy.” goes on to tell the reader that all depressives should …
