Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Food and smell 191
As a summer treat homemade ice-creams take some licking. Chins, wrists, elbows –
we’re up to our ears in sticky fingers. Gluttony for cool sensations overcomes us.
Fruit seduces us into feasting. Salads toss a new leaf. Picnics are the obsession of long,
luscious days: casual affairs which take breakfast and newspapers to the water’s edge;
and elegant settings from which the dining room walls seem simply to have melted
away. (Vogue, Entertaining, February/March 1996 p. 59; sic)
The juicy waffle of winespeak relies heavily on sex for inspiration. Tasting
notes refer to sex on a forest floor and sex in a bottle. A California Cabernet is
‘Naomi Campbell in latex’; an Australian Shiraz ‘a Chippendales dancer in
leather chaps – tight, full bodied and ready for action’. 36 The following
review describes what is claimed to be an outstanding Australian pinot noir:
Purple/red. An alluring nose with coffee and chocolate combined with wild berries and
forest floor aromas. Fresh and clean with fleshy fruit, ripe summer berries and cacao
bean flavours. Silky smooth and sensuous, this is a wine for seduction, as a symphony
of taste sensations saturate the palate. Seamless and integrated, there is a continuity of
flavour that lasts from first sip until last drop. Wine so sexy they should attach a birth
control warning to the back of the bottle! (Sloane 1999)
The preparation of food seems charged with ardent expectation of sensuous
manipulation. Even in these days of microwaves and takeaway, we are advised
to ‘get floury, sticky, wholly involved’. 37 Think of plunging your hands into a
bowl of egg and raw mince, pushing up moist herb-scented stuffing into the
open orifice a chicken, rubbing flour into soft dough. The stuffing of
courgette (zucchini) flowers is described like a wedding night: getting your
hands on fresh, small, plump, creamy-fleshed courgettes with their flowers
intact. ‘Born limp and languid, the shooting star of the vegetable world,
fiori di zucca beg to be dealt with quickly.’ 38
Of course, this style of writing is wonderful fodder for lampooning comedians.
BBC Two’s Posh Nosh is a notable example. Its website informs us
that this satirical show teaches you to ‘relax an avocado, bamboozle a parsnip
and shave a fennel, all on a duvet of rice paper’. 39 Here is Simon Marchant
explaining a number of the steps in his recipe for ‘Leftover Supper’ (as he
describes it, ‘dinner with its shirt undone . . . relaxed, languid, louche’):
Now for the chicken. Brando one-third of the butter in the chicken’s world of interior.
Then mollify its complexion with the remaining two-thirds. Massage rhythmically and
gently. Your aim is to make the dead bird happy. If a chicken feels bitter, it tastes
bitter. Aga-sweat at 200, for about 58 minutes, butter-basting often. When your
chicken is noblesse oblige, embarrass a leg and some decolletage and twirl some
flaked flesh in the pan-sweat. Leave by a south-facing window for an hour, giving the
chicken ample time to de-traumatise and un-heat.
Place your parsnips in an auction-bought dish. Arrange them centrifugally like the
spokes of a wheel in a Brueghel painting. (Brueghel the Elder, of course.) Twirl a
smattering of leaves from still-beating lettuce hearts. Shower the epicentre with French