OK, folks, so maybe the following snippet from Out The Door! is a bit of a stretch, but in my humble opinion the Corsica Loaf from the Door County Bakery is the sexiest bread alive. Even if you never, ever eat bread, or have banned carbs from your life, make this the one exception….

“Ever try the Corsica loaf from the Door County Bakery?” she asked. “That’s my kind of aphrodisiac.”

“How’s that?”

“Just how the hardness of the crust surrenders so easily to the moist, oil-infused dough when you take that first bite.”

“I don’t generally think of bread in those terms,” he said.

“It’s an irresistible sensation, especially when you tear into a warm piece and a rivulet of olive oil runs down your chin.”

The chapter on aphrodisiacs  was proving to be a tough one. On one hand, she was writing a book she hoped would be an essential guide to the physics of desire. On the other, providing recipes for getting people turned on seemed highly irresponsible. The most effective substances seemed to result in either kidney failure or death and consulting an authoritative text like the Kama Sutra hadn’t been of much help either. The recipes for exciting desire included sprinkling ground monkey turds on a lover’s head or rubbing wasp stings on tender parts.

Maybe anecdotal evidence was the way to go. Aida’s friend Lucinda swore by a charm gleaned from a Puerto Rican dental hygienist in Chicago. To conjure up the man of your dreams, all you had to do was form an anatomically correct figure out of flour and water, bake him in the oven and then wrap his penis with threads of your hair. Lucinda swore by the recipe having been married to the same man for twenty-seven years, a man she’d met at a bus stop.

Aphrodisiacs, as Aida well knew, ran the gamut from fish bait to tattoos. An aphrodisiac was whatever you wanted it to be, and if you seriously believed in doing things like keeping an apple or a hamburger under your armpit for a day and then feeding it to your lover, well, perhaps, it was worth a try. Short of a long list of weird ingredients involving wax effigies, hairs, mirrors, needles, dead bats, fish tongues, or the blood of a dove, frog or chipmunk, the only other possible consideration was an MRI. A brain scan would reveal just how much dopamine was being manufactured in the ventral tegmentum and that, of course, would answer whether an aphrodisiac was necessary at all.

Go ahead, gift your inamorato, wait for sweet nothings to emanate and don’t worry about those sesame seeds turning up in odd places.