Venus in the Kitchen: Or Loves Cookery Book

The cult classic-now available for the first time with its original illustrations.

Toss your Viagra in the trash and make room on your shelf for Venus in the Kitchen, Norman Douglas' wry, eccentric, and highly practical collection of aphrodisiac recipes. Compiled by Douglas and his friends during their twilight years, it was intended for private use among those who were 'anxious to preserve for as long as may be possible the vitality of their youth and middle age'. Now, Venus in the Kitchen is available to all of us who crave an extra dose of vigor in our diets.

A whimsical marriage of the utilitarian and the absurd, this collection of over a hundred annotated recipes runs the gamut from the simple and delicious (almond soup) to the dangerously effective (hysterical water) to the downright ridiculous (sparrows' brains, crane). Complete with beautiful vintage illustrations, introductions by Graham Greene and Stephen Fry, and an unforgettable frontispiece by D.H. Lawrence (whom Douglas quipped 'certainly looked as if his own health would have been improved by a course of such recipes as I had gathered together'), Douglas' irreverent cookbook is a gift you can either slip discreetly under your lover's pillow, or keep for yourself.

Norman Douglas (1868-1952) was an expatriate British novelist and essayist. He settled in Capri, putting it on the literary map and becoming himself a necessary stopping place for any aspiring aesthete. He mainly wrote travel books but is perhaps best known for his novel South Wind (1917). Venus in the Kitchen was his final work, published posthumously in 1952.