Real men don’t eat quiche. Or do they? When it comes to virility, attempts at measuring the potency of certain types of food or mysterious concoctions on performance often rely on unverified facts and entail a host of undesirable side-effects. A carefully prepared quiche awakens the senses just as well as the next blue pill. At least, that is the opinion the gastronome offered as subtle questions of masculine desire were cleverly folded within XIXth century gastronomic discourse—a take on what ‘real men’ eat that arguably continues to define our modern practices in the kitchen and in the bedroom.
