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Men’s Secret Culinary Seduction Tricks
Cooking his way into your heart. Men dish on their recipes for love.
by Jane Black
I’ll always remember the guy who got away. Not because of his doe-brown eyes magnified through round glasses, which were cool even before Harry Potter. Not because he was a graduate of Brown and Columbia Business School and could make beautiful furniture by hand. And not because, as I found out years later reading about his wedding in The New York Times, he was sitting on a $100 million real estate fortune. No, what I’ll always remember about him was the dinner he cooked on our third date.
It was a rainy, blustery March evening. In his perfect way, Jake* called mid-afternoon to suggest that we skip dinner at the latest hip restaurant and grab something at his place instead. I was smitten. (Had he served me frozen pizza and a Bud I would have thought him a culinary giant.) But since he had spent three months at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, the menu was creamy pea soup, sea bass with ginger and miso, perfectly charred asparagus, and a rhubarb-pear crumble for dessert.
We never made it to dessert.
“That’s ‘the closer,’” my friend Paul told me not long after
the guy who got away got away. “You know, the meal that seals the deal. Every guy has one.”
The closer is, indeed, an illustrious tradition: the guy’s shot to impress a date within the four walls of his home. Some make just one dish—the dating equivalent of the 1950s housewife’s company dinner—that’s sure to dazzle. My 40-something friend Nick always closed with a chicken curry studded with green apples and raisins that was oh-so-hip back in the 1980s. Others, usually the ones with cooking experience, tailor the meal to their date: Andrew*, 34, remembers making an on-the-fly Thai curry—pulling coconut milk, peanut butter, cayenne pepper, lime, and fish sauce from his cupboards—to make an impression on the “hippie chick who liked creative types.” But for the self-styled sophisticates, he made grilled shrimp with lime.
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1 L // May 13, 2008 at 8:05 pm
You know my favorite course? It’s the one where he’s made you all that yummy food and is waiting on edge to see if you enjoy it…. I love that part!
Gentlemen, if you cook, please remember the anticipation you’ve experienced moments before your lover tasted their meal. Something tells me it’s akin to what many women are feeling after they’ve plugged a lot of time, money, and energy into looking good for a date (or planning an outing). We see you, and the same thoughts buzz around in ours heads and bellies…. Will he like what I’ve prepared? Hope so, because I like him!
Also: Thank you. Someone cooking dinner is like a tasty little present - sooo sweet when delivered with sincerity.
2 5 Things I Wish I Knew About Sex at 30 // Feb 12, 2008 at 10:04 am
[…] women, and which men can’t get out of their own aura. How do I know? Men who love women get to know you over the dinner table, and they apply what they have learned about you there in the bedroom. Rule of thumb: If a man […]
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4 CreativeGoddess // Jan 2, 2008 at 5:06 am
I’d absolutely agree. If a man can take the time to find his way around the spice rack, then I know he’ll take the time to find his way ’round me.