WARNING: This post contains very graphic photos of stag penises being prepared as food.
Sophie Gerrard
The four pizzles lay sprawled out on the kitchen counter. Two of them were neat and tidy, as gorgeously tanned as homemade bacon, still attached to their pubic bones and exuding an appetizing aroma of wood smoke. The other two looked as if they had only moments ago been hacked off. Both came with the whole apparatus — not just the bones, but pairs of testicles in cozy sporrans of fur and flowerlike protuberances through which, we worked out, the erect penises must protrude. Leaking pink juices, they had a ferocious, feral smell that assaulted our nostrils—the mighty stags' last stand.
Over the course of my career, I have prepared and eaten many unusual ingredients, from sea cucumbers to frog ovaries, but until recently I had maintained a maidenly innocence when it came to cooking penises of any species. Never in my life would I have imagined that I would be in command of not one but four male members, and of such extravagant proportions. Prone and passive as they were at that moment, they were still a daunting sight. But I sharpened my cleaver, tied tightly my apron, and steadied my nerve.
I can't say I had previously harbored any ambition to cook a penis. When I trained as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, penises were not on the curriculum. And I'm not one of the many foreign adventurers who have made pilgrimages to Guolizhuang, the famous penis restaurant in Beijing, where you can grapple with a smorgasbord of cocks and balls, including those of oxen, dogs, yaks, and occasionally, it is rumored, tigers.
I did eat one once, inadvertently, in China. It was early in my explorations of Chinese cuisine, and I naively assumed that the "ox whip" listed on a Chongqing restaurant menu was an oxtail. I ate it, sliced into pieces, tasteless and flubbery in a clear chicken broth. Years later, I saw a group of men tucking into an "ox whip" hotpot at a restaurant table in northern Hunan. And I often pass by a couple of liquor stalls in the Sichuanese capital, Chengdu, that sell a special brew for the gentlemen of assorted animal members steeped in rice wine.
Of course I was aware that penises have magical properties in Chinese medicinal terms. According to the doctrine of like curing like, animal pizzles can zhuang yang, or strengthen the forceful, masculine yang energy of the body. Stag pizzles, fresh or dried, are a particularly prized tonic, extraordinarily expensive in China, which may be prescribed for impotence and infertility. If you needed to boost your virility in the days before Viagra, eating stag-pizzle soup was certainly easier than following the example of the priapic hero of Li Yu's seventeenth-century erotic novel The Carnal Prayer Mat, who undergoes surgery to have a massive dog's penis grafted onto his own.
Sophie Gerrard
I came by my four pizzles through what the Chinese call yuanfen — a happy, fateful accident. At a dinner party for my sister and some of her friends, I was recounting the tale of a visit to London's Borough Market with a pair of Sichuanese chefs. These chefs, old friends of mine from Chengdu, had been beside themselves with excitement when we stopped at a stall selling wild Scottish venison. "You have to tell the owner," they told me in Chinese, "that if he can dry the stag penises and send them to China, he will make his fortune!" Stag pizzles of any sort, they said, were extremely valuable, but the Chinese would go nuts for the pizzles of stags that roamed the pristine Highlands of Scotland.
I don't remember saying much more than that, but my sister's friend Roxy, who lives in Scotland, clearly got the impression that I was burning with desire to cook them myself. A few months later, when I was traveling in China, I received one of the more surprising text messages of my life:
Hi Fuchsia it's Roxy. I am just about to collect yr stag penises. There are 2 of them. I'm going to try to get one smoked but really need to get them to you quickly as they are fresh.
I phoned Roxy and discovered she had taken enormous trouble on my behalf, spreading the word among the deer stalkers of Scotland that a friend of hers was longing to cook stag penises. "It's become a point of interest with everyone I've spoken to," she said. "Even a guy called Johnny Stalker. He's a stalker and smoker, like his father and grandfather, and he was tickled pink at the idea of smoking stag pizzles. He said he's smoked everything else, but not these, so he's trying out various different recipes. Everyone is dying to know what you are going to do with them."
Roxy's friends had risen to the challenge, and by the time we spoke she'd rounded up eight pizzles, some of them with balls still attached, and Johnny was smoking half of them. What could I say? I told her I was delighted, and thanked her effusively for her efforts.
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