Vocabula Amatoria: A Glossary of French Culinary Sex Terms

Abstract

Abstract John Stephen Farmer’s Vocabula Amatoria, published in 1896, is a French-English erotic dictionary that is a gold mine of popular sexual discourse. Farmer, editor of a seven-volume dictionary of English slang, based Vocabula Amatoria on three French erotic dictionaries published between 1861 and 1869 by Auguste Scheler, Alfred Delvau, and Jules Choux. The first of the three drew on literary sources, but Delvau’s and Choux’s dictionaries incorporated vernacular that they encountered in Paris’s cafés, cabarets, theaters, and brothels. Farmer’s translations also integrated English slang from the late nineteenth century that he either had collected for his dictionaries or had learned through his work as a journalist and editor living on the margins of respectability. Many of the French sexual idioms collected in Vocabula Amatoria incorporate food metaphors—for example, likening the penis to root vegetables, or the vagina to cooking tools. The English idioms are less food focused. Farmer’s dictionary is a valuable source for understanding the differences between French and English popular attitudes toward food and sex in the late nineteenth century.