All sorts of brews are known and experimented with in the East. A stimulant that, although credited with amatory effects, produced at the same time violent reactions, was a Chinese concoction of opium and other ingredients, called affion.
Herbs were always a contribution in love drinks. An aromatic herb that was called by the Romans Venus’ plant was known in the Middle Ages as Sweet Flag and was considered an erotic excitation.
Animal flesh and organs have immemorially formed part of the amatory apparatus. In the second century A.D. a physician of Alexandria recommended the flesh of lizard as a genesiac agent.
Cheese and cherries, dried shrimp and scallops, fried spinach and noodles: chestnuts boiled with pistachio nuts, pine kernels, sugar, rocket seed and cinnamon: chicken gizzard: a compound of juice of powdered onion and ghee, heated and then cooled and mixed with chick-peas and water: a cider drink: cinchona bark: a liqueur distilled from cinnamon: civet-perfumed candy: cod liver, and cod roe: cockles: all these disparate items, some centuries ago, others in our own contemporary times, East and West, have been in use as generative provocations: sometimes traditionally and hopefully: at other times, merely traditionally.
In the Hindu manuals there are enumerated and described such varied potions and unguents and drugs that masculine activity, according to legend, can be prolonged continuously to the extent of hundreds of individual and successive occasions.