Usually, amatory concoctions were prepared individually, for each suppliant. In the seventeenth century, however, an Englishman by the name of Burton, an apothecary, established a factory in the town of Colchester. Here he produced on a large scale aphrodisiacs compounded of the roots of sea holly.
There were for sale, in Rome, in the market place, in booths and emporia, and in quarters where people of all ranks and all ethnic origins congregated, philtres and brews, and articles putatively endowed with provocative and generative properties. Dried human marrow, and the sucking-fish, star-fish and intimate genital secretions, both male and female, were used in these concoctions. And over the preparations arose supplications and invocations and incantations directed to the divinities of the underworld, entreating efficacy in the purchased potions.
Among plants that have both culinary uses and at least presumed amatory implications are the artichoke and asparagus. In France, artichokes were sold by vendors who, in their street cries, added forthrightly that artichokes aroused the genital areas.
Similarly, in the Orient, asparagus, fried with egg yolks, and sprinkled with spices, constituted a decidedly amatory dish.
The egg plant, too, split and boiled with a flour paste, vanilla beans, pimentos, chives, and pepper-corns, and a concoction known as bois bandé or tightening wood, containing strychnine and hence highly dangerous, was commonly in use in the West Indies, where it was credited with excitant qualities.
In China, again, bamboo shoots, usually an appetizing culinary ingredient, are believed to have an aphrodisiac value.
A shrub that, since Roman times, was used for inciting desire was birthwort. In this respect it was quite familiar to the Middle Ages.
Bitter sweet, too, like many herbs, was at one time credited with erotic virtues.