Natural Harvest

At first glance, Natural Harvest by Paul Photenhauer looks like any other glossy softback cookbook produced in the late 2000s. The recipes are simple and elegant, the photography crisp and stodgy-looking, and the layout smells faintly of Microsoft Publisher.

It wouldn’t look out of place on your kitchen shelf, so long as none of your guests looked too closely – Natural Harvest is a book dedicated to recipes involving cum.

Yes, cum as in jiz. Ejaculate. Human semen.

In a conscientious move, the author includes a note in the front of the book, instructing readers to always forewarn dinner guests if they plan on cooking with semen. There are also some genuinely helpful observations about the use and storage of the stuff.

Ever noticed how the consistency of a fresh batch of cum changes in the minutes after production? Paul Photenhauer sure has, and he describes the transformation with the loving precision of a spunk connoisseur:

“When freshly ejaculated, semen usually has a thick lumpy consistency. Left untouched it will then ‘melt’ and turn more fluid. Some semen cooks prefer using semen in its melted state while others enjoy ejaculating directly into the sauce pan or mixing bowl.”

I suppose he’d have to be a connoisseur, since he devised most of the recipes in this book, and tried them out along with his friends. There are enough different dishes that you could whisk your jiz into something new pretty much every weekday for a month.

And it’s varied fare: everything from oysters garnished with unadulterated jiz, to extra-thick chickens soup, to “Creamy Cum Crepes”, for when you’re in the mood for a slightly stomach-churning dessert.

Naturally I tried some of them out.

I am, I’ll be the first to admit, not really the target audience for this book. I’m not an avid cum-eater, although I have tried my own semen out of curiosity.

The salty, saline, slightly glutinous taste never struck me as either pleasant or unpleasant. If I had to compare it to anything it would be egg white; a coagulant or a thickener, but never really the main purpose of the dish.

Cooking with my cum challenged this perception, especially given Photenhauer’s omnivorous enthusiasm both for food and for spunk.

You can use it as a glaze on meat, in place of the egg in cookies, as a garnish on a cocktail, or even as a vital thickener for a sauce or marinade. And in each of these foods it adds a something unique in terms of flavour, texture, or consistency.

Unique, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean good.

A cummy chicken soup or a spunk-thickened stir fry sauce are definitively not for me. I’d be tempted to say they’re not for anyone, but I recognise that many people enjoy semen a lot more than I do.

Suffice to say, smothering a roast lamb in ejaculate did not significantly improve it. Not as far as I’m concerned, at least.

Sweet things, however, were a different proposition. When added to panna cotta, tiramisu or an éclair it’s actually rather pleasant, providing a distinct salted caramel edge.

Perhaps this is an indicator that I look on jiz as a sweet rather than a savoury option… or perhaps I just happen to have dessert spunk. That’s something I’m not particularly displeased with.

If you want a copy of Natural Harvest either for novelty value, for genuine cookery instruction, or to see what you might learn about you or your partner’s cum, you can pick up a copy on Amazon.