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.