Did Olivia Wilde’s salad dressing cause a cheating scandal?

It used to be that our hearts might jump into our throat – and our mind race with images of our partner entangled with another on the cheap floral sheets of a motel bed – if we found receipts from a fancy restaurant we’d never visited. Perhaps a box of jewellery given to someone else.

But now, people’s minds are turning to food.

“That’s our thing,” says one woman I know, of her husband’s parmesan and continental parsley-crumbed schnitzel. “It was the first meal he ever cooked for me, on our first date. So, I would see it as an absolute… if he made that for another girl, I would feel uneasy about that choice.

“Sometimes he’ll make it, and I’ll be like, ‘Ooh’,” she sighs. Then her voice turns steely. “He better not be making that for other girls, unless it’s for his daughters.”

Another friend says if her husband carried any dish out of the house, for another woman, it’d be a worry.

“Because he doesn’t cook,” she says. “I reckon any husband going out the door with a casserole dish would be extremely suspicious.”

Says another, of the betrayal: “It’s like when you learn the special pet name your partner has for you is the same one they had for all their exes.”

Food, of course, has always been a way of cementing a bond or flirting. (See: any Nancy Meyers film.)

It’s possible, though, that the pandemic – and our craving for comfort, any comfort – has further strengthened the trend, and our heightened awareness about what it means to be fed by someone else.

One survey of 2,000 Americans from this year discovered that 70 per cent of respondents felt that preparing a dish for someone was more intimate than making love.

This doesn’t help us, though, when it comes to deciding how we should best respond should we discover a loved one is sharing our biscuits with someone else.

To that, we must defer to the late Nora Ephron, whose hit autobiographical book Heartburn, gave us something of a primer on the matter. The tome was a thinly veiled take on her acrimonious split from her husband, Carl Bernstein, the famed Washington Post reporter who helped break the Watergate scandal.

In real life, Ephron poured an entire bottle of red wine over the head of her husband, who had been cheating on her while she was seven months pregnant with their second child.

But in the author’s do-over of the event in her book, her alter-ego chose a different edible for revenge.

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“If I had to do it over again, I would have made a different kind of pie,” Ephron writes, in the guise of her alter ego, Rachel Samstat, who threw a key lime pie at her philandering husband, Mark. “The pie I threw at Mark [her husband] made a terrific mess, but a blueberry pie would have been even better, since it would have permanently ruined his new blazer.”

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