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If the Marx brothers had ever
taken to food writing, they might have produced something very like F.T.
Marinetti’s marvellously slapstick work,
The Futurist Cookbook.
The provocative (and regrettably Mussolini-approved) Italian artist
Marinetti was infatuated by all things sleek, sharp, electronic, and
shiny, but he was also an avowed enemy of pasta, which he denounced as a
pathetic Italian addiction to nostalgia and tradition. Instead, he
preferred his Futurist meals to combine the radical use of colour,
shape, music, lighting, and ideas, leaving taste and nutrition off the
list entirely. In fact, the modern vitamin supplement industry should
make Marinetti a patron saint: He argued that all sustenance should come
from pills, freeing up food to be the raw material of art, preferably to
be consumed while listening to the soothing hum of an airplane engine.
His oddball cuisine debuted in
the first (and only) Futurist restaurant, in 1929 Turin — an angular,
alumina-plated interior called La
Taverna del Santopalato, or Tavern of
the Holy Palate. It was an event Marinetti considered on a par with the
discovery of America and the fall of the Bastille (“the first human way
of eating is born!”) His cuisine was then replicated at various Futurist
events across Europe, to the horror of many pasta-lovers, and his 1932
cookbook has both delighted and mystified gastronomists ever since.
Some recipes can be visualized fairly easily, such as
his sculpted meat skyscrapers with geraniums on skewers. But other
recipes are more conceptual:
Aerofood:
A signature Futurist dish, with a strong tactile element. Pieces of
olive, fennel, and kumquat are eaten with the right hand while the left
hand caresses various swatches of sandpaper, velvet, and silk. At the
same time, the diner is blasted with a giant fan (preferable an airplane
propeller) and nimble waiters spray him with the scent of carnation, all
to the strains of a Wagner opera. (“Astonishing results,” Marinetti
says. “Test them and see.”)
Taste Buds Take Off:
A soup of concentrated meat stock, champagne, and grappa, garnished with
rose petals — “a masterpiece of brothy lyricism.”
Italian Breasts in the
Sunshine: Two half spheres of
almond paste, with a fresh strawberry at the centre or each, sprinkled
with black pepper.
Chicken Fiat:
A chicken is roasted with a handful of ball bearings inside.
“When the flesh has fully absorbed the flavour of the mild steel balls,
the chicken is served with a garnish of whipped cream.”
Beautiful Nude Food
Portrait: A crystal bowl filled
with fresh milk and the flesh of two boiled capons, all scattered with
violet petals.
Equator + North Pole:
“An equatorial sea of golden poached egg yokes” surrounds a cone made of
whipped egg whites. This is “dotted with orange segments like succulent
pieces of the sun” and black truffle carved to look like airplanes.
The Excited Pig:
A “whole salami, skinned” is cooked in strong espresso coffee and
flavoured with eau-de-cologne.
Candied Atmospheric
Electricities: Brilliantly-coloured
bars of marbled soup, filled with sweet cream.
Diabolical Roses:
Red roses, battered and deep-fried.
Simultaneous Ice-Cream:
Vanilla dairy cream and little squares of raw onion frozen together.
Marinetti was not entirely
indifferent to the romance of fine dining, and does include a “Nocturnal
Love Feast” in his cookbook. The meal, which should be eaten at midnight
on the island of Capri, climaxes with a cocktail called the
War-in-Bed
— a relatively appetizing blend of pineapple juice, egg, cocoa, caviar,
red pepper, almond paste, nutmeg, and a whole clove, all mixed in the
yellow Strega liqueur. He declares that modern women (preferably
sheathed in dresses made of gold graphic patterns) will inevitably be
won over by the intellectual rigor of Futurist cooking, describing one
beautiful donna’s wide-eyed response: “I’m dazzled! Your genius
frightens me!”
Although Marinetti’s reputation
suffered thanks to his embrace of Italian fascism and his taste for
macho posturing, the goofy humour of his cookbook would influence a
generation of younger artists, most notably the Spaniard Salvador Dalí.
Dalí wrote obsessively about the connection between food and art,
providing recipes for a Venus de Milo made from hard-boiled eggs
(imagine the pleasure, he explained, of biting into her yolky breast)
and championing the Art Nouveau style of Antonio Gaudí as a form of
edible architecture, “whose softness seems to beg ‘Eat me!’” He penned
and illustrated his own cookbook (Les
Diners de Gala, dedicated to his wife)
and included loopy food imagery in many of his surrealist paintings,
such as “Average French Bread With Two Fried Eggs Without the Plate
Trying to Sodomize a Crumb of Portuguese Bread” (1932) and the famous
“Soft Construction with Baked Beans: Spain, Premonition of Civil War” (1936). In the modern world, Dalí
declared, “beauty will be edible or not at all.” •
13 February 2008,
SOURCE/FUTURE READING, Irwin,
Robert, “The Disgusting Dinners of Salvador Dali,”
Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and
Cookery, 1998, pp. 103-111;
Marinetti, F.T., (ed. Chamberlain, Lesley), The Futurist Cookbook ,
(San Francisco, 1989).
Tony Perrottet's
new book, Napoleon's Privates: 2,500 Years of History Unzipped ,
is a literary version of a Cabinet of Curiosities (HarperCollins, July,
2008.) He is also the author of
Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists
and
The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Olympic Games .
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