art and hunger

Simple Food for Simpler Times

Artists’ Cookbooks and a Humble Repast to Share with Friends

We’ve been cooking from several different artists’ cookbooks lately, because the personalities writing them are interesting but also because artist’s food is different. For one thing, artist’s recipes are simpler, use fewer ingredients, and cost less to cook. One exception to this frugality is Salvador Dali, whose lavish presentations of food in his cookbook Les Diners de Gala included conceits like encasing all sorts of meats and seafood in gelatin. Aside from our wild night making Dali’s food for some hedonists we know, I normally prefer cooking –and eating– simple artist’s food. But it seemed there was more to artist’s food than simplicity, and I only had an inkling of what it might be. Maybe it’s that artists, with their eye for form and color or their sensitivity to the experiences associated with food, have a unique touch in the kitchen.

"Some artists hardly go into their kitchens... except for a glass of water or to scramble some eggs. Others go into their kitchens quite a bit. They make things they think are good for themselves and other people. They have fun, they really get into it.

Sometimes it's really good what they do, I mean extraordinary and good to look at. It means something. It has meaning. It's simple. It tastes like nothing you have ever had before, like some great quintessence of food, especially with a glass of wine."

-Donald Goddard, Former Editor of ArtNews

Or maybe it’s that artists have a sense of humor. When my pursuit of artist’s food began I did not suspect the exploration would take me all the way from cooking colorful, Surrealist concoctions to sexually suggestive appetizers by Marinetti and his fellow Futurists.

In Food Sex Art, a cookbook of artists' recipes compiled by Paul and Melissa Eidia in the 1980s, there is a loose definition of edible that makes the book more amusing to read than to eat from. The nice thing about this cookbook is how many pranks it contains. As long as there are artists, they will be up to something good. For instance, "Burger Pravda" is a recipe by Russian artists Komar & Melamid for making hamburgers out of shredded newspaper. They recommend you experiment with various publications, comparing the juiciness of the New York Times to others.

Gilbert and George’s contribution to Food Sex Art was a photo of themselves eating in a restaurant, accompanied by the words: “We have no interest in cooking, or in anything else for that matter.”

Another mischievous recipe was “Flash Light Jello” by Debbie Davis. Perhaps inspired by Dali’s work with gelatin 30 years earlier, she instructs you to seal a working flashlight in plastic wrap and submerge it in Jello (leaving access to the on/off switch of course). After the Jello sufficiently sets, turn the flash light on, flip over onto a platter and serve. I imagine you could really run with this idea, encasing all sorts of objects in Jello, depending on the sense of humor of your dinner guests.

After many experiments, we invited friends to a dinner party and settled on a summer menu of recipes from both Paul and Melissa Eidia’s Food Sex Art and The MOMA’s Artists’ Cookbook. In contrast to Food Sex Art, the earnestness of the food in MOMA’s Artists’ Cookbook inspired us to keep the menu simple, combining easy recipes from both books. Our party happened on a warm summer night that allowed us to throw open the windows and doors, letting in the usual honks and clanks of the Brooklyn streets below. And in the interest of staying cool, we served only two hot dishes, flanked by a cold one.

     The Menu

Appetizer:

Olives and Prosecco

First Course:

Artist’s Vegetable Soup with homemade jalapeno corn muffins

Second Course:

Too Hot to Cook Summer Salad

Lazy Chicken with steamed green beans

Dessert:

Polverones Cuban Cookies

That cold dish was the “Too Hot to Cook Summer Salad”, which artist Brad Melamed says he makes because his kitchen is so small his oven melts his refrigerator door. As city dwellers, we could relate to this. This tasty dish is simply a Greek-inspired salad with feta, cucumbers and green peppers. The artist’s instructions: “You figure it out. Feel free to do your own thing.”

“Lazy Chicken” by Lori Montana is a quick roasting recipe that requires only a bit of fresh tarragon and tamari soy sauce. We did our own thing, substituting the tamari with a mashed apricot sauce after we found seasonal apricots at our Brooklyn farmer’s market that looked seductive. The result was both lazy and delicious. This chicken would also be excellent grilled if you have access to a barbecue.

By far the holy grail of artist’s recipes was Paul Jenkins’s “Artist’s Vegetable Soup.” Although Jenkins claims he is no cook, he used this recipe to inexpensively feed a party of ten, and it can easily be doubled to feed twenty. With a mountain of vegetables, water, and a large soup pot you get an economy of scale that satisfies many. That is what I search for both in food and in art: economy and taste at the same time.

Jenkins’s soup is the kind that you remember for weeks afterwards, hankering for it when hungry. This is especially so if the first time you tried it, you shared it with friends. Now all I can think about is soup. Instead of cooking a single meal, I can make soup out of anything we have and feed all of us for days. I don’t need a glossy food magazine or an expensive jar of some imported ingredient. I don’t need an authoritarian celebrity chef. All I need is water, herbs and vegetables. In fact, I’m heading out to the market now to start John Cage’s “Soup des Jours,” a soup you keep warm on the stove as it evolves over time, adding whatever leftovers you have in the fridge each day of the week.

In the end, it’s precisely that little kernel of experimentation artists throw in that makes their recipes special. It’s that little note at the bottom: “feel free to do your own thing.” It may seem minor at first… but in reality, embracing that clause makes us all better cooks- able to adapt to the availability of local, seasonal foods, confident and creative in our kitchens. It’s an exhortation to engage, to employ our own palette and our own mind when making food.

Recipe- Artist’s Vegetable Soup by Paul Jenkins

Serves 8-10

4 large baking potatoes, peeled

2 large onions, peeled

1½ carrots, peeled

3 celery stalks

2 leeks

3 tomatoes, peeled

1 turnip, peeled

3 mushrooms

1 zucchini

½ tablespoon parsley, chopped

1 clove garlic, crushed

1 bay leaf

1 tablespoon salt

½ teaspoon cracked white pepper

8 oz. sweet butter (or olive oil as a substitute)

1 lb. spinach

4 oz. cream (optional)

Chop all vegetables except spinach into ½ in. pieces. Place in soup pot. Add spices and water to cover. Place butter on top. Cover and bring to boil. Lower heat and simmer until vegetables are tender, about 45 minutes. Remove from flame. Stir in spinach until wilted. Puree mixture in a food mill or blender (in batches). Return to pot and add cream [if desired], stirring until hot. Note: this recipe doubles to feed twenty. The cream is optional. Spinach gives the soup a special taste. This is an elegant and perky soup.

An Edible Engagement: A 13 Course Italian Feast

The tradition in Italy is that a wedding dinner should be 13 courses to wish the happy couple good luck in their new life together. When some good friends of ours – who are well-known as generous and gracious hosts – announced they got engaged, we decided to go all out and cook a celebratory 13-course Italian feast for them. 

It is quite a daunting task to serve six people a 13-course feast, but we worked together as a team and the resulting jubilee was well worth the effort. This is the story of how we did it.

First, the menu planning began several days in advance. We used ideas and ingredients found online, found in cookbooks, and even some found in local Italian restaurants. Some of the dishes we invented ourselves. Here is the complete menu:

Next, we set the table nicely and left each guest a copy of the menu on their plate.

With each course requiring a small appetizer plate we needed to ensure that we had sufficient plates and ample room for plating the large number of courses quickly as they were created. It helped that the earliest dishes, such as the orange-marinated olives, we could plate an hour in advance. Our tiny kitchen was instantly transformed into a bustling Manhattan eatery churning out food at top speed for a hungry, impatient crowd.

Shown at top are the olives we marinated for two days in a blood-orange infused olive oil. Orange-infused olive oil can be bought at most gourmet food stores. If you cannot find it, you can also use regular olive oil. Simply hollow out an orange peel and put the olives and oil inside it for a few days inside your refrigerator. Fresh green olives pick up the orange flavor nicely. We served these with a light, crisp glass of Italian Prosecco. Shown above is the second appetizer, our miniature "Insalata Caprese". We stacked a basil leaf and a slice of fresh buffalo mozzarella on top of one slice of tomato. We drizzled basil-infused olive oil on top. 

The course that followed was a fresh Calamari salad. This is a delightful Italian dish you make a day in advance because its flavors marinate together in the refrigerator overnight. It is typically served on Christmas Eve as part of an Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes. But we thought it would go nicely with our meal. You can find the recipe for this wonderful salad courtesy of Gourmet magazine here.

This was followed by the "Primi" (first courses) that are usually served in Italy before the meat dish (which is the main course). Primi are often small, healthy bowls of pasta, completely unlike the oversized, heaping platters of pasta served in too many American restaurants. For this feast, we served two primi: a homemade Italian wedding soup and a pasta dish we called "Two Lonely Spaghetti". This dish consisted of only two strands of 20-inch long spaghetti, intertwined in each other to symbolize our two friends joining for life in a happy union. 

The spaghetti was tossed with Porcini mushrooms and Parmigiano in a white wine and herb sauce of our invention. The extra-long spaghetti is imported from Napoli in Southern Italy. You can find it at any Italian import store. It is made by Garofolo and comes in beautifully-designed packaging. It is shown here, for scale, next to a bottle of wine:

The humor in using this novel, extra-long spaghetti will become apparent if you serve this dish after your guests have already had a little too much wine!

For our two main courses we served a zucchini blossom risotto and a roast porkloin stuffed with Prosciutto and Parmigiano. We first ate zucchini blossom risotto many, many years ago on a quiet cobblestone street in Rome. Being nestled in a cozy Trattoria with a fragrant, steaming bowl of this risotto delighting our senses was an experience we shall never forget. This time around, the zucchini blossoms were purchased at our local New York City farmer's market. If you cannot find the blossoms you can also make a wonderful risotto with zucchini. 

The pork roast took 2 hours to cook, so we were able to sit down and enjoy our meal while we waited. In the interest of efficiency, we purchased our roast stuffed by a local Italian butcher, but if you would like to do your own there is an excellent blog about how to do this here. We served several "Contorni" (side dishes) including asparagus we had grilled earlier that morning.

Last but not least, we enjoyed a mixed greens salad tossed with homemade pesto and an espresso course with two "dolci": homemade pignoli (pine nut) cookies, biscotti, and olive oil gelato we purchased from a local Italian restaurant. The pignoli cookies were delicious and quite easy to bake. Their recipe can be found here. 

When serving a festive meal, go with what feels best, even if you have to buy a hard-to-find ingredient from a restaurant instead of a store. It is the overall experience of the meal, of breaking bread with friends, that matters most. The opportunity to host such a feast for our friends was a joy in itself that erases all the hard labor put in. It is precisely that joy we find in great food, great friends and great art that this blog is all about. We relished each dish and we shared each moment of the feast at this special time in our lives. Congratulations to the happy couple and to feasters everywhere!

A Futurist Dinner Party

If you ever get an invitation to a Futurist Dinner Party, you should be afraid. Be very, very afraid. The Futurist Cookbook, written by Italian Futurist poet F.T. Marinetti in 1932, contains recipes that are more amusing than edible. At the time, Marinetti wanted to propose a complete break from the past, catapulting Italy into the modern age both artistically and culinarily. So when we held a Futurist dinner party at our house recently, we used a simple work-around to avoid serving something downright offensive to the taste buds.

Our brave guests even wore their pajamas, as instructed in the above invitation we sent out. It was designed to mimic Fortunato Depero's classic Futurist design, shown here:

In addition to Depero and Marinetti, the Futurists included artists such as Boccioni, Russolo, Balla and Selta. Their definition of Futurism is very complex. In the below drawing, Marinetti attempts to chart the meaning of Futurism and associated movements:

Image courtesy Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

We will not attempt to explain Futurism here, but we can tell you a bit about The Futurist Cookbook. The classic Futurist parties were experiments in assaulting peoples' expectations of food and dining. For example, the "tactile dinner party" involved everyone wearing pajamas made of different touchable materials such as cork, silk, velvet, paper or sandpaper. Blindfolded in the dark, guests were instructed to choose a dining companion based on touch alone. The lights would then be turned back on so everyone would be shocked by who they had chosen to eat with.

Fortunately, we did not pull antics like this on our guests! We chose a simple appetizer called "Intuitive Antipasto". It was a little orange rind basket containing a standard Italian antipasto: grilled peppers, olives, cheese, etc.  The orange gave the olives and salami a lovely citrus aroma.

It is easy to halve and then scrape out the pulp if you use navel oranges. You can then reserve the pulp of the oranges and use it for something else.

The recipe called for hiding little notes inside the orange baskets, which could be any Futurist motto such as "Live Dangerously" or "Futurism is an anti-historical movement." Instead, because many of the recipes for entrees were downright inedible, we enclosed a note describing what our guests were NOT going to be served that evening. This proved to be a good work-around, as it was amusing and very much in the Futurist spirit to arrive at a dinner party and be told what you were not going to eat.

Other bizarre dishes in the book included veal sprinkled with powdered chocolate, trout wrapped in calves' livers, and ice cream with hard-boiled eggs in it. So for our entree, we served meat and potatoes. That way we directly countered our guests' expectations of dining, by serving them the most simple, widely-available food around. (But we couldn't resist throwing in a bit of homemade chimichurri sauce to spice things up!)

For dessert it was back into Futurism mode, as several of the cookbook's desserts were do-able. We made a dish called "Italian Breasts in the Sunshine". It was simply two adorable mounds of almond paste with a strawberry on top. As in life, the women selected to have smaller breasts while the men at the table took the large ones.

There was another noteworthy dessert in the book called "Man and A Woman at Midnight". We were a little too modest to serve this one. But you can get the idea from a helpful sketch Marinetti included:

In sum, the Futurists were a lot of fun, but if you get invited to one of these parties you should play it safe and eat before going.

Cooking from Salvador Dali's Les Diners de Gala

We recently hosted a Surrealist dinner party in honor of a good friend's birthday, cooking the entire meal from Salvador Dali's little-known cookbook Les Diners de Gala. Written in 1971, this fabulous gastronomic work contains Dali's favorite recipes from famous Parisian cafes and his wife Gala's home cooking.

Dali's introduction states that when he was a little boy he always wanted to be a chef. At the age of 68, as an established artist, Dali created this heavy tome about his gastronomic adventures. Filled with colorful spreads and illustrations, Dali here exemplifies the starving artist. Not the artist who cannot afford to eat, but the artist hungry with passion, consuming food just as he devours art– with gusto, extravagance and panache.

While the Surreal visuals range from light and airy to bizarre and frightening, the recipes in the book are all lavish, fattening and expensive to produce. At the beginning, he opens with a Dante-esque warning:

"Les Diners de Gala is uniquely devoted to the pleasures of taste. Do not look for dietetic formulas here."

With recipe titles like "Pierced Heart" and "Ox Snouts in Puff Pastry Shells", we had trouble composing an acceptable modern menu that would not scare our guests, especially since there was one vegetarian attending the party. Almost everything seemed to be encased in gelatin or coated with expensive caviar. Below are a few dishes we thought might be a little elaborate for our guests:

Instead, we settled on a tasty salad, a beef roast with polenta balls, a green vegetable puree and a tomato pie for dessert. After the menu was planned, we sent our guests the below invitation to set the tone for the party.

We created an elegant table presentation with homemade napkin rings. Despite the small size of our Manhattan apartment (which can barely fit a table) we were able to make it look suitable. And luckily our friends are accustomed to living in tight spaces.

The salad we made was called a "Salad composed according to Alexandre Dumas." We supposed Dali's friend Dumas was often seen eating this salad at Maxim's cafe in Paris. It was a simple, delicious Parisian cafe salad. Since Dali's intention is always to create a visual gastronomic experience, the recipe instructed us to dispose the ingredients artistically. 

The beef roast was quite easy to make and delicious. We used a beef bone-in rib chop and roasted it in a hot oven on a bed of fresh herbs (bay and thyme) for about 30 minutes. The polenta balls were more labor-intensive but were an inexpensive companion for the meat that replaced needing bread at the table. A big box of corn meal can be bought for less than 2 dollars, and can make enough polenta or biscuits for countless dinners. Likewise, the green vegetable puree, made of spinach and split peas, was both delicious and inexpensive to make in large quantities.

And finally we ended the feast with Dali's homemade tomato pie. At first it seemed like it might be better suited to being an appetizer, but in the end the pie came out so sweet and tart it really could not be anything but a dessert.

The feast was a great celebration of art and food. The added interest of sitting around the cookbook together after dinner, gazing at Dali's wild, lush illustrations made it a truly memorable meal.

Dali with his wife Gala in 1945