Kitchen Table Kibitzing Friday: “The great artist of tomorrow will have to go underground”

The Futurist Cookbook. It was not merely a set of recipes; it was a kind of manifesto. He cast food preparation and consumption as part of a new worldview, in which entertaining became avant-garde performance. The book prescribed the necessary elements for a perfect meal. Such dining had to feature originality, harmony, sculptural form, scent, music between courses, a combination of dishes, and variously flavored small canapés. The cook was to employ high-tech equipment to prepare the meal. Politics could not be discussed, and food had to be prepared in such a way that eating it did not require silverware.

Marinetti’s musings could not have predicted the role food would come to play in art nearly a century later. Contemporary artists have used food to make statements: political (especially feminist), economic, and social. They’ve opened restaurants as art projects, conducted performances in which food is prepared and served in galleries, and crafted elaborate sculptures from edible materials like chocolate and cheese. Horrifying as it might have seemed to Marinetti, some artists today even embrace food as a rejection of everyone and everything that is future-obsessed.

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One recipe calls for beef sliced with “vehement blasts on the trumpet.”

What made Futurist “cooking” so revolutionary was that it drew on food as a raw material for art and cultural commentary reflecting the Futurist idea that human experience is empowered and liberated by the presence of art in everyday life, that osmosis of arte-vita. Marinetti himself framed the premise of the cookbook in his introduction to the original 1932 edition:

The Futurist culinary revolution … has the lofty, noble and universally expedient aim of changing radically the eating habits of our race, strengthening it, dynamizing it and spiritualizing it with brand-new food combinations in which experiment, intelligence and imagination will economically take the place of quantity, banality, repetition and expense.

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Futurist meals comprised a cuisine and style of dining advocated by some members of the Futurist movement, particularly in Italy. These meals were first proposed in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Fillia's Manifesto of Futurist Cooking, published in the Turin Gazzetta del Popolo on December 28, 1930.

en.wikipedia.org/…

We had to compile a menu from the cookbook, which wasn't easy—every recipe seemed very deserving to be made. We made a selection based on how inspired we felt by a dish, by how difficult it would be to prepare, and by the aesthetics and name of it. That meant that too complicated dishes like “Sculpted Meat” or not Futurist enough sounding dishes like “Divorced Eggs” (“Divide some hard boiled eggs in half and remove the yolks inside. Put the yolks on a mashed potatoes and then the whites”) were off the table.

In the end, we decided on “Tummy Tickler,” the “Excited Pig,” and the “Black Shirt Snack” as starters. The main dish would have to be the “Fasces”—according to the recipe, its shape ought to bring to mind a fasces—a symbol of authority in the Roman Empire that later became the symbol of Italian Fascism. To accompany it all, we'd have a “polibibita” (poly-drink, the Futurist version of a cocktail) with the suggestive name “Devil in Black Key.” It consisted of two quarters orange juice, one quarter grappa, one quarter liquid chocolate, and a floating hard-boiled egg yolk. Just to be safe, we also bought cheap beers.

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