Making Food an Art Form
by Bruce Palling
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| Some of the food offered during the Electric Cinema's recent Food-themed film photo: Zoe Fletcher |
Food as an art form stemmed from the work of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Fascist Futurist, who inaugurated the movement at a 1930 banquet in Milan. Although the later Manifesto of Futurist Cooking was seen as a slightly over the top joke, it did contain some propethic comments. One he got seriouslty wrong, was his desire to ban pasta because he thought it made Italians sluggish and lethargic, whereas he was keen to help them become a master race. The recipes sound quite amusing – Tennis Chop (veal cutlets cooked in butter and cut in the form of tennis rackets); Man and woman at Midnight (a pool of red zabaglione with a nice big onion ring penetrated by a stalk of candy) or Piquant Airport ( a field of Russian salad with different coloured fruits, anchovies and salads carved to look like aircraft).
There were other aspects that still sound rather too futuristic, like the abolition of knives and forks, but others sound quite contemporary, like the creation of multi-coursed meals, with some of the dishes merely sniffed and then passed around the table. Interestingly, there was also a move to ban music accompanying meals except when it specifically complemented a particular dish or food.
This aspect of food accompaniment has been picked up by some food and design artists in London for what was termed an “Edible Cinema” evening – said to be the first attempt so far to enhance a cinematic experience by the consumption of specific foods to designated scenes in a film. The idea certainly must have captured the zeitgeist, because when Notting Hill’s Electric Cinema announced this performance to accompany Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth in early May, all seats sold out in less than an hour. It is hardly a foodie film as it is a fairy tale about Ofelia, the step-daughter of Captain Vidal, a Francoist officer during the Second World War, who is tasked with wiping out remnants of anti-fascist rebels in Spain during the Second World War.
It was an intriguing challenge – how to match the consumpiorn of eight different foods, drinks and odours with relevant scenes in the film, with an usherette at the side of the screen holding up large signs with the matching number of the ingredients.
Perhaps the very first one was the most successful because it was entirely matched by the visual image – a Scots Pine forest-floor scented handerkerchief with pine and oak smoked popcorn while Ofelia and her mother Carmen, travel through a pine forest. Andrew Stellitano, one of the designers behind the concept, said he tracked down some Scotch Pine wood chips while the flavors in the handerchief came from the “Forest floor” aroma kit of the gin company that sponsored the event. “What I liked about this project is how it is almost the opposite of how I normally work, which is the visual aspect of food. That doesn’t really matter when you are in a darkened room and the film has always been created, so it is almost as if you are working backwards.”
The other organizer, Polly Betton, who runs the party event company Tea Time Production (www.teatimeproduction.com), was especially pleased about the scene where villagers had been lined up to receive rations of bread from the army. Viewers were instructed to consume the item called ‘Fire & Bread” at this point – a shortbread biscuit laced with chilli and served in a paper bread bag. Other items included a carbonated muscat grape with elderflower and Malic acid to be popped into your mouth at the moment when the heroine decides to illicitly consume a forbidden grape. (Polly also creates interesting party events – I particularly liked the sound of the children’s birthday party at Faringdon, Lord Berners old seat. Berners was also into food and art – he dyed his flocks of pigeons, which Nancy Mitford said made them look like flying confetti. For Polly’s event, the ballroom was turfed over, decorated with helium balloons and the children were given bottles to hand feed orphaned lambs.)
The overall response to the two-hour event at the Electric was extremely positive with many viewers trying to put their name down for the next screening in the Summer, even though it has not even been decided which film it will be.
Personally, I found the experience more an affirmation of the power of art and the imagination. Regardless of how the eating drinking or smelling related to the film imagery, it never came close to replicating the effect of the images on my imagination – perhaps because it dragged you back to the mere consumption sensations in your body rather than your mind.
This is not the only way that the boundaries between art and food are being stretched. Recently, two London based women formed a supper club called The Novel Diner (http://noveldiner.tumblr.com) which arranges meals from famous novels, with some guests appearing in costume while extracts from the books are read. So far, books to have been performed include Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (a Bouef en Daube described in the novel as Mildreds Masterpiece).
"Put it down there," she said, helping the Swiss girl to place gently before her the huge brown pot in which was the BOEUF EN DAUBE—…. and an exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice rose from the great brown dish as Marthe, with a little flourish, took the cover off. The cook had spent three days over that dish. And she must take great care, Mrs Ramsay thought, diving into the soft mass, to choose a specially tender piece for William Bankes. And she peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats and its bay leaves and its wine, and thought, This will celebrate the occasion—a curious sense rising in her, at once freakish and tender, of celebrating a festival, as if two emotions were called up in her, one profound—for what could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands.
"It is a triumph," said Mr Bankes, laying his knife down for a moment. He had eaten attentively. It was rich; it was tender. It was perfectly cooked. How did she manage these things in the depths of the country? he asked her. She was a wonderful woman. All his love, all his reverence, had returned; and she knew it.
"It is a French recipe of my grandmother's," said Mrs Ramsay, speaking with a ring of great pleasure in her voice. Of course it was French. What passes for cookery in England is an abomination (they agreed). It is putting cabbages in water. It is roasting meat till it is like leather. It is cutting off the delicious skins of vegetables. "In which," said Mr Bankes, "all the virtue of the vegetable is contained." And the waste, said Mrs Ramsay. A whole French family could live on what an English cook throws away. Spurred on by her sense that William's affection had come back to her, and that everything was all right again, and that her suspense was over, and that now she was free both to triumph and to mock, she laughed, she gesticulated, till Lily thought, How childlike, how absurd she was, sitting up there with all her beauty opened again in her, talking about the skins of vegetables.
There was also a Proust evening from an extract of Swann’s Way with a Belle Époque menu starting with an absinthe cocktail, then a truffled asparagus velouté, chicken liver parfait, fried sole with lemon and lastly truffles and of course Madeleines. This was accompanied by a classical duo on cello and violin playing Proust's favourite music including Debussy, Franck and Beethoven.
“... asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream) at transforming my humble chamber pot into a bower of aromatic perfume.”
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
The most recent one, which was Donna Tartt’s A Secret History (a field mushroom dish instead of the poisonous ones in the novel). Claire Coutinho, the co-founder, said “The act of reading a novel is completely solitary, especially compared to eating in a restaurant and seeing that we enjoy reading and eating, this was the perfect way to marry them together.
The other organisation that explores all aspects of food beyond the restaurant experience is the Experimental Food Society (www.experimentalfoodsociety.com) Founder Alexa Perrin has gathered together many of the leading food designers, food artists and academics for an annual event which involves interactive exhibitions, food films and even food magicians. “People are really expecting far more from food in terms of having an experience, so we offer a platform for different ways to enjoy food, whether it is through pop up restaurants, mobile food markets or just street food.”
At last years Experimental Food Society Spectacular banquet John Van der Put, Food Magician hosted a series of magic tricks involving food such as toasting a marshmallow using a straw, turning smoke to milk and turning a balloon into a Chinese fortune egg.
This year he will be working to put some magical elements into one of the courses in the Experimental Food Society Spectacular banquet, which he has done for Heston Blumenthal in the past.
These include “Exploding Sorbet” - A freezing cold sorbet that bursts into flames at the click of a finger and
”Egg and Bacon Ice Cream”.
A petal is plucked from a white rose and dropped into a glass cocktail shaker. As it is shaken it visibly morphs into what appears to be a genuine chicken egg, which is then cracked and found to be filled with custard. The custard is scrambled with liquid nitrogen to create Bacon and Egg ice cream.
Food Films are also screened – Last year they showed one which was tied in with Gingers Comfort Emporium creating camel milk ice cream which was sold in an ice cream van – a first in Britain.
Alexa Perrin is very keen on camels, especially as her Omani mother in law has eight of them. Other films included Carl Warner, Food Landscape Artist creating a London landscape made entirely out of food.
There are other chefs who wish to actually embed themselves in their product as an art work. My friend Gay Bilson, a co-founder of the magnificent Berowra Waters north of Sydney, once tried to serve sausages made of her own blood at the Body Dinner at the 1993 Symposium of Australian Gastronomy in Canberra. There was a general unease about the thought so according to Gay “The response was so disspiriting, so overwhelmingly negative, that I shelved the idea. Now I think that I should have gone ahead in private, given that I could have found someone to test, take and store the blood. Poaching the sausages to a specific temperature would offer double indemnity. What no one seemed to understand was that this would not be a gruesome epater la bourgeoisie exercise, but the most generous gesture a host might make: I would be giving myself to others; no cook could do more.” (Plenty by Gay Bilson Penguin 2004 pp206-8)
There is also an overlooked slim volume called Rude Food, which is a collection of food/nude photographs by David Thorpe published in 1981. The cover shows a naked torso lying upright with a mixed salad spreading from her groin. Other shots show a banana with cream and split meringues at the other end or filets of sole in suggestive strips.
Other artists pursue aural effects – a company called Condiment Junkie (www.condimentjunkie.co.uk) works in sonic branding and has had a close relationship with Heston Blumenthal, especially with his Sound of the Sea dish.
This is where Heston offers diners at the Fat Duck the opportunity to put on headphones and listen to gulls and waves breaking on a beach while they eat a maritime inspired dish called “Sound of the Sea”. He is reported to have also considered introducing individual sand pits for diners to place their feet to further replicate the seaside. He is currently the top of the bunch when it comes to special effects with his cuisine.
The actual Sound of the Sea Dish
I am happy for people to explore other realms to enhance or accompany food – so far though, none of these offerings seem to have the power of a perfect dish to speak subliminally through its impact on our taste and olfactory senses, but there’s plenty of fun for everybody in exploring the options.