F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook: the recipe for every faddish dinner you’ve ever had
Faddish, modish food was played with brilliantly in 1932, when Italian futurist Filippo Marinetti (1876–1944) published Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook, a cookbook that would trigger a “revolution of cuisine”. Humans, said Marinetti, “think, dream and act according to what they eat and drink”.
The introduction is choice:
Contrary to the predictable criticisms, the Futurist culinary revolution, illustrated in this volume, is aimed at the high end, noble and useful at all to radically change the power of our race, fortifying, dynamizing and spiritualizing it with brand new dishes in which experience, intelligence and imagination economically replace the amount, the banality, repetition and the cost. Our futuristic kitchen, set like a seaplane engine for high speeds, will seem crazy to some trembling and dangerous traditionalist. It wants to eventually create a harmony between the palate of men and their lives today and tomorrow… It is optimism at the table.
Suzanne Brill notes:
Futurist food was full of suggestiveness and provocation. Sex was one topic, the thrill of air travel another. Along with recipes for “Sculpted Meat” and “Man-and-Woman-at-Midnight” came whole scenarios for acting out themed meals while sitting in a biplane. The art chefs of our day, Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adrià, surely perpetuate what Marinetti began.
By way of a taster, here’s the recipe for The Excited Pig: A “whole salami, skinned” is cooked in strong espresso coffee and flavored with eau-de-cologne.”
Spotter: Flashbak, which has a lot more on FT Marinetti’s recipe book.
Posted: 1st, May 2017 | In: Books, The Consumer Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
