|
| The Futurist Cookbook
“…and the diners were given materials of different textures such as velvet and sandpaper to stroke with their left hand. Sweet was combined with savoury to produce startling effects, and bitter and sour tastes were given their place: sardines with pineapple, mortadella with nougat, cooked salami with coffee and cologne. An aphrodisiac cocktail was devised, consisting of pineapple juice, eggs, cocoa, caviar, red peppers, nutmeg, and cloves…”
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (Wikipedia) was an Italian Futurist.
His cookbook, Cucina futurista (Wikipedia) -- literally Futurist meals -- is very weird.
It's basically a recipe book, but with random asides about radically avant-garde presentational aspects of the food... texture, setting, ambient music and perfume, costume of waiters, prescribed topics of conversation, and oh: the abolition of decadent pasta.
I intended to write a page on this book, which I remembered as being sort of funny.
Then it occurred to me to check the fascist connections.
After all, the book was written in the 1930's in Italy. Artistic movements from that period are charged with the politics of the time. These connections can easily be overlooked: consider the protagonist of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Wikipedia) , or the film recollection scenes of the movie Kiss of the Spider-Woman.
Here's what I read on the Wikipedia page for the book:
Elizabeth David, the cookery writer, comments that Marinetti's ideas about food contained a germ of common sense, but behind his jesting lay the Fascist obsession with nationalism. Marinetti wanted to prepare the Italians for war. "Spaghetti is no food for fighters," he declared.
I like spaghetti. Oh well.
Naively, I did not realize Marinetti was a fascist (a founding member of the Italian fascist party, ulp) when I found the book. It's now a collectors' item. I found it in Pegasus I think, for a song, then valued it in the sadly now-defunct Cody's Books. I bet you could get it at Serendipity. But I digress.
Like I say, I can't claim I consciously detected any fascism when I read the book; though, in my defense, I wasn't looking for it. It's stylistic more than political: proto-surreal, I guess, was how I saw it.
Now, however, reading the Wikipedia page, I note that one of the Futurists' culinary precepts was that mealtime discussion of politics should be banned, which seems a bit of a giveaway.
Why not discuss politics at dinner? You're probably already watching The Daily Show (Wikipedia) ...
Another quirk of the Cucinistas is that some food is placed on the table for purely decorative purposes: you must not actually eat it. I thought of this as just being absurd Pythonesque satire at first --- but am somewhat more horrified by it now. I mean, think about that, for real... so completely fascist.
Anyway, I thought this book might give a new meaning to the phrase Soup Nazi (Wikipedia) .
I feel a bit like I have just been caught out at something, by George Orwell.
-- IanHolmes - 21 Nov 2008 |
