THREE FUTURIST DINNERS: a love story
Declaration of Love Dinner
Formula by the Futurist Aeropainter Fillìa
A shy lover yearns to express his feelings to a beautiful and intelligent woman. The following Declaration of Love Dinner served on the terrace of a grand hotel in the twinkling night of the city will help him achieve this aim.
I Desire You: antipasto composed of a myriad selection of exquisite tidbits, which the waiter will only let them admire, while She contents herself with bread and butter.
Flesh Adored: A big plate made from a shining mirror. In the center, chicken slices perfumed with amber and covered with a thin layer of cherry jam. She, while eating, will admire her reflection in the plate.
This Is How I’ll Love You: Little tubes of pastry filled with many different flavors, one of plums, one of apples cooked in rum, one of potatoes drenched in cognac, one of sweet rice, etc. She, without batting an eyelid, will eat them all.
Super Passion: A very compact cake of sweet pastry with small cavities on the top filled with anise, glacier mints, rum, juniper and Amaro.
Tonight With Me: A very ripe orange enclosed in a large hollowed-out sweet pepper, embedded in a thick zabaglione flavored with juniper and salted with little bits of oyster and drops of sea water
Nocturnal Love Feast
Formula by the Futurist Aeropoet Marinetti
A terrace in Capri. August. The moon pours a stream of curdled milk straight down on the tablecloth. The brown-skinned, heavy-breasted native mama enters carrying with an enormous ham on a tray and speaks to the two lovers who are lying stretched out in the two deck chairs, uncertain if they should renew the fatigues of the bed or begin those of the table:
– ‘This is a ham that contains a hundred different pork meats. In order to sweeten it and free it from any possible bitterness and virulence I have soaked it for a week in milk. Real milk, not that illusory milk of the moon. Eat as much of it as you like.’
The two lovers devour half the ham. Large oysters follow, each with eleven drops of Muscat wine from Syracuse mixed into its sea water.
Then a glass of Asti Spumante. Then the War-in-Bed. The bed, vast and already full of moonlight, fascinated, comes to meet them from the back of the open room. They get into it, toasting each other and sipping from the War-in-Bed. It is composed of pineapple juice, egg, cocoa, caviar, almond paste, a pinch of red pepper, a pinch of nutmeg and a whole clove, all liquidized in Strega liqueur.
The Bachelor Dinner
Formula by Futurist Aeropoet Marinetti
Futurist cooking sets out to avoid the usual pitfalls of eating alone:
- The anti-human solitude that fatally drains a part of the stomach’s vital forces.
- The heavy silence of meditative thought which taints the food and makes it leaden.
- The lack of a living, human, fleshy presence, which is indispensable for keeping alive the palate of the man who is confined to the zone of animal flesh.
- The inevitable speeding-up of the rhythm of the jaws as they take flight from boredom.
In a dining room decorated with aeropaintings and aerosculpture by the Futurists Tato, Benedetto, Dottori and Mino Rosso, on a table whose four legs are made of accordions, some food portraits are presented on jingling plates bordered with bells:
1) Blonde Food Portrait: a beautiful piece of sculpted roast veal with two long eyes of garlic in a dishevelment of chopped boiled cabbage and small green lettuces. Dangling earrings of little red radishes soaked in honey.
2) Dark Man-Friend Food Portrait: well modeled cheeks of pastry – moustache and hair of chocolate – big eyes of milk and honey with pupils of liquorice. A split pomegranate for the mouth. A nice necktie of tripe broth.
3) Beautiful Nude Food Portrait: in a small crystal bowl full of fresh milk, two boiled capon thighs, the whole scattered with violets.
4) Food Portrait of the Enemies: seven cubes of Cremona nougat, each one with a little well of vinegar on top and a big bell hanging on one side.
*Recipes reproduced from The Futurist Cookbook, Bedford Arts, 1989.
