[MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR: Throughout
history, food
has served subject matter,
inspiration, and, of course,
sustenance for artists.
Food has also been the art
on a number of occasions.
Today, we are exploring
the gastronomic adventures
of a most distinctive,
distinguished, and delightfully
deranged artist,
known around the world
by just two syllables, Dali.
We're working with a reprint
of Dali's 1973 cookbook,
"Les Diners de Gala," named
after the extravagant dinner
parties he would host with
his wife and muse, Gala.
There's an introduction
to this approach
to eating an
entertaining or Dalinian
gastro-aesthetics by Dali's
associate and hype man Pierre
Roumeguere.
There follows a caution
that the book is, quote,
"uniquely devoted to
the pleasures of taste."
If you are a disciple of one
of those calorie counters who
turn the joys of eating into
a form of punishment, it says,
"close this book at once."
It features 10 chapters of
elaborate menus and recipes
drawn from the leading French
chefs of the famed Paris
restaurants of the day, such as
Maxim's, La Serre, and La Tour
D'Argent.
It's chock-full of sumptuously
'70s food photography
and fantastical
illustrations by Dali.
While many of the recipes might
be difficult for a home cook
to attempt, or contain
hard-to-source ingredients,
we found one recipe
that seemed to capture
the right level of
Dalinean excess, while also
being within the realm of
possibility, bush of crayfish
in Viking herbs, from
famed Paris restaurant,
La Tour D'Argent,
open since 1582.
Not without its
challenges, to be sure.
They explain, in
small print above,
that after giving
us this recipe,
the chef decided that
he wanted to keep
the exact ingredients a secret.
We present the recipe anyway
for its reading pleasure.
So we're going to piece this
together as best we can.
The recipe asks us to prepare a
fumet, the French term for fish
stock, but gives no
amounts, so we're also
using this quick
and easy fish stock
recipe from Daniel
Gritzer that's
posted on "Serious Eats."
We're to start with two
pounds of fish bones and heads
of lean white-fleshed fish, like
snapper or bass, which I called
a local fish market to request.
They said they could get grouper
for me, which I accepted.
But, after unwrapping
it, I realized quickly,
it wasn't bone so much,
mostly skin and grouper flesh
with little tiny
pin bones in it.
Not ideal, but since
they didn't charge me
and we live nowhere near the
ocean, I can't really complain.
So let's pretend
these are fish bones
and cover them with
cold water, as we're
asked, stirring in two
tablespoons of kosher salt
and letting them
stand for an hour
to rinse away any areas of
blood in our hypothetical bones.
As our fish soak unnecessarily,
we're going to prep our veg,
upping the amounts from the
recipe so we yield more stock
and try to make up
for our lack of bones.
First we dice a yellow onion,
then a large fennel bulb,
followed by three leeks, which
we halved lengthwise and gave
a good rinse before mincing.
Next up, four stalks of
celery diced, and then
four cloves of garlic,
which we give a good whack,
remove the little green
sprouts, since they're
supposedly bitter,
but it probably
doesn't matter, and
then roughly chop.
We're going to go ahead and
drain and rinse our fish parts,
since there are no
bones really from which
to remove blood,
and then head over
to the range to heat two
tablespoons of olive oil
in a large stockpot.
In go all of the
veggies, which we'll stir
until they begin to soften.
After that, in goes our fish,
which we stir around a bit.
And then add in two
cups of dry white wine.
After this, we move back
to the original Dali
non-recipe recipe, which,
along with white wine,
calls for vermouth.
We add half a cup.
And cognac, which we
don't have, so we're
going to sub in some
less fancy brandy.
This might be an excessive
amount of alcohol for a stock,
but it seems Dalinian and
is going to cook off anyway.
When it begins to steam, we
add in water to cover it all.
And then in goes
parsley, tarragon, dill.
This is the Viking part.
And then salt. And
precisely 10 peppercorns.
The whole thing is going to be
ruined if it's not exactly 10.
As we bring this
all to a bare simmer
and let it cook for
about 20 minutes,
it's time to get to
the why of all of this
and learn a bit
about its instigator.
Dali was born in
Figueres, Spain in 1904,
with this really long name that
I'm going to share on screen
rather than
mispronounce in Catalan.
After his expulsion from the
Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid
where he befriended Luis Bunuel
and Federico Garcia Lorca,
young Dali escaped to
Paris, met Picasso, and also
the founder of
Dada, Tristan Tzara.
There he contributed to
surrealist publications and was
welcomed into the surrealist
ranks by André Breton after
the success of his shocking
1928 film, "Un Chien Andalou."
Dali made the film in
collaboration with Bunuel,
basing it on images from
their dreams, a hand crawling
with ants from Dali's,
and, from Bunuel's, a cloud
slicing the moon in
half like a razor
blade slicing through an eye.
Informed by Freud's then
new psychoanalytic theories,
the surrealists were
attempting to explore
the depths of the subconscious
through writing and visual art,
rejecting the
rational and tapping
into the powerful thoughts
and desires and dreams that
lie beneath.
We know some people who
made a cool video about it
that you should check out.
Dali's name became
synonymous with surrealism,
although, they would give
him the boot by 1934.
And he contributed some of the
group's most memorable images
and concepts, including his
paranoic, critical method,
a process he used to
systematize confusion,
deliberately disorienting
his state of mind
in order to look at
the world in a new way,
bringing together disparate
images that he would later
paint, calling them his
hand-painted dream photographs,
and disparate objects as well.
In the summer of 1929,
Dali had met Gala,
the then Russian-born wife
of artist Paul Éludard.
And within a year, the
two were inseparable,
and married by 1934.
Without Gala, Dali
said later in life,
he would be at the bottom
of a pit, full of lice
and drops of melted wax.
The couple moved to New
York to escape World War II,
and there Dali's
notoriety ballooned
to even greater proportions.
In 1948, they returned
to Port Lligat, Spain,
where they spent most
of the next 30 years,
except for winters spent
in fine hotels in Paris
and in New York City.
The couple was known for their
opulent, imaginative dinner
parties, attended by
many celebrity guests.
And Dali's work
continued all the while,
expanding from painting to
jewelry, fashion, furniture,
and a dream sequence
for a Hitchcock film.
By the time of the cookbook, he
was a household name, as well
known for his
antics, as his art.
Now that it's
simmered long enough,
we're asked to skim the scum off
the surface of the stock, which
I presume you might have
more of if you actually
have bones in your broth.
After scum skimming,
you'll pour the whole thing
through a fine-mesh
strainer and push through
to make sure you're extracting
as much flavor as possible.
You can now discard everything
but the stock, or do, as I did,
and pull out the fish
to feed to your dog.
We're going to pour the stock
through the strainer one more
time as we put it
back in the stock pot
to make sure we got out any
stray bits, which it turns out
we do have.
Now that that's ready,
it's time for a new segment
on art cooking.
And, for it, you're going to
need a very special kitchen
implement, a box cutter, because
a mystery box has arrived,
folks, and I am
going to unbox it.
Oh, and make sure you've
got your stock simmering,
which I had forgotten.
But back to the box,
which I've carefully
opened to find no
messages or instructions.
There is a bag, but I can't seem
to find where it originates.
A wise person would have
maybe made a cut in the bag,
but I did not.
I just sort of slid the contents
out and soon realized my folly.
Oh, there's the opening.
Oh.
Oh.
It's the live
crayfish, of course,
which were no mystery
to me, really,
since I ordered them in
advance from a crawfish farmer
in Louisiana and timed
this whole shebang
around their
availability and arrival.
But while the contents
were not a mystery,
they were, nonetheless,
surprising, not only in the way
they so dramatically
unfurled from the box,
but also how lively they are,
no doubt because I just shocked
them out of their cold slumber.
As we attempt to get this
situation under control,
I start to feel a
tremendous amount of guilt
for what I'm about to
do, which reminds me
that Dali was raised by a
devoutly Catholic mother
and once blamed the religion
for his feelings of guilt
surrounding sex.
He initially followed
in the footsteps
of his atheist
father, shocking many
with his scandalous
portrayal of corrupt priests
in [INAUDIBLE] and
[INAUDIBLE] and because
of another 1929 work he so
delicately titled, "Sometimes I
Spit With Pleasure on the
Portrait of My Mother,
the Sacred Heart."
But by 1949, Dali had
drifted back to the church,
even having a private audience
with Pope Pius XII in 1949, who
blessed his recent painting
depicting Gala as the Virgin
Mary.
Dali considered himself
a religious mystic,
reinterpreting Christianity
through the lens
of modern science.
His paintings from the
'50s explore this position,
which he called
nuclear mysticism,
and follow a classical
style influenced
by Italian Renaissance masters.
I'm distracting, of
course, from the matter
at hand, which is the
terrible reality that I
have to dispatch these crayfish
as quickly as possible.
Releasing them into the Indiana
winter would not be wise.
I am reminded of David Foster
Wallace's brilliant 2004 essay,
"Consider the Lobster," in which
he confronts the brutal reality
of lobster death.
And while these
are not lobsters,
they're freshwater cousins.
And while I eat
animals all the time,
I, nonetheless, feel sorry and
seek repentance for my sins.
Dali's recipe has us
poach the crayfish
in the broth for 20 minutes.
But to make this
faster, we set up
additional pots of boiling
water and accomplish our feat
in batches.
Then we pull our cooked
crayfish and allow them to cool.
We're instructed to
chill them overnight,
so we wrap them up,
put them in the fridge,
and break for the day.
24 hours later, our crayfish
are cool, we're feeling chipper,
and we're ready to
assemble this sucker.
We're going to start
with the topper.
And you'll need a nice ripe
December tomato, a lemon,
and a truffle.
First we cut the lemon across
the middle in a zigzag pattern,
like the picture, and then
do the same, a little less
successfully, to remove the
stem portion of the tomato.
We ordered some whole black
truffles, preserved in salt,
because the price
was right and they
were the best
reviewed truffles that
weren't insanely expensive.
We picked out the
largest one, threaded it
onto a metal skewer.
We didn't have one with a fancy
silver finial like the picture.
Followed by the tomato,
and then a lemon.
Now we set that aside and
put on our serious face
to figure out the engineering
of our crayfish bush,
starting with a platter,
followed by a bowl.
At La Tour D'Argent
in Paris, all of this
would be silver, of course.
And then I weight down the
bottom with a bag of raw rice,
one bowl facing down and
then another facing up.
Into that one, I put a
Styrofoam topiary cone, which
I've wrapped in plastic,
something I'm positive
did not happen at La
Tour D'Argent, but heck.
I then fill the base of the
bowl with the smaller crayfish.
And then when I reach the lip,
start to use the bigger guys
and let their claws hang over
the side, as in the picture.
I stack and stack,
following the picture
to the best of my ability.
Phew, this is hard work, guys.
I'm getting warm.
It's a good thing I have on my
"All Art Was Once Contemporary"
Art Assignment t-shirt,
available for purchase
at DFTBA.com.
But back to work.
I add in some curly parsley
and continue my stacking,
then use toothpicks to affix
the crayfish to the cone.
I'm deeply curious
how they accomplish
this at the restaurant in a
way that would be pleasant
for the eating process.
Anyway, Dali is quoted in
the cookbook as saying,
"In fact, I only
like to eat what has
a clear and intelligible form.
If I hate that detestable,
degrading vegetable called
spinach, it's because it
is shapeless, like liberty.
The opposite of
spinach is armor.
I love eating suits of arms.
In fact, I love all shellfish,
food that only a battle to peel
makes it vulnerable to the
conquest of our palate."
The book is rife with such
descriptions of Dali's approach
to gastronomy, which
he considers a high art
and calls, quote, "The
most delicate symbol
of true civilization."
With this cookbook, Dali
hoped to present to us not
the usual drab work
of cookery, that field
earmarked by mediocrity
and characterized
by having been reduced until
now to its bare physiological
attributes, but, instead,
a new world, revealed to us
in a witty shower of
intellectual exuberance
and dionysiac jubilation.
For as ridiculous as this
crayfish tower might seem,
as I constructed it, my feelings
of guilt for these creatures
lifted.
Instead of being dumped on a
table, covered in newspaper,
which has its
merits, to be sure,
these crayfish are
being presented
in a grand and
celebratory manner,
showing off their
magnificent suits of armor.
This is food taken
very seriously.
Dali is quoted in
the book as saying,
"I know with ferocious
exactitude what I want to eat."
Gastronomy takes on a
spiritual dimension for Dali.
The book compares the
creation of this high cuisine
to a ritual that, quote,
"sublimes and transcends
the profane into the sacred,
events into rituals, ingestion,
digestion, assimilation, into
lethargy, transubstantiation,
holy communion, and mass."
It goes on but is perhaps best
summarized by this statement
by the artist, "The
sensual intelligence
housed in the
tabernacle of my palate
beckons me to pay the
greatest attention to food."
This process and this
object are truly ridiculous.
It's not necessary to boil
your crayfish in fish broth
and construct them in a
bush with a truffle on top
in order to enjoy them,
but I did enjoy them,
and I enjoyed this
process tremendously.
Dali was 68 when he
published this book,
and a larger-than-life figure,
a master of self-promotion,
a courter of controversy,
derided by his critics
as having peaked in his
youth, and descending
into commercialism and greed.
But the mythos of Dali
and the reality of Dali
are presented in
this cookbook as one.
Here, we are granted
access into this world.
We paid the greatest
attention to food,
and the results are
triumphant, transcendent,
and positively Dalinesque.
[MUSIC CONTINUES]
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