Recipes, Rumors, and Reminiscence: A Literary Cookbook Gift Guide
Before we begin, you should know that I hate cooking and am addicted to gossip. If you’re worried that these qualities render me unequipped to curate a cookbook-based gift guide, I understand your hesitation. Though I do have some saving graces in the realm of gastronomical guides: I’m highly literate and extremely hungry. But those aren’t actually essential qualities for the books I’ll be writing about here, which aren’t so much cookbooks as they are experiments in autobiography, gossip columns, avant-garde practical jokes, literary scene reports, prose poems, love letters, and cookbooks-cum-charisma vehicles from across the twentieth century. These are gifts for your esoteric aunt, your ex-best friend, a pretentious PhD student, an e-girl niece, your cocktail-loving godmother, and the crush you want to impress with your thoughtful eccentricity. In the spirit of a writer who tends to insert her recipes into the middle of sentences, I’ll start with:
1. Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone to So Much Trouble (1980) —Caroline Blackwood & Anna Haycraft
My mother is obsessed with Caroline Blackwood for myriad reasons, including but not limited to Blackwood’s biting, embittered prose, her historic homewrecking, and the fact that my mother has a soft spot for aristocratic alcoholics. Blackwood—Guinness beer heiress, child of a Marquess, novelist, memoirist, socialite, famously hospitable party host, and one-time wife to Lucian Freud, Israel Citkowitz, and Robert Lowell—loved hosting and hated cooking things that took longer than thirty minutes to make. I can relate, so after I finished reading my mother’s stash of her novels, I read the cookbook she wrote with her friend Anna Haycraft (pen name Alice Thomas Ellis).
As a teenager, Haycraft converted to Catholicism and committed herself to a convent, where she lasted six months. She moved to London’s Chelsea neighborhood and began dressing entirely in black and spending time in bohemian bars, where she met Blackwood and the husband she’d purchase a publishing house with in 1968. Both women were prone to tragedy, exceptionally talented prose stylists, and flagrant pessimists (Christopher Isherwood claimed his friend Caroline could “only think negatively,” while Haycraft’s novels have been described as interested in “small savageries, deep discontents, and abiding grief”), and their co-written cookbook provides a welcome glimpse into the charmingly caustic conversational style that made both women social centerpieces of their era. It also proves that girls with bad attitudes throw the best parties.
The comic introduction announces that this is a guide for women who might “go berserk” if “anyone expects them to spend more than a few minutes” in the kitchen after a long day, but who remain “unliberated enough to admit that they like their food to be praised.” As such, it promises recipes that “are unusual and glamorous and taste and look as if they have taken hours,” collected from their own kitchen as well as the notepads of famous friends and former lovers. You’ll find Blackwood’s own recipe for a “Black Velvet” cocktail (equal parts champagne and Guinness), Lucian Freud’s tomato soup (he begins by announcing “my recipe is not right for this book”), Marianne Faithfull’s “Different Sweet/Sour Pork,” Sonia Orwell’s Tagliatelle with Truffles, Francis Bacon's “Thick, Fat, Genuine Mayonnaise,” and Anna Freud’s “Oeufs a la Neige,” among many other ostensibly quick and easy recipes by princesses and painters. Because “guests are frequently late, and often want to drink for an indefinite amount of time” before and after the meal, there is an extensive cocktail section—as well as a pork loin and potato dish deemed “A Drinker’s Sunday Lunch.”
For: party girls, anglophiles, mistresses, stepmothers, witty pessimists, second-wave feminists
2. The Futurist Cookbook (1931) —Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
For a wedding banquet, serve truffles the color of sin. Dosed as prescribed, poetry and music serve as inspired ingredients for an appetizer course. Irreverent and ultimately excellent diamonds of advice decorate the pages of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook, which has been described as “the greatest artistic prank of the twentieth century” for its irreverence and surrealism, comprised as it is of parodic parables, blueprints for architectural experiments in eating, and political screeds teetering on the edge of satire. First published in 1931 during the Italian futurist movement—a technologically-oriented artistic and social movement—this combination cookbook, manifesto, story collection, and curated collage project is an enthralling existential experiment, which should be read with a drink (perhaps an Inventine, the futurist moniker for cocktails that inspire the imagination) and taken with a grain of salt (Marinetti’s futurist project devolved into support for fascism; he was a big fan of Mussolini). Opening with a parable entitled “The Dinner that Stopped A Suicide,” other chapter titles include “Manifestos-Ideology-Polemics” and “Typical Anecdotes.” Recipes read like practical jokes, and are named as such: a “ManAndWomanAtMidnight” is an “onion ring transfixed by a stalk of candied angelica;” “Italian Breasts in the Sunshine” refers to an “almond and strawberry dessert.”
Instructions for building “food sculptures” are interspersed with winking political diatribes, from a call for the abolition of pasta—which will “free Italy from expensive foreign wheat and promote the Italian rice industry”—to a condemnation of luxury hotel food (it is “logical that politicians of every country who gather to discuss their great obligations, the revision of treaties, disarmament, and the universal crisis, can clarify nothing and decide little after ingurgitating such depressing, saddening, and monotonizing foods.”) Multi-course menus for “dinner programs that we call PROVOCATIVE AND EVOCATIVE” promise to align your palate with your politics, philosophy, and social life. A “Summer Luncheon for Painters and Sculptors” consists of tomato soup, polenta, green salad, and radishes, to be eaten without plates or cutlery, and will supposedly prevent the “cerebral anxieties and pessimism” that ostensibly follow meals eaten with a fork and knife, which leave artists “loitering artistically” all afternoon, instead of creating. Pro tip: If you ever find yourself faced with three young men in “a state of literary and erotic anxiety that cannot be appeased by a normal meal,” feed them Italian peppers, garlic cloves, rose petals, soda, peeled bananas, and cod liver.
For: socialists with contrarian tendencies, American girls with Italian boyfriends, cubists, design obsessives
3. The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954) —Alice B. Toklas
Alice B. Toklas is perhaps most famous as the subject of her partner, writer Gertrude Stein’s, modernist masterpiece Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Perhaps the most famous literary lesbians after Sappho, the couple hosted salons in Paris attended by Hemingway, Picasso, Matisse, and Braque. While Stein wrote opaque, avant-garde prose, Toklas played many roles in her life, all of them supporting: cook, muse, secretary, secret-keeper. After Stein’s death, during a period of illness, Toklas decided to write a book herself. But not considering herself a writer, she decided to recount a lifetime of cooking and eating instead. (Toklas’ role as “wife-secretary” to Stein included making her meals.)
This book is Toklas’s own modernist masterpiece, a “mingling of recipe and reminiscence” with recipes set startlingly in the middle of sentences, often interrupting memoiristic vignettes. Many of those hinge on hangouts with writers and artists. Toklas “decorated a fish” for Picasso, even though he told her she should have saved it for Matisse, was served canapes by F. Scott Fitzgerald in Baltimore, and ate oysters rockefeller with Sherwood Anderson in New Orleans. The book is also rife with aphorisms and almost-proverbs, as well as amusingly overstated judgments on American, French, and English cuisine and culture.
You’ll find that the French, for example “being realists look facts in the face and only call a sauce a cream sauce when it is made with cream” while Americans are fantasists, though we do make “unrivaled T-steaks, soft-shell crab, and ineffable ice cream.” Between a recipe for “Carp Stuffed with Chestnuts” and one for “Braised Pigeons on Croutons” years pass: “there was a war and after a lifetime there was peace.” You’ll learn that it is “certainly a mistake to allow a reputation for cleverness to be born and spread by loving friends,” because you’ll end up being asked to come up with a three-course meal for a dinner party made out of measly war rations. If you ever find yourself on the precipice of a world-historical crisis, as Toklas did on the eve of World War II, she gives sage advice for those preparing to host parties throughout its duration: to “not only exist but be able to be hospitable” during the war, Toklas and Stein bought “two hams and hundreds of cigarettes.”
Toklas offers her own recipes for dishes too, such as “Giant Squab in Pajamas,” and “Swimming Crawfish” alongside Frances Picabia’s eggs, Virgil Thomson’s Shad Roe Mousse, Pierre Balmain’s “Vent-Vert Chicken,” Carl Van Vechten’s “Garlic Ice Cream,” Princess de Rohan’s “Salade Aphrodite” (described as “ideal for poets with delicate digestion”), and a “Hot Toddy for a Cold Night” supposedly passed down from Flaubert. Chapter titles include “Dishes for Artists,” “Marder in the Kitchen,” “Food in the Bugey During the Occupation,” and “Recipes from Friends.”
For: lesbians, actually talented cooks, war history bros, Parisians, expats, grad students
4. Consider the Oyster (1941) —MFK Fisher
My grandfather—who ate a dozen oysters a day for decades and rated each one on a scale of one to ten—gifted me this short book on crustaceans on a spring day in 2019. I read it in one afternoon. Written in prose as salty and sparkling as the seawater from which its subject came, Consider the Oyster is an essay-in-recipes, combining memoir, marine biology, food criticism, satire, and philosophy. MFK Fisher’s food writing was widely recognized as ingeniously literary during her lifetime, so much so that she recalled in her memoir The Gastronomical Me often being asked why she wrote about “eating and drinking” and not “the struggle for power and security, and about love.” Her answer was that she’s as hungry as the next human, and humanity’s “three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled that . . . when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love.” That authorial ethos is evident in this book, which opens with a brief narration of an oyster’s “dreadful but exciting,” life—which involves two cherished weeks of “vagabondage, of devil-may-care roaming”—and is followed by a pastiche of recipes, memories, and philosophy.
Debunking the myth that oysters should only be eaten in months with an “R” in them, Fisher writes that “men’s ideas continue to run in the old channels about oysters as well as God and war and women.” One recipe for a French oyster dish is distressingly convoluted, and closes with a wink to the reader: “or fry and serve with ale.” The book’s embrace of existentialism and comedy simultaneously is a testament to Fisher’s droll grace amid calamity: she wrote the book to cheer up her second husband as he fought Brueger’s disease, a rare, degenerative autoimmune disorder brought on by smoking.
For: seafood addicts, people who have been sending you articles about vibrio, friends with short attention spans, martini drinkers
5. Les Diners de Gala (1973) —Salvador Dali
One night in 1941, Salvador Dali’s wife and muse, Gala, wore a unicorn headdress and played hostess from a red velvet bed. Alfred Hitchcock, Ginger Rogers, Bing Crosby, and Bob Hope ate sole out of satin slippers, while dressed as their own dreams. The party, entitled A Surrealistic Night in a Surrealist Forest, was a fundraiser thrown by the Dalis for refugee artists; one of a string of dinner parties styled as daydreams; feasts that did double duty as art installations. Dali recalled fostering something between a fetish and a fixation on food since childhood, when at six years old he dreamed of becoming a chef. At twenty-two, he spent four months painting a heel of bread. At thirty-five, he dressed nude models in seafood for the New York World Fair, and at sixty-five he arrived at the Sorbonne to deliver a lecture entitled “Phenomenological Aspects of the Critical Paranoiac Method” in a Rolls-Royce filled with cauliflower. So when he published a cookbook called Les Diners de Gala just before turning seventy, it came as no surprise to friends and fans.
The book, composed of 136 recipes either supposedly served at Gala’s dinner parties or culled from the couple’s favorite restaurants, is illustrated and narrated by Dali, and reads alternately like a dream journal, a prose poem, a party report, and a dead-serious parody of fine dining guides. Chapters are divided by course, each of which is renamed in sly, subversive fashion: appetizers are re-christened “Delicious Little Martyrs,” main courses become “Sodomized In Between Plates” and desserts are aphrodisiacs, entitled “I Eat Gala.”
Recipes for dishes like “Bush of Crayfish in Viking Herbs” and “Thousand Year Old Eggs” (hard-boiled eggs left in the fridge for three weeks in a jar filled with water, garlic, lemons, sugar, vinegar, tabasco, tea, and thyme) sit between surrealist illustrations. A woman wearing what appears to be a ball gown of crustaceans stands atop a pile of dead bodies, bleeding profusely herself. Raw chickens wear aprons and geese sprout extra heads. We’re offered a glance inside a woman’s mind and find her brain composed of peas and carrots; we see a massive sea bass eaten by a team of small lobsters sitting atop a sarcophagus. The book is riddled with invented terms that tilt toward the absurd: you’ll read about “meat jewelry,” “gastro-esthetics,” and “hors-textes.” Equally distressed by dieting and self-seriousness, Dali opens the book with a warning: “If you are a disciple of one of those calorie-counters who turn the joys of eating in to a form of punishment, close this book at once; it is too lively, too aggressive, and far too impertinent for you.”
For: surrealism simps, nymphomaniacs, hedonists, museum employees, your rich friend who loves coffee table books
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