Feasting on Art

As far as cookie recipes go, this little beauty has become my new holiday staple. I first tried this recipe by Gourmet a couple of years ago but made too many substitutions. The cookies were extremely disappointing and I filed the card away in my recipe box until a bag of what was described as ‘the best pistachios you will ever eat’ arrived from my mother. The cookies are extremely festive, dotted with ruby red berries and dusty green nuts and extremely moorish, one is never enough. I used salted pistachios and so omitted the salt from the recipe. The salted nuts are perfectly offset with the sweet and chewy cranberries while the butter-rich dough melts in your mouth.

Albert Anker, Still Life: Two Glass of Red Wine, a bottle of Wine; a Corkscrew and a Plate of Biscuits on a Tray, oil on canvas, 43 x 40cm, Private collection

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Growing up in the Midwest, cookies played a major part of my December. Throughout the holiday season, we gathered at my grandparent’s home for various parties and meals, always entering their home via the garage and past the cookies. Perched on the woodpile, the cookies lived in old tins between layers of wax paper and were kept cold by the Michigan winter. This holiday staple, a recipe by my grandmother, produces a soft and chewy cookie with a dense crumb and can easily be scaled up or down.

John Frederick Peto, The Poor Man’s Store (detail left), 1885
oil on canvas and panel, 90 x 65cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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Set against the slate gray skies of winter, the kitchen calls. With my hip pressed against the counter and the trusty wooden spoon I found in the back of a drawer in my first London home, I stand and stir with wafts of steam creating a makeshift heater. In the midst of the season of soup, I have swirled pots of stock until the freezer was brimming. Slowly caramelizing onions is a satisfactory substitute to soup-making; it is a long process that continues to warm the kitchen during the last of the chilly days.

De Scott Evans, A Plate of Onions, 1889
oil on canvas, 25.4 x 30.4 cm

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Adorning the cloaks and garments of royalty, the colour purple was often called imperial purple due to the close association. The word purple is a derivative of the original Greek porphura, the name of the Tyrian purple dye of antiquity extracted from a spiny snail. The pigment was extremely expensive to produce and only the very wealthy could afford clothes dyed the colour of grapes and plums. As a secondary colour, purple is wedged between red and blue on the colour wheel. The tones leaning towards the blue side of the spectrum were desired due to their association with the rare blue pigment favoured by artists and craftsmen.

Benjamin Roberts, Still life of plums with a cabbage white, 1862
oil on board, 16 x 21.5 cm, Private collection

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As an art historian, I find the artist’s conceptual process to be incredibly intriguing, it lends readability and a deeper understanding to the artwork. In interviews, I am often asked to describe my methods of adapting an artwork into a recipe and truth be told, my approach varies greatly from post to post. There is a general formula I tend to follow and as this blog nears the two-year mark, I decided to share my creative process for the recipe below. In the beginning of each month, I sit down with a calendar and begin combing through my image archives. I try to post a new entry once every five days and so I map out the month, reserving two Mondays to cook and photograph all of the dishes. I queue up artworks that pique my interest and begin listing out the ingredients depicted in each one. As an example, Still Life of Asparagus, pictured below by Nicolas-Henry Jeaurat de Bertry features butter, onion, garlic and white asparagus. After listing the ingredients, I start arranging and rearranging the signature item which ended up being the white asparagus in the recipe below. I tend to start with the recipe title and from the title, work out the ingredient proportions and method of cooking. With the soufflé edged with asparagus, I had a clear picture of how the finish dish should look but was unsure if the recipe would actually work the way I intended. Lucky for me, the soufflé emerged better than I had imagined and the asparagus, when plucked from the soufflé, acted as a vehicle to transport the spongy egg, an aspect I had not anticipated.

Nicolas-Henry Jeaurat de Bertry, Still Life of Asparagus, 18th century
oil on canvas on panel, 25.5 x 36 cm, Private collection

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