Feasting on Art

This post has been a long time coming. Between a few freelance writing projects and my curatorial debut, I have had very little free time left to finish this post. Plus I have managed to forget butter the last three times I went grocery shopping. Without it, these pretty madeleines would have been very sad tasting. A madeleine is a small sponge cake that hails from the northeast of France – the Lorraine region to be exact. The cakes are distinctive for their shell-like appearance and are made with a dedicated pan especially for madeleines, available at most home-ware shops.

Vincent van Gogh, Still Life with Basket and Six Oranges, 1888
oil on canvas, 45 x 54 cm, Private collection

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The following recipe has been affectionately known by the names ‘Chichcock’, ‘Spatcken’ and ‘The Great Chichicken Debacle’. Conceived and executed with my brilliant friend Mel, the spatchcock stuffed chicken was a two-day affair. Day one consisted of meticulously deboning a small spatchcock, otherwise known as a poussin or juvenile chicken, and a larger adult chicken. Using Jacques Pépin’s youtube tutorial for deboning quail as a guide, we sliced our way through the poultry incurring only minor injuries while keeping the majority of the bird intact. We stuffed and rolled the fowls into a small bundle and chilled them overnight in the fridge until the following day. Day two involved cooking the chickens and after sliding our concoction into a hot oven, two hours later we were delighted to find two tender birds – the spatchcock inside fairing a bit better than the larger chicken outside.

In the words of the great Julia Child from Mastering the Art of French Cooking,

“You may think that boning a fowl is an impossible feat if you have never seen it done or thought of attempting it. Although the procedure may take 45 minutes the first time because of fright, it can be accomplished in not much more than 20 on your second or third try.”

With this advice ringing in our ears, Mel and I decided to forfeit the cooking class or online courses uk in favour of a self-taught approach. In the end, there will be none the wiser should there be a few extra cuts or or pieces after deboning a bird.

Gustave Caillebotte, Display of Chickens and Game Birds, c.1882
oil on canvas, 76 x 105cm, Private collection

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Within the history of art, the egg has been used to symbolise life, rebirth, fertility and potential. The icon has a long history and according to Silvia Malaguzzi in Food and Feasting in Art, “They symbolise rebirth, and that symbolic value was subsequently christianized in biblical exegesis and took the form of Easter eggs, the food of the Resurrection since the Christian Middle Ages.” Left with an inordinate number of eggs after Easter (pending they have not all been hard boiled and dyed) this recipe is an ideal way to convey an indulgent breakfast into a hearty supper. Apart from a slick of butter in which the bread is fried and a layer of melted cheese, there is little fat alongside the protein in the eggs and the tang of the mustard. Paired with a bitter salad of greens, this recipe is the antithesis of the surgary croissant french toast inspired by Morandi.

Claude Monet, Still Life with Eggs (Nature morte aux œufs), 1907
oil on canvas, 73 x 92cm, 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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In the mid-16th century, Spain began importing a vibrant red pigment from the New World that was so highly sought after that the source was held as a national secret. The dye was extracted from the blood of a female cochineal, a wingless insect that lives upon the leaves of the prickly pear. The dye was so valued that in the late 18th century, a French spy by the name of Nicolas Joseph Thierry de Menonville, snuck into the Spanish territory and successively procured a living specimen. The cochineal insect is closely related to the Indo-European kermes bug. Kermes insects live upon the scarlet oak and the red dye they produce was the most expensive pigment in the middle ages and very valuable to the Romans. According to Victoria Finlay, author of Colour: travels through the paintbox, “for many cultures red is both death and life – a beautiful and terrible paradox.” The connotations this colour, often made from the blood of insects, is embodied in Claude Monet’s Still Life: Quarter of Beef. This painting of a dead animal is created – is given life – through the death of the cochineal insect; yet represents a food source that sustains life. The small canvas represents the cyclical and paradoxical nature of the colour red.

Claude Monet, Still Life: Quarter of Beef (Nature morte : le quartier de viande vers), c.1864
oil on canvas, 24 x 33 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

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