Feasting on Art

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

Read the rest of this entry »

“A cooked tomato is like a cooked oyster: ruined.”
Andre Simon, The Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy

As a writer with a penchant for fresh oysters and summer tomatoes, this quote fits squarely into my culinary logic. Personally, a weeknight meal consists of little more than a ripe tomato, sliced, salted and layered on buttered dark bread. Inspired by a painting by a Scottish Colourist, I became preoccupied with preserving the range of tomato colours as well as the summer taste as the season began to wane here in Australia. By braising the tomatoes over low heat for a limited amount of time, this recipe for sweet tomato relish seeks to preserve the fruit while maintaining the flush of summer ripeness.

Francis Cadell, Still Life (Tomatoes), c.1920
oil on board, 37 x 45 cm, Private collection

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Read the rest of this entry »

Dating back to 1898, a tarte tatin was traditionally made by caramelizing apples in butter and sugar and baking upside down in an oven. The dish was allegedly created by accident at the Hotel Tatin when the tart was baked upside-down by mistake. I substituted chunks of  apple for thick slabs of juicy tomato and gave my tart a savoury bend with brown butter and balsamic vinegar. At this time of year the tomatoes are a brilliant shade of red and are perfect paired with a soft lump of goat cheese. I am having a great time in Michigan and thank you for all of the well-wishes from the previous post. It will be so hard returning to winter after eating fresh fruits and vegetables from the markets and my grandfather’s garden (not to mention saying good-bye to family and friends again)!

Paul Gauguin, Nature morte aux tomates (Tomatoes and a pewter tankard on a table), 1883
oil on canvas, 60 x 73 cm, private collection

Read the rest of this entry »