I have dined at Kaye Winwood’s GULP, hidden deep in the heart of the Jewellery Quarter in Spencer Street, several times over the last few years (as reported in previous blogs) and most recently I dined there on the fifth anniversary of Kaye’s establishment of her business (see Blog 564). I returned just a couple of weeks later for a bespoke dinner with some old friends to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of our university graduation and themed on a favourite subject of Kaye’s - that of the cuisine of the Italian Futurists of the 1930s. Tony O’Callaghan and Kaye was front of house and it’s fair to say that a grand evening was had by all.
Kaye’s interest in the Futurists is somewhat unexpected given the artists’ eventual association with Italian fascism after the rise of Mussolini - one expects Kaye certainly has no fascist sympathies whatsoever but their art is interesting, their cuisine quite mad and they are of their age - avant garde and heretical. The artistic movement was founded by the poet Fillippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909 when he published his Manifesto of Futurism in which he demanded the destruction of museums and libraries to liberate Italy from its classical past which he saw as oppressive and harmful to the growth of what was still then a ‘young country’ (modern Italy had finally been united just forty nine years previously in 1860) .
Marinetti’s disciples joined him in attempting to celebrate a new era of energetic dynamism brought in by the machine age (remember Italy, as a country where agriculture was heavily dominant over industry was far behind Britain in its experience of the industrial revolution and therefore it is not surprising that there were those who were still thrilled at the start of the twentieth century by the triumph of industry and all they perceived it would bring to them including an acceleration of life itself, and with it, art.
The Futurists subverted traditional ideas of beauty perceiving a flashy racing car as being more glorious than the work of Michelangelo (there are many now who still do here in England where parafascist Reform politicians often share the same opinion - it is therefore unsurprising that the Futurists themselves drifted into holding fascist beliefs.
The Futurist artists embraced a style of fragmented planes and fractured lines and evoked speed, motion and noise. Since gastronomy itself is an art it is therefore not surprising that the preparation, serving and consumption of food eventually became dragged into the Futurist world view. In 1930 Marinetti and the artist Fillia (Luigi Colombo) published the Manifesto of Futurist Cooking and then released The Futurist Cookbook in 1932 (a copy of which Kaye Winwood owns and regards with a degree of affection as any book reader does when they possess a much loved book - some of the recipes served at our meal were derived from Marinetti’s tome)
The cook book highlighted the eccentricities of Futurist dining - an abhorrence of pasta which the Futurists blamed for causing sluggishness, pessimism and lack of national pride. The Futurists substituted rice in their meals instead. The Futurists cast away their traditional kitchen implements and instead turned to centrifuges, ultra violet ray sterilisers and ozonisers and gloried in the use of aluminium, the application of chemistry and the speed of both the preparation of food and the eating of it.
Food was not just to be tasted but must be experienced in a multisensory fashion - there must be synchronised perfumes, bespoke music and tactile elements. This tactility was heightened by not using utensils and this increased the contact between the diner and the art. The atmosphere in which the meal was eaten was also of importance - there was to be no political discussion during the meal and the meal might be accompanied by the reading out of poetry and changes in the table settings with each course.
And so it was, with Marinetti’s manifesto in mind and his cook book in the kitchen, my friends and I set about our Italian Futurist experience,
I know, from my communications with her, that Kaye had spent a lot of time and put in much thought and effort into planning and preparing the event in general and the meal in particular. She was the perfect hostess, had prepared happily art deco menus, presented as folded airplanes as one might expect from the Futurists for us to read, and provided some splendid table decorations including strings of olives constructed to look like trees. The Campari-based aperitivo was served in Kaye’s glass bowls which were held by placing the five fingers each in an individual indentation in the glass, a talking point in itself and, I suppose, multisensory à la Futurism given that not only the senses of smell, taste and vision were involved but also touch associated with the contact of individual fingers with glass, and sound, as the 1930s music played in the background.
And so on to the stuzzichini served as part of the aperitivo. No crab croustade or cheesy tartlets these. They were brutally Italian Futurist - Tricolore de Insalata Caprese ‘Towards food in pills’ - two pills each aggressively citric and flavoursome and then a syringe with the third stuzzichini to be emptied into the both and to elicit a little yelp of surprise.
Next, following ‘Boarding’, came ‘Take off’ in the form of ‘rice oranges’ - a generously sized, crispy coated arancine with mozzarella and ragu which was not entirely successful, the dish Still, it was fun to eat. There was a little boat of salt available if I had noticed it before I ate the dish. It was a nice illustration of the Futurists’ rejection of pasta and their embrace of rice. This was accompanied by Intuitivo antipasto in the form of a hollowed out orange filled with olives and pieces of charcuterie.
And so to the main, ‘In-flight’, and Kaye brought an alluring piece of beautifully cooked pork to the table. The meat had been rolled with some very pleasing chestnut stuffing, onion and sausages and powdered with chocolate. It was rusticly delicious.
After a little demonstration of the relationship of texture to taste when eating which brought us all to having to wear masks for a few seconds it was to the drama of the dessert that we all turned - ‘Cruising Like a cloud’ which bright the divine joy of a fantasy of Italian meringue, cream, strawberries and strawberry jam set alight with an almost eternal blue flame of Asti. Happy diners all round.
While ‘descending’ we were served piccola pasticherria in the form of pert little Seni Italiani al sole/Italian breasts in the sunshine, an authentic Futurist mignardise invented by the artist Marisa Mori and made up of two mounds of marzipan topped by nipples of strawberry jam. There’s nothing like strawberry nipples with your coffee. Our evening with the futurists ended with a little slice of pannetone from which a balloon on a string drifted ceilingwards, the balloons then being popped synchronously to allow the perfumed gas inside to be released, once more intended to show how flavour may be affected as the perfumes filled the air.
Buono notte! That’s if the Futurists allowed themselves to say goodnight to each other.
