All the Time in the World

by Jessica Kerwin Jenkins

  Great things can happen when artists, musicians, and poets apply themselves to the art of eating. In the early 1500s, the artistically inclined members of the Company of the Cauldron gathered in Florence for one of the weirdest potlucks on record. Led by the eccentric sculptor Giovanni Francesco Rustici (1474–1554), the diners took their places in a giant cooking pot made to look like a wine vat. Painter Andrea del Sarto (1486–1530) had crafted an especially creative dish: an edible eight-sided temple supported by sausage columns topped with Parmesan cheese capitals. The structure framed a tableau of cooked birds, beaks open as if caught mid-song, reading sheet music made from lasagna noodles dotted with black peppercorn notes. Rustici, as host, had prepared a statue of Ulysses, molded out of capon meat and posed as if the mythical hero were dipping his father into a pastry kettle. As his guests settled into their own vat, “there rose up in the middle a tree with many branches bearing the supper,” painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) reported. “And then it descended again and brought up a second course, and afterwards a third, and so on, while the servants went around with precious wines and musicians played below.”

  Rustici, who kept a pet porcupine, was also a founding member of another Florentine dining club, the Company of the Trowel, which indulged in similar endeavors. One night, in the garden behind the house of a charming humpbacked piper called Fe d’Agnolo, club members dressed as workmen constructed a gigantic structure using loaves of bread as bricks and ricotta cheese as mortar, which they slathered on with trowels. “But their building being pronounced badly done, it was condemned to be pulled down,” Vasari reported with a chuckle, “upon which they threw themselves upon the materials and devoured them all.”

  Art and food collided with the same bizarre passion four centuries later when the Futurist movement, led by another set of Italian artists, pushed gastronomy to its limits. “This Futurist cooking of ours, tuned to high speeds like a motor of a hydroplane, will seem to some trembling traditionalists both mad and dangerous,” their leader, poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) wrote in the 1930s, “but its ultimate aim is to create a harmony between man’s palate and his life today and tomorrow.” Honoring that harmony, the artists declared themselves against practicality and tradition, daring even to denounce pasta—that “absurd Italian gastronomic religion”—and thus igniting a national controversy.

  Banquets served in Turin at the Futurists’ restaurant, the Tavern of the Holy Palate, paid tribute to the unleashed imagination. Dishes were named Railway Disaster, or Keel of Infernal Vessel, or Beautiful Nude Food Portrait—which consisted of “a small crystal bowl full of fresh milk, two boiled capon thighs, the whole scattered with violets.” Between courses, diners were encouraged to “let their fingertips feast uninterruptedly on their neighbor’s pajamas.”

  The freakiest fare was “Aerofood,” a culinary experience incorporating tactile elements, sounds, and scents. The Aerofood composition created by painter Luigi Fillia (1904–1936) consisted of fruits and vegetables to be eaten with the right hand, “without the help of any cutlery,” while the left hand caressed swatches of sandpaper, red silk damask, or black velvet. “Meanwhile the orchestra plays a noisy, wild jazz and waiters spray the napes of diners’ necks with a strong perfume of carnations.”

  Another Aero-dish, consisting of a quarter of a fennel bulb, an olive, and candied fruit, required a similarly eccentric accompaniment. “From some carefully hidden melodious source comes the sound of part of a Wagnerian opera, and, simultaneously, the nimblest and most graceful of the waiters sprays the air with perfume,” wrote a journalist who sampled the fare. “Astonishing results: test them and see.”

  At ancient Roman banquets, musicians played and dancing girls wriggled, and Emperor Nero (37–68 CE) showered guests with flower petals in his circular dining hall, which “constantly revolved day and night, like the world.” It was the sort of decadent act of antiquated imperialism that made a big impression on eighteenth-century Parisian tastemakers such as court painter Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755–1842) and the notorious gourmand Grimod de La Reynière (1758–1837).

  “We ought to try this tonight,” Vigée-Lebrun’s brother suggested one afternoon in the 1780s, having read aloud a passage in which the Athenian philosopher Anacharsis describes a grand dinner given in the sixth century BCE. With a dozen friends already on their way, Vigée-Lebrun and her brother revamped their menu to include Mediterranean fare and threw a Grecian soirée that became legend. On arrival, guests were stripped down and re-dressed, in white muslin togas, with the men trading in their formal wigs for laurel wreaths and wiping the white powder from their faces as they “metamorphosed into veritable Athenians,” Vigée-Lebrun remembered. To serve their Cyprian wine, she borrowed antique Etruscan vases and cups from a collector friend. One of the guests, a poet, decked out in his laurel crown, recited odes written by Anacreon (ca.582–ca.485 BCE). They all sang, accompanied by a lyre. “I think I never spent a more amusing evening,” Vigée-Lebrun concluded. When members of Marie Antoinette’s clique asked the painter to do another Greek night for them, she refused.

  Her contemporary de La Reynière, however, took inspiration from the ancients’ dark side, and from the murderous Roman emperor Domitian (51–96), who threw a chillingly gruesome banquet around 89 CE. In a hall draped in black, Domitian set out gravestone nameplates and served the kind of food reserved for funeral ceremonies. Naked boys painted black flitted past like phantoms “and after circling around the guests in a sinister dance took up their positions at their feet,” a witness reported. Domitian spoke of nothing but gore and slaughter throughout the meal. His trembling guests had to wonder if they’d make it out alive.

  In homage to Domitian’s fearsome vision, in 1783 de La Reynière sent out black-bordered invitations decorated with a funeral bier, a cross, and candles. As guests entered his ghastly party, a judge tallied the merits of each, then sent them through a pitch-dark room and into the dining hall, which was draped in black and lit by 365 candles. Choirboys wafted funeral incense, and in the center of the table stood a giant sarcophagus. After the meal, for fun, an Italian scientist demonstrated the latest electrical experiments, and the party roared on until seven the next morning.

  Thirty years later, de La Reynière went to extremes once more when friends received notices of his death, and a request that they gather for his memorial. The solemn crowd congregated in de La Reynière’s sitting room, sharing their sadness and memories, and discussing their friend’s peculiarities. Suddenly the dining room doors swung open wide, revealing a sprawling, splendid feast on the table, where de La Reynière himself sat waiting. A tiny coffin stood in front of each guest’s plate.

  “Here’s the stuff to make you jump! Hokey pokey, a penny a lump!” The cry rang through the summer streets of nineteenth-century New York, as vendors offered up a mini-scoop of sweetened ice milk served on a scrap of paper. (“Hokey pokey” is thought to be an Americanized version of the Italian “O, che poco,” meaning “Oh, how cheap!” or “just a bit.”) But while the masses slurped their hokey pokey, the rich gathered at Delmonico’s restaurant, where Baked Alaska was the ultimate in sophistication. English writer George Augustus Sala (1828–1895) gave the novel dish a try in 1879. “The nucleus or core of the entremets is an ice cream. This is surrounded by an envelope of carefully whipped cream, which, just before the dainty dish is served, is popped into the oven, or is brought under the scorching influence of a red hot salamander,” he explained. “So you go on discussing the warm cream soufflé til you come, with somewhat painful suddenness, on the row of ice.”

  Others found the experience anything but painful. The ice cream novelties of chef Charles Ranhofer (1836–1899) were a specialty of the house at Delmonico’s. Ranhofer made mushroom-shaped treats of maraschino ice cream, studding their stalks with grated chocolate in imitation of natural grime. He served “potatoes” of chestnut ice cream and “asparagus” ice cream spears tied with a pink ribbon
. His Baked Alaska, or Alaska-Florida, as he called it—a frozen cake topped with banana and vanilla ice creams hidden under a toasted meringue crust—vied for supremacy with the Omelette Norvégienne, another fancy French dessert with a layer of jelly sandwiched between the cake and the ice cream and the meringue.

  The novelty of hot-and-cold creations and flaming desserts piqued the creativity of top chefs in those years. In France, Auguste Escoffier (1846–1935) introduced a flaming ice cream dish called Bombe Nero, and at Monaco’s Café de Paris, chef Henri Charpentier (1880–1961) came upon Crêpes Suzette one afternoon when the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, arrived with a group of friends, including a young girl named Suzette. It should have been a routine lunch, but then something spectacular happened. Charpentier prepared the dessert tableside for the esteemed guests, but in his nervousness while warming the crêpes in orange liqueur sauce over a flame, he sloshed it so that it all caught fire. “I thought I was ruined,” he wrote in his memoirs. Then he tried the caramelized concoction. “It was, I thought, the most delicious melody of sweet flavors I had ever tasted.” For decades to come, hosts and hostesses would imitate his lucky mistake. Mid-twentieth-century American cooks swooned over flaming desserts like Bananas Foster (bananas and ice cream in a flaming rum sauce), Cherries Jubilee (flambéed cherries with brandy), Grapefruit Flambé, and, once again, Baked Alaska—now ignited.

  Still, none were as deceptively simple and as fabulously dramatic as Crêpes Suzette, with its glorious haze of blue flames. As one wit wrote in the 1940s:

  No food is quite so debonair,

  Nor so imbedded with savoir-faire.

  It goes with pearls ’round swan-like necks,

  With limousines, five-figure checks.

  It matches coats of mink and sable,

  And priceless silver on the table.

  And yet, withal its rich appeal,

  So fitting for a prince’s meal,

  The fact remains—and what a shame!—It’s only

  pancakes set aflame.

  Crêpes Suzette

  FOR THE BATTER, IN A BLENDER OR FOOD PROCESSOR MIX:

  1 cup of all-purpose flour (or gluten-free substitute plus xanthan gum)

  ¾ cup whole milk

  ¼ cup water

  2 eggs

  2 tablespoons melted butter

  Dash of salt

  2 teaspoons sugar

  ¾ teaspoon almond extract

  Add another ¼ to ½ cup of water a bit at a time until the batter has the consistency of heavy cream. Store the batter in a jar and let sit for at least 2 hours.

  FOR THE ORANGE BUTTER:

  12 sugar cubes

  2 beautiful organic oranges

  4 tablespoons sugar

  1 stick of butter, cut into pieces, plus more for pan

  1 tablespoon orange liqueur, such as Grand Marnier

  Rub the skins of the oranges with the sugar cubes—six cubes for each—working to incorporate all of the precious orange oil into the sugar. Then peel the oranges with a vegetable peeler, taking the flavorful rind, and not the white pith. In a food processor, grind down the two sugars plus the rind, until the mixture is grainy and as fine as can be. Add the butter and the liqueur and process until just smooth.

  Make the crêpes in a buttered crêpe pan, or a good frying pan, pouring ¼ to ⅓ cup of batter into the center, then quickly rotating the pan over medium heat to spread the batter into a thin round. Flip the crêpe to cook for a minute or so on both sides until it is flecked with golden brown. Fold each crêpe in half, and then in half again, and set aside.

  When the crêpes are all made, use a rubber spatula to smear a teaspoon-size dollop of the orange butter into the center of each. Then refold the crêpes.

  FOR THE FINAL STEP:

  More butter

  More sugar

  ⅓ cup good cognac

  2 tablespoons orange liqueur, such as Grand Marnier

  Choose a pan large enough to fit the folded crêpes so that they overlap slightly. (You may need to do two batches—requiring the full amount of liqueur for each—or you may want to use two pans, as an overcrowded pan means bad results.)

  In the larger pan (or pans) heat the remaining knob of the orange butter until it’s foamy. (It’s okay to supplement with regular butter if you’ve run out of the other.) Arrange the crêpes in the pan, each slightly overlapping with the next. Keep the crêpes heating for a minute or two until everything is all warm and bubbly, but without burning the butter.

  Mix the two cooking liqueurs in a cup. Sprinkle the crêpes with sugar. Get a match handy. Sprinkle the crêpes with the cooking liqueurs and then set your dessert on fire! (Please use caution and do not singe your brows!) Have someone flick off the lights immediately as you proudly march into the dining room so that everyone can admire this mysterious halo of blue flames. Voilà!

  Makes 18–24 crêpes, serving 6

  Gluten-free tip: This is one recipe that is actually better without the wheat. At home we use Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free all-purpose baking flour plus ½ teaspoon Bob’s Red Mill xanthan gum.

  In a transparent vinyl gazebo exploding with rock music, balloons, and confetti, guests at multimedia artist Gerd Stern’s 1968 installation Fanflashstick writhed under megawatt strobe lights that turned the scene into a series of freeze-frame vignettes. “It’s more fun than anything legal I’ve ever done,” a breathless coed in a micro-miniskirt told The New York Times. Stern, a groovy, bearded ad agency dropout, was traveling with the piece from one college campus to another and explained that it was meant to expand consciousness and intensify perceptions. “The sensory bombardment tends to break down old patterns,” he said.

  That very summer, Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968)—the Times’s “Giotto of light painting”—died in West Nyack, New York. He’d become famous in the 1920s for his Clavilux, a “color-organ,” which, as Wilfred played its keys, projected twinkling shards and dreamy swaths of colored light onto a screen. “Light is the silent universal expression of the greatest force our senses can grasp,” Wilfred declared. The audiences at his light concerts were mesmerized. The Clavilux produced “cadenzas of color,” a reviewer wrote, “ceaseless rhythmic motions of various colored lights, the changing and fusing of colors, now soft and now intense, whirling and swirling, curling, twisting, gliding and folding.” Another claimed loftily that this was “the beginning of the greatest, the most spiritual and radiant art of all,” a genre that promised viewers “that feeling of detachment, of ecstasy, which is a response only to the most solemn religious or aesthetic experience.” Wilfred dedicated his life to promoting the new art form, “lumia,” as he named it, opening New York’s Art Institute of Light in 1930 to teach the discipline that he hoped would grow and thrive. He never found a successor. However, artist James Turrell (1943–), who stunned the art world with his projected light shapes and shadow slabs in Los Angeles that very same summer of 1968, has used light as an artistic medium ever since.

  On the promise of Turrell’s earliest works, New York gallerist Arne Glimcher (1938–) of Pace Gallery lent the artist enough cash to see him through a year’s worth of creation. The result was Mendota Stoppages, which the twenty-six-year-old Turrell showed Glimcher the next year. His raw material was the old Mendota, a former Los Angeles motel, whose interior illumination he’d systematically controlled through its windows and doors. These engineered “stoppages” allowed light to enter, or shut it out, casting patterns of light and shadow that played across the motel’s walls. It was revolutionary, risky work, and so hopelessly noncommercial that Turrell had to pay back the gallery’s advance. Still, during the summer of 1969, Turrell, who would become one of the most important artists of his generation, produced a very different sort of art happening at the Mendota, a kind of anti-Fanflashstick.

  At 9:00 p.m., viewers arriving at the Mendota were ushered into a room where they sat on chairs. Over the course of the next two hours, Turrell performed the Stoppages in ten episodes. First, h
e turned off the overhead lights. Then he slowly opened the shades of the south window, allowing the colored taillights from passing cars to splash across the walls. During the second episode, he drew up another shade, and light from a streetlamp streamed in to illuminate one corner of the room, “making for more subtle blushes of light,” as Turrell explained. Each episode lasted ten to fifteen minutes, depending on how he gauged his audience’s waxing or waning attention. Next, he led the viewers to a second, darker room, where they sat on the floor on Japanese tatami mats, watching the ethereal show, swirling with streetlights, stoplights, and the occasional taillights of a bus, which passed with dazzling effect most evenings. Eventually he shut down every stoppage, leaving the audience in complete, silent darkness, an atmosphere that allowed them to experience a physiological phenomenon in which random retinal firings produce chaotic phosphorescent images that keep the eye prepared to perceive light. Some viewers “became very involved in the experience, while others became impatient after a relatively short period,” Turrell later recalled. “Those who were more interested saw a better performance.”

  Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visitors on the Grand Tour flocked to see Rome’s Colosseum by moonlight—preferably under a full moon, in order to best evoke Lord Byron’s poetical Manfred, who was transformed by the sight,

  till the place