There was a great article by Fuchsia Dunlop in the Financial Times at the weekend, headlined ‘Stone Feasts: Verisimilar meat, fish and poultry carved from rocks are part of a long Chinese cultural tradition.’ I don’t believe I’ve ever seen ‘verisimilar’ used in a sentence before.
Now, Fuchsia Dunlop appears to know pretty much all there is to know about Chinese food and culture, but even she seemed to be taken aback by the practice of collecting and displaying, in some cases after carving and cutting, rocks that look like food.
She describes a ‘stone banquet’ she visited at the Ningxia Museum in Yinchuan, assembled by ‘self-declared stone lover’ Xie Nin, and says it looked as though Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti had collaborated on dinner.
Inevitably, as you see from the pictures, some of the rocks look rather more convincingly like food than others - belly pork seems especially persuasive, but the general effect as shown in these pictures both from the newspaper and from Fuschia Dunlop’s Instagram feed is downright wonderful. Speaking as someone who loves both food and rocks, this is about as good as it gets.
I pick up a lot of rocks on my meanderings, but I’ve found very few that look like food, apart from the odd one that looks a bit like a potato. But I’ve always been intrigued by restaurants or other establishments that display ‘verisimilar’ food. I found myself digging through my files looking for example of fake food I’ve photographed over the years.
Obviously a lot of restaurants don’t have the time or the staff to go hunting in the mountains looking for rocks that resemble their fare. They have to rely on more mundane and easily available materials. Some of these may be quite straightforward and literal like these replicas displayed outside a restaurant in Koreatown in LA, simply giving an impression of what the food served inside looks like.
But more often that not there’s some gigantism involved. Ice cream is very good for this:
In Manchester you’ll find the Vimto monument. I think those are giant raspberries and grapes – I mean, those are the ingredients of Vimto - but those really are some funny looking grapes:
Hot dogs too are popular, and this may be more of an American thing. This is, or anyway was, on Hollywood Boulevard:
This was, and I believe still is, Jimmy’s Hot Dog Company in Bisbee Arizona
And perhaps best of all – instead of finding a rock that looks like a hot dog (which I think is not entirely unlikely), or making one out of wood, you could build a motor vehicle that looks like one. This is the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile:
There are plenty more where they came from.
Today while on my morning constitutional I picked up these three little rocky morsels – they look ‘almost’ but not quite good enough to eat.
And then I remembered, well I hadn’t really forgotten, that Dining on Stones is the title of a novel by the esteemed Iain Sinclair.
So … a cultural tradition with an international pedigree.
No comments:
Post a Comment