A MUSE BOUCHE

I’ve been rereading (in some cases reading for the first time) parts of Francine Prose’s book The Lives of the Muses: Nine women and the artists they inspired.

It turns out – and very possibly we knew this all along – that it’s very hard being a muse.  And it’s no picnic having a muse, either.  Prose discusses Alice Liddell and Lewis Carroll, Gala and Dali, Hester Thrale and Samuel Johnson, Yoko Ono and John Lennon, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, among others It’s surprising how often food crops up.

There’s John Lennon baking his own bread, taking Polaroids of it (way ahead of the Instagram game there, John) and bringing all the staff in for lunch.  Yoko says, ‘He makes the bread, and if they don’t eat it it’s a personal insult.’  Muses are, I suppose, allowed to make the occasional snide remark.

There’s Hester Thrale, Samuel Johnson’s muse, even while she was married to Henry Thrale, a brewer and MP. After Henry had had three strokes he started to eat and drink compulsively.  I haven’t been able to find exactly what he consumed but Johnson, who was no stranger to heroic eating, was so appalled that he said, ‘Sir—after the Denuriciation of your Physicians this Morning, such eating is little better than suicide.’  True enough.  Thrale didn’t stop eating and he died.  Johnson apparently though that Hester would then marry him, but in fact she married an Italian tenor named Gabriel Piozzi.   Muses, eh? Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.

Gala and Salvador Dali we know were sufficiently food-obsessed that there were two books: Les Diners de Galaand The Wines of Dali. (Gali?), though they never looked as though they did much actually eating. And yes, that is Gina Lollobrigida

I had some idea about all the above people but I didn’t know the full story of Lee Miller.  I knew her as a model (OK, muse) for Man Ray, then a collaborator, then as a photographer in her own right, photographing fashion, portraits, and then by force of circumstances becoming a war photographer, largely for Vogue. I knew that she’d married Roland Penrose but I didn’t know that after the war she suffered terribly from depression and alcoholism, (and probably boredom) and had developed a new, consuming interest in cooking, as a partial consolation.

There’s even a recent book. Lee Miller: A Life of Food, Friends and Recipes. Recipes include champagne and camembert soup, marshmallow-cola ice cream, carrots in whiskey, and chicken in edible gold and pink cauliflower breasts. I guess you could describe this as influenced by Surrealism.

Francine Prose finds this ‘dismaying’ and quotes from Roland Penrose’s Scrapbook to reinforce her point.  ‘Devoted to parlour games, she found a fascinating pastime in kitchen games, competitions which she often pursued with success, winning countless gadgets for the kitchen and at one time a triumphant tour of Norway … as a reward for a most startling and succulent open sandwich.’

Yes, this does sound like a bit of a comedown after Miller’s previous activities, but then, if you’ve washed yourself in Hitler’s bathtub, and photographed at Dachau and Buchenwald, well, what wouldn’t be?

         

The internet being the fine thing it is, I was able to find a description of her tour-winning entry, in an article in Gastronomica magazine by Becky E. Conekin.  It’s for something called a Penrose; mushrooms stuffed with pink foie gras mousse, seasoned with paprika and Madeira, and made to resemble roses.  I gotta say that doesn’t sound like quite enough to merit a triumphant tour, still according to the article, Miller won first, second, and third prizes, which I suppose does deserve some serious recognition.

DINING WITH THE DALIS

You’ll find many sources telling you that Salvador Dali’s soft clocks – the kind you see in “The Persistence of Memory” - were inspired by seeing a camembert cheese melting in the sun.  This kind of thing:

I didn’t Know this till very recently, and to my eyes, those clocks look to be inspired more by the thin floppiness of brie than of camembert, although admittedly it's hard to  who am I to argue with art experts?  Salvador Dali’s cookbook titled Les Diners de Gala (first published in 1975, reprinted in 2016 by Taschen) gives no clue, and makes no mention whatsoever of camembert or brie, although Roquefort is mentioned as the basis of a sauce to go with turkey.

Digging around I did find this picture by Irving Penn made in 1992, an homage to Dali no doubt, he did a lot of food photography for Vogue and he photographed Dali too.  And this surely is a camembert, unless of course it’s a baby brie:

Les Diners de Gala is an odd confection, for one thing it’s not absolutely clear who wrote it.  Dali one assumes, though it doesn’t actually say that anywhere in the book.  It says he “conceived and materialized” it, and presumably Gala had a hand in it as well.  It’s translated by Captain J. Peter Moore who was one of Dali’s “aides,” a man so trustworthy than in 2004 he and his wife Catherine Perrot, were convicted of “tampering” with Dali's 1969 painting "The Double Image of Gala." The painting was stolen in 1974 and found in the Perrot-Moore Art Center in 1999.  The authorities then searched Moore’s home and workshops and found 10,000 allegedly fake Dali lithographs.

Other names appear on the book.  There’s an introduction by P. Roumeguere.  The Draeger Freres “assured the layout” with the collaboration of Max Gerard “under the direction” of Rene Toutain.  

The book is illustrated partly with Dali’s paintings and partly with photographs, some of the photos are credited to R. Guillemot, a few to other photographers – and some are not credited at all.

As for the recipes, some of the dishes are really not very appetizing – frog cream, and veal cutlet stuffed with snails.  Some sound perfectly good but way more trouble than they’re worth: blood sausage with chestnut soufflé, Peacock a l’Imperial (actually a quail dish, though foie gras and truffles are involved).  Some just seem a bit dull.  Do I really need Dali, or Gala, to tell me how to make a celery gratin?

Still it’s a fine and intriguing art volume.  Obviously it was never intended to be a practical recipe book to be used in the kitchen, and for that very reason I had to try making one of the recipes. I went for quail eggs with caviar, a dish that requires assembly rather than cooking, and in fact it’s a recipe “given by Maxim’s.”  Of course I didn’t use real caviar, and I hardboiled my eggs whereas the recipe called for them to be soft poached.  Runny quail egg yolks and black fish eggs struck me as a bit revolting, but arguably that was the point.  The end result tasted fine and it more or less looked the part, though I can’t say it was very Dali-esque,

By all accounts (especially John Richardson’s) Gala was a bit of pill, but Dali obviously got something he needed from her, and together they did seem, at least once, to bond over the pleasures of a good lobster.