While not all painters make great cooks, they certainly share a refined sense of taste. That’s what writers Madeleine Conway and Nancy Kirk learned when compiling The Museum of Modern Art Artists’ Cookbook: 155 Recipes: Conversations with Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors. The cookbook, published in 1977, shares the favorite meals of renowned 20th-century artists like Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, and Roy Lichtenstein.
It should come as no surprise that many of these creative individuals came up with their own recipes, ranging from the ordinary to the highly conceptual. Warhol allegedly limited his diet to the cans of Campbell’s tomato soup he put on canvas, while Dalí enjoyed preparing feasts from scratch.
“Dalí works every day in the year,” Conway and Kirk wrote of the Spanish Surrealist. “He does not have time to entertain as much as he would like, but when he does, he has dinners for 20 to 25 friends. His table is always exquisitely presented and always white—white porcelain, white damask, and white flowers in crystal vases.”
Salvador Dalí having dinner with Luis Miguel Dominguin in Paris, 1959. Photo: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images.
At the top of Dalí’s menu was a dish he christened “Red Salad.” The recipe, which serves four for lunch or eight for a first course at supper, includes eight ounces of diced red beets, eight ounces of smoked tongue, 12 ounces of grated red cabbage, one shallot, heavy cream, lemon juice, tomato paste, and sugar, with salt and cayenne pepper added to taste. Dalí specified the salad had to be refrigerated for two hours and served on a bed of lettuce, preferably with hot French bread and a “light red wine.”
If your stomach doesn’t agree with Dalí’s cookery, you may want to try Bourgeois’s cucumber salad. This simpler, healthier, and more accessible recipe consists of six peeled, salted cucumbers served with a vinegrette made from olive oil, tarragon, pepper, chives, and scallions.
Bourgeois had a complicated relationship with cooking and eating, one she linked to her traditional upbringing. “I was told as a child in France that cooking is the way to a man’s heart,” she told Conway and Kirk. “Today I know that the notion is absurd, but I believed it for a very long time. My mother was in delicate health and could not cope with long hours of work in the kitchen. To please her, I took on the responsibility of seeing to it that my father had dinner… During my student years I did not cook at all. The memory of those many wasted hours lingered. I subsisted on yogurt, honey, and pumpernickel bread. I still eat the same foods today.”
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