Let’s go back to the original Brain Pickings link from a month ago. Maria Popova had said, “And for a chuckle, consider the cancer — how amusing to reckon that Dalí, despite his culinary credentials, either didn’t know or chose to artistically disregard the difference between a crab and a lobster.”
If you follow the link you’ll discover that Dalí wrote and illustrated a cookbook of 136 recipes.
Looking for maybe a recipe or two, I found the Bookery Cook’s blog post with quite a few of his illustrations. He didn’t actually write it, or rather, they weren’t his recipes. Sort of a compilation of dishes he liked, similar to his illustrated selection of essays from Michel de Montaigne.
I like the Escher-esque chef-killing-a-frog sequence along the dustjacket bottom, but that’s off-topic. Here’s something about the cookbook:
In 1973 Les Diners de Gala (Gala’s Diner) was published as a collaboration between Dali and a “secret” chef in collaboration with some of the top French restaurants of the time.
In true Dali fashion, Les Diners de Gala moves between ‘sado-masochistic pleasure’, ‘acute sybaritism’, religious ecstasy, and anesthetic asceticism.
There is only one recipe on the post. I’ll hazard a guess to say it is from 10. Les “je mange GALA”.
The Casanova Cocktail.
“This is quite appropriate when circumstances such as exhaustion, overwork or simple excess sobriety are calling for a pick-me-up. Here is a well-tested recipe to fit the bill. Let us stress the advantage of this particular pep-up concoction is that one doesn’t have to make a sour face that usually accompanies the absorption of a remedy”
The juice of 1 orange
1 tablespoon bitters
1 teaspoon powdered ginger
4 tablespoons of brandy
2 tablespoons of old brandy (vieille cure)
1 pinch of cayenne pepper
At the bottom of a glass, combined the pepper and ginger.
Pour the bitters on top, then brandy and vielle cure.
Refrigerate, or even put in the freezer.
Thirty minutes later, remove from the freezer and stir in the juice of the orange into the glass.. Drink… and wait for the effect. It is rather speedy.
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NOTE: As to Maria Popova’s artistically disregarded observation, I think Dalí simply preferred lobster to crab. Thanks again to Lorna Wood for the original link