As soon as I opened The Kitchen Studio: Culinary Creations by Artists, I realized it was no ordinary cookbook. The recipes – splashed across multicoloured pages – are stories and manifestos, poems and doodles, performances and photo essays. Some have been passed down through the generations, while others are strange inventions.
The process of roasting a whole lamb is chronicled over multiple days. A series of brilliant green pages details how to flavour absinthe with wormwood and hyssop. On one page, wooden, frame-like sculptures are strung with orange triangles of dried sea cucumber ovaries, a Japanese delicacy called kuchiko. On another, there are instructions for a Jell-O salad filled with plastic toy soldiers. Massimo Bottura – the world-famous Italian chef – sums up his feelings in the forward: “At first everything about this book is alarming.”
Fallen Fruit, “How to Make Jam (and Share With Others),” pages 92-93 in “The Kitchen Studio: Culinary Creations by Artists,” Phaidon, 2021 (courtesy Phaidon)
More than 70 artists and collectives from around the world were asked to contribute a meaningful or favourite recipe by the team at Phaidon. Some, like Fallen Fruit, the Los Angeles-based duo of David Burns and Austin Young, turn the recipes themselves into art. Their instructions for How to Make Jam (and Share With Others) incorporate collaged images of fruit cut from magazines, creating a colourful assemblage spread across sunny-yellow pages. Others, like Berlin-based German artist Jeppe Hein, make art with their food. I attempted to recreate his multicoloured meringue smiley faces, but my piped loops bled together and shattered into dust when I tried to get them out of the pan.
Jeppe Hein, “Today I Feel Like … Meringues!” pages 122-123 in “The Kitchen Studio: Culinary Creations by Artists,” Phaidon, 2021 (courtesy Phaidon)
El Anatsui, the Ghanaian sculptor famous for works made from bottlecaps and other found objects, contributes a recipe for Nigerian oha soup with fufu – a round dough, in this case made from boiled acha or fonio, a grain similar to millet. Toronto and Berlin-based artist AA Bronson shares his mother’s fruit cake recipe, as well as her story of coming to Canada as a British war bride after the Second World War. Berlin-based artist Olafur Eliasson’s studio kitchen team offers instructions for Food Pigments on Studio Sourdough – small piles of red, yellow, green and purple dust from dehydrated vegetables sprinkled on a bagel.
It was the dehydrated food pigments that really pushed my partner, a professional chef, over the edge. “This is not a cookbook!” he said, flipping through a section that was particularly illegible. Throughout, there are questionable font choices, paired with hard-to-read colour combinations.
Studio Olafur Eliasson, “Food Pigments on Studio Sourdough,” pages 82-83 in “The Kitchen Studio: Culinary Creations by Artists,” Phaidon, 2021 (courtesy Phaidon)
Compelled to prove my live-in-chef wrong, I tried making Indian artist Subodh Gupta’s recipe for chila, or chickpea pancakes. The chickpeas are cooked and, together with rice, blended into a paste, then combined with a mix of onions, tomatoes and cilantro, and fried in a pan. Hot from the stove, they tasted delicious.
My favourite recipe from the book is impossible to make – a story by London-based Athanasios Argianas about diving for grooved sea squirts, eaten fresh, off the Greek coast. His description of swimming along the jagged shoreline plunges me into the best part of every cookbook – the feeling of possibility I get when I first read a recipe.
After combing through it all, the recipes from Gupta and Argianas shine. Others – captured with phone cameras in dim lighting – do not beg to be recreated.
Kathrin Böhm, “idt. cola,” pages 44-45 in “The Kitchen Studio: Culinary Creations by Artists,” Phaidon, 2021 (courtesy Phaidon)
At its best, The Kitchen Studio captures the artistic impulse to experiment – with food as the medium. Some recipes, like New York-based Suejin Chung’s quest to translate a Kandinsky painting into a taste, remind me of concoctions by surrealists Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, who mixed culinary magic together in Mexico City in the mid-1900s.
At the end of his forward, Bottura asks if The Kitchen Studio is an art book or a cookbook. He falls somewhere in the middle – as do I. Read it, decide for yourself – and if, like me, you hanker to make absinthe, take care when steeping herbs in 50-per-cent alcohol. ■
The Kitchen Studio: Culinary Creations by Artists. Phaidon, 2021.
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