philosophicalcuisine
Philosophical Fantasy Food
Invited to serve up fantasy at table, we wanted to avoid the trap of "fancy" cooking of some of the chefs featured in and awarded prizes by many food guides but often disbarred from attending to the classic sauces with their lengthy preparations, cooks who have lost the habit of carving up and tucking in, electing to serve wizened victuals with a side-dish of indigestible scribbles.
Because we are for great historic cooking - in our case the Emilian tradition and, in particular, that of Modena - with its feast of pasta and meat dishes, we have chosen to use "fancy" in the sense of the ability to reinterpret and construct reality, investing it with allusiveness and situating it in a symbolic context.
Hence the menus: pasta dishes - tortelli and lasagne, gramigna and tagliatelle - are the fantastic first courses, veritable universals in our local culture. And to follow...feasts of meat courses: bollito misto (mixed boiled meats) is a fantasia on the whole, whose parts - cow or calf, pig or chicken - can be restored to bodily wholeness by human fancy. Then an encyclopaedia of images as the pig - the "encyclopaedic animal" par excellence since nothing is discarded, exactly as with the encyclopaedia of knowledge - is presented in various guises.
We also wanted to represent one or two mythical events: imagining an earthly paradise meant ensuring a vegetarian menu, since before the Fall Adam and Eve ate no living creatures, just things growing wild. More recent events that haunt the revolutionary imagination are alluded to in the bomba di riso (rice bomb) and the cotechino in galera (steamed sausage detained in custody).
In flights of fancy we have presented yard-birds that imagine they can fly and which intensify the flavour of their meat by trying to take off. In alchemical fancies we have turned base metals into gold as happens when the fritto misto becomes a golden brown colour and simple elements are transmuted into savoury comestibles.
There is also a chance to eat with words, ingredients not in your plate but evoked by the force of fancy, as happens when we eat pasta bows or butterflies (farfalle) with bolognaise sauce and birds (uccelletti) that have flown. To end the experience with Dionysus, you can retrace the footsteps of the maenads on their journey of divine inebriation: the wine-bars will see to that one.
In this way, as fancy, fantasy and imagination takes over theatres, auditoriums and piazzas, involving old and young alike, it will also preside at restaurant tables, happy harbinger of taste, divine protector of convivial pleasures.
Tullio Gregory
