Food Talk & Tasting on Neo-plasticism and Nouvelle Cuisine

Food, as a cultural product, is worthy of scholarly inquiry and analysis. There is no singular academic discipline fully equipped to dissect cuisine; therefore, multidisciplinary modes of thinking are required. This event will showcase an experimental and interdisciplinary approach to the history of art, gastronomy, and modernist studies. We'll see how the application of art-historical methodologies to forms of cultural expression typically considered outside the realm of visual culture is a fruitful and worthwhile endeavor. By analyzing artist manifestos in tandem with recipes and chefs’ statements, and conducting visual analysis of paintings alongside gustatory analysis of composed dishes, new forms of innovative scholarship can be generated.

In this participatory talk and tasting, through an examination of art-theoretical writings, visual analysis of Piet Mondrian’s paintings, the critical musings of twentieth-century chefs and critics, and stylistic analysis of archival Nouvelle Cuisine recipes, we'll see how some of the chief modernist values, beliefs, and ideals espoused by Mondrian and found in his paintings later came to be distilled and translated in the composed dishes of Nouvelle Cuisine chefs of the 1970s, such as Jean and Pierre Troisgros. Part of this investigation involves the re-staging of a quintessential Nouvelle Cuisine dish (l’escalope de saumon à l’oseille) in order to engage in heuristic modes of gustatory analysis to draw multi-sensory conclusions about the similarities and differences between De Stijl painting and Nouvelle Cuisine cooking.

Host or Publisher Anthony Huffman