Filippo Tommaso Marinetti - The Futurist Cookbook (Penguin Modern Classics)

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was born in 1876 to Italian parents and grew up in Alexandria, Egypt, where he was nearly expelled from his Jesuit school for championing scandalous literature. He then studied in Paris and obtained a law degree in Italy before turning to literature. In 1909 he wrote the infamous Futurist Manifesto, which championed violence, speed and war, and proclaimed the unity of art and life. Marinettis life was fraught with controversy: he fought a duel with a hostile critic, was subject to an obscenity trial, and was a staunch supporter of Italian Fascism. Alongside his literary activities, he was a war correspondent during the Italo-Turkish War and served on the Eastern Front in World War II, despite being in his sixties. He died in 1944.

Lesley Chamberlain is a novelist and historian of ideas. Her thirteen books include Nietzsche in Turin, The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud and The Food and Cooking of Russia.

Suzanne Brill is an art historian and writer. She has translated several books for Italian art historians including Caro Pedrettis Leonardo: Architect, which was nominated for the John Florio prize.

Contrary to criticisms already launched and those foreseeable, the Futurist culinary revolution described in this book has the lofty, noble and universally expedient aim of changing radically the eating habits of our race, strengthening it, dynamizing it and spiritualizing it with brand-new food combinations in which experiment, intelligence and imagination will economically take the place of quantity, banality, repetition and expense.

This Futurist cooking of ours, tuned to high speeds like the motor of a hydroplane, will seem to some trembling traditionalists both mad and dangerous: but its ultimate aim is to create a harmony between mans palate and his life today and tomorrow.

Apart from celebrated and legendary exceptions, until now men have fed themselves like ants, rats, cats or oxen. Now with the Futurists the first human way of eating is born. We mean the art of self-nourishment. Like all the arts, it eschews plagiarism and demands creative originality.

It is not by chance this work is published during a world economic crisis, which has clearly inspired a dangerous depressing panic, though its future direction remains unclear. We propose as an antidote to this panic a Futurist way of cooking, that is: optimism at the table.

On 11 May 1930 the poet Marinetti left for Lake Trasimeno by car in response to this strange, mysterious and unnerving telegram:

Dearest friend since She departed forever have been wracked with tormenting anguish Stop immense sadness prevents my survival Stop beg you come immediately before arrival of the one who resembles her too much but not enough GIULIO.

Determined to save his friend, Marinetti had by telephone entreated the help of Prampolini and Filla, whose great genius as Aeropainters seemed to him made for such an undoubtedly grave situation.

With the precision of a surgeon the car driver sought and found the villa, among the putrid banks and heaving reed beds of the lake. In reality, hidden at the end of the park, between umbrella pines offering themselves up to Paradise and cypress trees diabolically infused with the ink of the Inferno, stood a veritable Royal Palace, not just a villa. On the doorstep, at the car door, the emaciated face and far-too-white hand of Giulio Onesti. This pseudonym, which masked his real name, and his combative and creative participation in the Futurist evenings of twenty years ago, his life of science and wealth accumulated at the Cape of Good Hope, and his sudden flight from inhabited places, filled the liberated conversation which preceded dinner in the polychrome quisibeve of the villa.

At the table, in a room hung with the red velvet of remorse and absorbing through its wide windows the light of a newborn half-moon rising but already immersed in death in the waters of the lake, Giulio murmured:

I sense your palates are bored with antiquated ways and I feel your belief that to eat like this is to prepare for suicide. Youre my old friends and Im going to speak plainly: for the past three days the idea of suicide has filled this whole house and the park too. But so far I have not yet had the strength to cross the threshold. What do you advise?

A long silence.

Would you like to know why? Ill tell you. She you know her, Marinetti! She met her death three days ago in New York. Im sure shes calling me. But by a strange coincidence a new and significant fact has intervened. Yesterday I received this message. Its from the other one, who resembles her too much but not enough. Another time Ill tell you her name and who she is. She announces her imminent arrival

A long silence. Then Giulio was overcome with irrepressible, convulsive shivering.

I will not, I must not betray death. Ill kill myself tonight.

Unless? cried Prampolini.

Unless? repeated Filla.

Unless, concluded Marinetti, unless you take us instantly to your splendid, well-stocked kitchens.

With the cooks terrified, having been dictatorially deprived of their authority, and the fires lit, Enrico Prampolini cried: Our ingenious hands need a hundred sacks of the following indispensable ingredients: chestnut flour, wheat flour, ground almonds, rye flour, cornmeal, cocoa powder, red pepper, sugar and eggs. Ten jars of honey, oil and milk. A quintal of dates and bananas.

It will be done this very night, commanded Giulio.

The servants immediately began to fetch great heavy sacks, emptying them into pyramidal heaps of yellow, white, black and red and transforming the kitchens into fantastic laboratories where enormous upturned saucepans on the floor changed into grandiose pedestals predisposed to supporting unpredictable statuary.

To work, my aeropainters and aerosculptors! said Marinetti. My aeropoetry will ventilate your brains like whirring propellers.

Filla improvised a sculptured aerocomplex of chestnut flour, eggs, milk and cocoa in which planes of nocturnal atmosphere were intersected by planes of greyish dawn, with expressive spirals of wind piped in pastry.

Enrico Prampolini, who had jealously surrounded his creative work with screens, cried out as the first light from the lucent horizon filtered through the open window:

At last I hold her in my arms and she is beautiful, fascinating, carnal enough to cure any suicidal desire. Come and admire her!

The screens vanished and there appeared the mysterious soft trembling sculptured complex which was her. Edible. In fact the flesh of the curve signifying the synthesis of every movement of her hips was even appetizing. And she shone with a sugary down peculiar to her which excited the very enamel on the teeth in the attentive mouths of his two companions. Higher up, the spherical sweetnesses of all ideal breasts spoke from a geometric distance to the dome of the stomach, supported by the force-lines of dynamic thighs.