Salvador Dali Inspired Dinner with Chef Joseph Cizynski

In honor of ArtWeek Massachusetts and the Art of Food, we will have an evening of adventurous eating using Salvador Dali’s’ recipes from his Les Dinners de Gala. Most of the recipes were by chefs of cuisine classique like Maxim’s Lasserre, La Tour de Argent and Le Train Bleu. We will dine on crayfish, sea bass, quail, roast side of beef and assorted fruit desserts. We’ll put a pitcher of his “Casanova Cocktail” on the tables to get the “Gala” going!! “When I was six years old,” Salvador Dalí (May 11, 1904–January 23, 1989) once professed, “I wanted to be a cook.” But it wasn’t until his late sixties that he channeled his childhood fantasy into Les Diners de Gala — a lavishly illustrated cookbook, originally published in 1973 and featuring Dalí’s intensely erotic etchings and paintings. The twelve chapters each cover a specific class of dishes — from exotic courses to fish and shellfish to vegetables — rendered with a surrealist twist both gastronomically and aesthetically, but nowhere more so than in the tenth chapter, dedicated to aphrodisiacs. Prefacing the recipes is Dalí’s unambiguous cautionary disclaimer, penned at the dawn of the first major dieting era of popular culture: “We would like to state clearly that, beginning with the very first recipes, Les Diners de Gala, with its precepts and its illustrations, is uniquely devoted to the pleasures of taste. Don’t look for dietetic formulas here. We intend to ignore those charts and tables in which chemistry takes the place of gastronomy. If you are a disciple of one of those calorie-counters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, close this book at once; it is too lively, too aggressive, and far too impertinent for you.”