Community Think Tank

In the 1930s Italian Futurists, who aspired to revolutionise the traditional way of living through speed and technology, made plans to innovate the Italian cuisine. It was the first modern attempt to see cooking as a form of art and to involve it into artistic practice.

Futurist cooking declared the use of chemistry as one of the main sources for creating new flavours and substances. The kitchen should be furnished with the newest technical equipment. Furthermore, the Futurists were strictly against pasta, as it was conceived as making the body inactive and obese. They promoted its best substitution — rice — a more virile ingredient, which was produced in Italy[1]. Tastes and habits of the Italian eating culture had to be changed, new foods invented, and the old habits of the palate bursted. Moreover, the aesthetic side of cooking should be taken into account — it was going to be studied artistically.[2]

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Not only pasta was abolished from the plates, also cutlery from the tables, as well as political and philosophical discussions. The Futurists proclaimed their new way of banquets a Gesamtkunstwerk, involving all the five senses.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of the Futurist movement, and Luigi Colombo aka Fillìa published the Futurist Cookbook in 1930. It was a suggestion on how to change the traditional cuisine and comprised manifests, recipes and also instructions for a variety of banquets. The average Italian housewife was given instructions on how to change the traditional Italian ways of cooking completely, not spending more money on food as she was used to do. 

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The announcement of the Futurist kitchen happened during a banquet in November 1930 at the Pennadoca restaurant in Milan. By the time, Pennadoca was the meeting point for the Milan based journalists, futurists and intellectuals. The design itself was made by five of the leading futurist artists. Invited to the dinner was the elite of Lombardy’s capital, comprising politicians, artists, literati, entrepreneurs and industrialists[3]. Even though these guests had little in common and a lot to argue about, gastronomy was miraculously able to unite them around a table. Bulgheroni, the chef of the restaurant, served innovative dishes, comprising plates called fat goose frozen by the moon, roses and sun broth, Mediterranean’s favourite and rain of candy floss. Before dessert, F. T. Marinetti held a speech announcing the futurist kitchen, which was live broadcasted on the radio. Futurist kitchen echoed in the press worldwide and futurist banquets were held around Italy and France[4]. In March 1931 Santopalato (holy palate), the first futurist restaurant, opened its doors in Torino. Its interior design was predominantly in Italian aluminium to give the place a metallic, shining, elastic, light and serene atmosphere[5]. Fillìa and Marinetti, who were the main actors behind the restaurant, wanted to create an arts centre, by not only serving food, but also holding poetry evenings, art exhibitions or fashion shows — instead of the traditionally known post-prandial dancing and drinks. The dishes had the same prices as in conventional restaurants. For the days after the opening, more trains from all over Italy to Torino were planned to be scheduled, as Marinetti expected every Italian to want to come to eat at Santopalato.

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On the opening evening, poets, artists, journalists etc arrived to experience the first performative dinner, involving all the five senses. Every dish was served with a perfume especially attuned to it and spread out by electric fans. Poetry or music accompanied the courses to make special flavours stand out. 

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The first dish served was the intuitive antipasto — its form and colour meant to stimulate the diners appetite. The plate comprised the peel of half an orange inside which a breadstick with ham, an artichoke, an olive and a chilli pepper were placed. In the place of the olive pit was a rolled up paper with a maxim or eulogy by one of the guests.

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The second course was Fillìas aerofood: A dish involving sound, touch and scent. The guests ate one fennel, one olive and one candied fruit with the right hand and meanwhile touched rectangular devices of red silk, black velvet and sandpaper with their left. Out of the kitchen came the sound of airplanes and the waiters sprayed perfume of carnation on the guests necks. Two other courses followed, being the sunshine soup (a consommé with sun coloured ingredients) and the total rice (a beer, wine and fondue seasoned risotto), before the famous carneplastico (sculpted meal) was served. It consisted of a rissole of roasted veal stuffed with eleven different vegetables and placed on chicken meat and sausages. This sculpture was then topped with honey. After that, the ultra virile and the edible landscape were served, before the eighth, ninth and tenth course arrived all together, being Italian sea, mediterranean salad and chickenfat. Finally, the dessert — exited pig — arrived. An ordinary cooked salami in a cup filled with coffee and eau de Cologne. Throughout the dinner white and red wine was drunk. Even if it belonged to a very ancient tradition, it was celebrated by the Futurists as a progressive drink, renewing itself annually and therefore and modernising itself in many ways, fueling the man and being its engine. 

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In the Futurist Cookbook Marinetti proposed instructions for several different kinds of meals, ranging from a heroic winter dinner with marinated mullet, to a tourist dinner for the futurist exhibition in Paris to an official banquet.[6]

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One dinner which was realised stands out from the others, as nothing was actually eaten. The Extremist Banquet happened in a Villa on the Italian countryside. Eleven people (five men, five women and one "neuter") shared a table for two days without eating anything. Different food sculptures were served, all having the scents of various meals, which were spread around the room with electric fans. The participants got their satiety from "chewing" emptiness, or the perfumes.[7]

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Marinetti gives in the Futurist cookbook also instructions for a Bachelors Dinner, starting with the sentence "Futurist cooking sets out to avoid the usual pitfalls of eating alone, the Anti Human solitude that fatally drains a part of the stomach’s vital forces."[8] Marinetti stated that the consuming of food on his own ruins the dish and vitiates the taste. For him, the company of another person was essential to stimulate the palate. He suggested to decorate the dining room with aeropaintings and -sculptures and to serve food portraits served on plates with bells to have some acoustic company. Two of the suggested food portraits were the blonde, a sculpted roast veal, garlic eyes, boiled cabbage and small green lettuce, and the dark man friend, with cheeks of pastry, a moustache and hair of chocolate, eyes of milk and honey with pupils of liquorice, a split of pomegranate for the mouth and a necktie made out of tripe in broth. 

Theses examples for banquets show that the Futurists aim was to experiment not only with taste, but with also with touch, vision, hearing and scent during dinners. They wanted to make them inclusive. The kitchen should be cheap, approachable by everyone, and housewives should be able to cook the recipes, which ingredients were affordable. Nevertheless, the banquets were only attended by the Italian elite of the time. With the death of Marinetti in 1944 and the end of WWII the end of the Futurist movement was marked.

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[1] "Tagliatelle is the passéists last stand; the last stand of egg pasta. Futurist food is the realisation of the general desire to renew our eating habits and of the fight against weight, big bellies, obesity. We need to maintain the vitality we Italians had in our youth in Antiquity, and in our realty manhood in the Middle Ages, even if the years mask us with their storms and fogs. The militarisation of a young culture is where we find our strengths. Therefore we do not want Italian cooking to remain a museum. We affirm that Italian genius can invent another 3000 dishes, equally good, but more in keeping with the changed sensibility and changed needs of the contemporary generation." [Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook, trans. Suzanne Brill (London: Bedford Arts, 1989), 98.]

After this statement a polemic arose, women signed a petition in favour of the pastasciutta in Aquila, P.I.P.A (International Pasta Propaganda Association) was founded, a march in favour of pasta was organised in Naples and as well as a conference by the most important chefs in Torino.

[2] Marinetti dreamed of the diffusion of nourishing waves via the radio.

[3] Some of the attending guests were Umberto and Delia Notari, Favia, Sansanelli, the prefect of Milan, S.E. Fornaciari, ms Colombo (wife of Fillía) — director of La Scala, Luigi Chiarelli, Fortunato Depero, S.E. Giordano, Pick Mangiagalli, Enrico Prampolini, Aroldo Seffenini, Leonida Répaci and Carlo Ravasio.

[4] Franco de Agazio, “Il Club dei Ghiottini inaugurato a Milano,“ in Cucina Futurista - Manifesti teorici, menu e documenti, ed. Guido Andrea Pautasso, (Milano : Abscondita, 2015), 52-54. (my own translation)

[5] Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook, trans. Suzanne Brill (London: Bedford Arts, 1989), 67-77.

[6] The official futurist dinner was an instruction for preventing the banquet of the defects of other official dinners: embarrassed silence, conventional reserve, the funereal and banal tone of the dishes. Marinetti proposed a toastmaster who would tell obscene jokes and the serving of the drinks polibibite and traidue. The organiser of the dinner should enter in delay and excuses himself for thirty minutes, saying that the ice sculptor collapsed and that the fruits from the equator did not make it. Furthermore, dishes like cannibals sign up at Geneva, the league of nations or the solid treaty should be served. During the meal a drunk person enters the room and requests more wine. The person only gets it under the condition that he talks about solutions to the problem of disarmament, the revision of treaties and the financial crisis for two hours. Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook, 111.

[7] Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook, 67-117.

[8] Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook, 115.