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When a celebrity reaches his twilight years, he’ll often write a memoir. Salvador Dalí, never the conformist, wrote a cookbook.
Les Diners de Gala came out in 1973. It’s no memoir, but it’s semi-autobiographical: Dalí and his wife, Gala, were known to throw lavish dinner parties. Guests wore costumes, live monkeys decorated the room, and food arrived at the table served in satin slippers.
Dishes from those parties show up in *Les Diners de Gala. *The cookbook features 136 recipes, including such eccentric items as “Thousand year old eggs,” and “Conger of the rising sun.” Until recently, these exotic-sounding recipes really were rare delicacies: the original Les Diners de Gala published in a limited run; surviving copies are rare and expensive. That changes this month with Taschen’s reprint ($60) of Dalí’s book.
The reissue is a faithful clone of the original. Dalí’s recipes---which are all, somewhat remarkably, actual recipes you can follow---come with his original, colorful, at times erotic illustrations. The paintings, drawings, and collages that fill the book are less instructive than the actual recipes, but they’re the stars of Les Diners de Gala. Paintings of blood-red meat cuts, photographs of implausibly tall shrimp towers, a womanly-shaped fish festooned with even more shrimp---this is food porn at its most gluttonous.
