|
Futurist Dinner
An Excursion into the Kitchen of Tomorrow
Thursday, September 13, 1984, 7:30 p.m.
Make your reservations at the restaurant "Allegro", Linz, tel. 0732/66 98 00.
MENU
Vitamin mosaic in vinaigrette sauce with chives
Genuine bottled bone concentrate, year 1984
Halibut with muscles on steamed seaweed
Goldleaf sorbet
Twisted loin of venison with elderberries and baked mushroom pasties
Trilogy of rose-scented fruit
WINES
Sparkling Riesling in gay colours
1983, Grüner Veltliner Ritter von Zaucha—Strass
Bottled for Allegro exclusively by Kirchmayr winery, Weistrach
1981, Riesling Kabinett—Schloß Mauthern, Sass vineyards, Nicolaihof—Mauthern
1973, Imperial Grand Reserve, Compania Vinicola Rioja, private cellar
1977, Riesling Spätlese—Ried Achleiten, from the wine-growers association of the Wachau, Dürnstein
Coffee Whereas the development of high technology in industrial and everyday life will have reached its climax at the beginning of the new millennium, elementary needs will emerge in the sphere of interpersonal human relations. It is most of all the direct and immediate pleasures of life that will make life after 2019 an enjoyable experience for the world's inhabitants.
In the year 2000, the consumer will chose his meals during the day from the ready-made mass products of the industrial age; in his leisure-time, however, a meal becomes a work of art. The higher the standards of technology, the higher the culinary demands of future man. The final stage of high-technology development will be accompanied by an increased quest for personal challenge and personal experience.
The desire for direct, non-manipulated experience will also find its expression in table habits. Computer and technology have not dehumanized man, they have liberated him for community.
A bill of fare from the court of King Frederic the Great of Prussia from the year 1786 and a futurist menu do not exclude each other, a kind of ageless continuity can be seen. This fact will only surprise someone who has never given a thought to futuristic cooking.
La cuisine inspires the experience of culinary delights with that spirit of which Voltaire (1694–1778) said, "A chef, and I mean a good chef, is a divine being…" This holds true for the future, too, and even man of future ages with his increasing tendency towards rationalism cannot shake this truth.
Eating and drinking will retain its importance in the kitchen of the future. The restaurant computer stops at the experience of culinary delights most respectfully, as soon as it has calculated the optimal requirements for culinary feasts. In former days, attending a lecture, a theater performance, a concert had been primary events preceding a festive dinner, the futurist cuisine merges eating and drinking with the cultural experience to create a total work of art, for: "man is a gourmand in the same way as he is an artist, a scholar or a poet" (Guy de Maupassant, 1850–1893). This even more so as a main reaction to the high technology of the future will be "the desire to be together" (John Naisbitt).
Whether considerations of futurist cooking are derived from the rather extravagant approach of a Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, from the frugal Greeks of antiquity or the recycling theories of science fiction authors—even after 2019 it will be the chef who makes palatial delights.
With these considerations in mind, Günther Hager and his team have entered a cooking competition with future. Hager is convinced that the cooking of the future will be split into two trends: "The kitchen of the masses where everything is ready-made and pre-cooked; and the cuisine of the gourmet on the other hand, where everything is prepared specially from fresh ingredients."
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: Futurist Cooking:
"In general it has become increasingly difficult to convince those restaurant owners of a new kind of nutrition, who do not want to give up the old cooking for lack of understanding or courage. Their timidity shows clearly in the way they help their customers to put on their coast.
If gastronomers had contributed to the proclamation of the necessity of a more modern nutrition, they could have done away with a lot of doubt and ridicule and restaurants would have lost the grey look of the same, day after day. The usual customer entering and asking for a plate of spaghetti ought to be addressed by the waiter in the following way: 'From this day on we no longer serve pasta asciutta. We have made this decision because pasta asciutta consists of long, archeological worms that, like their living relatives in the underground passages of history, make the stomach heavy, sick and useless. They are white worms which you must not introduce into your body, if you do not want it to become locked up, dark, immobile like a museum. ' The Italian of our fast age must be open to such reasoning. The waiter will then serve him the following rejuvenating dish: boiled rice, fried in butter and then formed into small balls, wrapped in lettuce leaves, sprinkled with grappa and served on a bed of mashed tomatoes and cooked potatoes."
Recipe of the futurist air-painter FILLIA
"The first cook within me—for I can only tell you of cooks squatting within me and wanting to get out—was called Aua and had three breasts. This was in the stone age. Men at that time did not have much to say, for it was Aua who had stolen the fire for us, three pieces of glowing charcoal which she had swiped from the heavenly wolf and had hidden somewhere, under her tongue probably. Then she had invented the spit and had taught us to distinguish between the uncooked and the well-done. The rule of Aua was mild: the women of the stone age used to nurse their infants first and then they would offer their breasts to their stone age husbands so that they would no longer kick about and sweat fixed ideas but would become drowsy and quiet: quite useful for a number of things.
Thus we all had our feed. Never again, in our later future, did we feed like that."
Günter Grass, THE BUTT
|
