Photo c. 1961 or earlier. The design in the early 60s edition of French publisher Flammarion’s famous L’Art cuilinaire français is unusual. Aside from the deeply saturated colors of the kodachrome, the presentation is very spare, to the point of oddity, with haute cuisine dishes often being shown on comparatively homely plates, while the food design is minimalist, even industrial at times, making the food look more like late modernist sculpture made of resin than something actually edible. Nevertheless, I find the pictures compelling. Stylized to the point of abstraction even when it’s a question of a humble side dish, they say something about the artifice and formalism of French cooking and remind you why the French and Japanese understand one another so well, even if the French might not immediately recognize their own sensibility in the silicone fakes displayed in the windows of sushi restaurants. It’s not how strikingly the glistening replicas resemble the food– it’s how well the food resembles the replicas… Everything is always already in aspic.
The dessert translated in my copy as “Chocolate Head” is actually called in France by the much less politically-correct name tête de nègre, and the concept of serving such a head on a platter reveals a disturbing comfort with certain aspects of the country’s colonial past one would rather not talk about in polite dinner company.
Besides, the old chap doesn’t look very happy, n’est-ce pas?
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[...] I might also use the batter recipe to attempt that curious, historical and highly embarrasing French desert, Tête de Negre. [...]