ASPEN ART MUSEUM
ANDY WARHOL: LIFETIMES
42
Warhol in the Kitchen
better than roebuck killed after a chase. Keep this in mind on your next hunting trip’; and ‘Omelet Greta Garbo’ (a bed of genoise filled with pink ice, covered with browned meringue, doused with kirsch and set aflame with a match), which ends with the following directive: ‘Always to be eaten alone in a candlelit room.’ The recipes are a combination of illegible (Frankfurt and Warhol elected to leave Warhola’s mistakes uncorrected) and impossible-to-follow, if not intentionally revolting—for instance, the ‘Salade de Alf Landon’ in which one coats a bombe in clear jelly, before adding slices of spiny lobster tail, capers, green asparagus tips, plover’s eggs and sliced cock’s kidneys mixed with bacon and dandelion dressing. The wonderfully whimsical ink drawings, typical of the fashion and art direction illustrations Warhol was making at the time, exaggerate the absurdity of the cook- book’s contents. The colors—sometimes appropriate, sometimes discordant— bloom aqueously within the lines. They are luminous, acidic, even floral; a prefigu- ration of the palettes he would employ in later portraits. It is hard to square all this camp and culinary exuberance with Warhol’s claims to have eaten a tin of Campbell’s soup every day for 20 years (in part because he marveled that the soup, like Coca-Cola, would taste the same in the mouths of the wealthiest and poorest diners alike.) Yet the disparity perhaps prefigures that of the unusual, sickly boy, born into a working-class family in a crowded pocket of 1920s Pittsburgh, who found himself in- vited to Frankfurt’s multi-story Georgian mansion: the exotic ingredient high society craved. The recipe in Wild Raspberries for ‘Stuffed Morels’ begins: ‘Although mo- rels do not grow in the United States, the editor includes a recipe in case the reader is planning a spring voyage to the conti- nent.’ Morels do grow, however, in the US, their range extending from the middle of Tennessee northward into Michigan, Wisconsin, Vermont and as far west as Oregon. In late spring, when the tempera- ture warms, they can even be found outside Pittsburgh. Fanny Singer is a writer, editor and the co-founder of Permanent Collection. Her first book, Always Home , was published by Knopf in 2020. She lives in Los Angeles. Left Wild Raspberries by Andy Warhol and Suzie Frankfurt , 1959, lithograph, 17 1/8 × 10 3/4 in. Image and Artwork © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
There is a room in the Andy Warhol Museum in his hometown of Pittsburgh, that contains a raft of silkscreened por- traits in Warhol’s iconic, keyed-up color palette of the 1970s. Few of the subjects, however, are immediately recognizable to a contemporary viewer: they are so- cialites and patrons, the well-heeled upper crust of New York, upon whom Warhol’s enterprise depended. On a visit to the museum this summer, I was struck by their anonymity—they are but distant cousins of the Marilyns and Elvises seeded throughout the collections of modern art museums the world over—yet through them I glimpsed more piercingly into the often-transactional nature of some of Warhol’s close relationships. One such friendship—with the promi- nent interior designer Suzie Frankfurt —yielded Warhol’s little-known early pseudo cookbook, Wild Raspberries (1959). Fittingly, Frankfurt first encountered the young artist’s work in 1959 at one of the occasional art exhibits mounted at Serendipity, Manhattan’s famous ice cream parlor-cum-cultural hub. She arranged to meet him and, within the year, the two were collaborating on a parodic, illustrated cookbook intended as a pasquin- ade of the French cookery books and entertaining manuals circulating in high society in the 1950s. Frankfurt dreamt up the recipes, Warhol created the illustrations, his mother, Julia Warhola (with whom he was still living), provided the looping, error-laced calligraphy, and four schoolboys who lived upstairs from Warhol used his Dr. Ph. Martin’s liquid pigments to color the books by hand. Only 34 copies were completed and, having failed to consign or sell many of them to bookstores, Warhol and Frankfurt ended up gifting most of the precious stock to friends. (A facsimile edition was published by Frankfurt’s son in 1997, after he discovered the original pages amongst his mother’s affairs.) The book, the title of which riffs on Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries (1957), is a wacky delight. For anyone literate in cookbooks of the era, in which impossible-to-procure ingredients are frequently casually called for, the tone of its satire is spot-on. The recipes include ‘Piglet a la Trader Vic’s’, for which the ‘chef’ must send a chauffeur to the Plaza Hotel’s restaurant to acquire a suckling pig ‘to go’; ‘Seared Roebuck’, which includes the editor’s bon mot : ‘It is important to note that roebuck shot in ambush is infinitely
Fanny Singer explores caricature and class dynamics in Warhol’s little-known cookbook, ‘Wild Raspberries’
CULINARY ARTS
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