FROM THE INTRODUCTION
This little book accompanies the exhibition in New York (February 2009) devoted to Guercino and his first works and represents a little “anticipation” of a more comprehensive volume which will be published on the occasion of the exhibition about Guercino in Bologna next spring.
In both books, the relationship art-food plays the leading role, from many points of view. In this first book the aspects approached are mainly two.
The first, and the more frequently approached, underlines the link between territorial realities, relating to specific foods, and the painter’s subjects.
Fast flashes will light up the social, political and economic conditions of Cento’s territory in the same period when the paintings were realized, in a way that they become the key to the discovery of the contemporary food introduced by the painting.
We’ll so find out, as an example, that food appearing on the table in the “Dinner in Emmaus” is a Ferrarese transcription of the passage from St. Luke’s Gospel: bread takes the older and simple form of the Ferrarese bread before the Court’s cooks thought up new forms, and fish has been replaced by mussels.
And it only remains for me to give you the recipe for a good dish with mussels, drawn from ancient Ferrarese cookbooks.
The second aspect is connected to the sociology of art and remembers the Antal’s lesson “nobody, not even the artist, the scientist, the scholar, is out of his time”. It’s not a question of considering art as the mirror of a society, but of discovering assonances, backgrounds, references linking the various forms of living; as concerns our research, we are interested in the forms of art and food. These are particularly important forms, because, like art, also food has always been considered a serious thing, both from the material and the symbolic and metaphoric point of view. In case it should be necessary, the Veda testify: “the human and the divine actions are both necessary when eating and when preparing the food; also the karma-marga, the way of action, is integrated in the mystery of food. Matter and spirit are joined in the food and through it they exist”.
The relationship between forms and structures in painting and between forms and structures in food is credible and investigable, also if with all the difficulties linked to the fact that, if on one side the work of art survives its time maintaining its form and structure, on the other the food’s forms and structures pass through the following times more unsteady and the adjustments to new realities could shade the original essence, sometimes even remove it, sometimes let it just appear.
[...]
I consider particularly pleasant and appropriate to combine the work of Guercino with a collection of recipes speaking about the food they commonly used in his time. That food, also if with the necessary adjustments to changed life conditions, still cheers up our nowadays tables, because Guercino was a simple man and a deep observer of the essential logics of nature.
From Guercino’s tablets, canvases, frescos and drawings the real life comes out, the life he savoured every day, in the countryside, in the houses where he was often guest of clients who had not washed away yet the smell of the stables and the fields: traders, landowners, clergymen, whose lives were set along the creeks of the Po Delta.
[...]
Egeria Di Nallo
FROM THE TEXT
(Guercino, The wheat threshing, detached fresco, 1615-17, Pinacoteca civica di Cento)
Some horses in a circle thresh the wheat in the courtyard of the owner’s house, in front of a pergola, which throws its shade on a country table inviting to heavy drinks. The flours of high quality produced in this territory offer sweets of an unforgettable flavour.
Recipe for the “miottini”
Ingredients for 12 people:
350 grams of flour
170 g of the finest sugar
170 g of butter
½ lemon peel
2 egg yolks
Directions:
Pour the flour on the work surface through the sieve, make a well and place the sugar. Melt the butter over the warm cinders of the fireplace (over low heat) and pour it in the flour well; add the grated lemon peel, the egg’s yolk and beat all together; mix before with the flour and then with the sugar until well blended; with the hands’ palm knead gently the dough till it’s smooth. Form the dough into a ball, roll it out to a sheet, an half finger high, remove from the work surface with a long knife and level; brush with beaten yolk or simply with the white, and dust with a lot of sugar. With a knife cut into 6 portions and into six again to obtain 36 miottini; bake slowly till lightly golden.
