We communicate to you the most notable results of our rural culinary experiments. What follows concerns a clearly engaged meal, which still isn't completed in its totality.
(The amounts anticipate four dinners, but are solid.)
Brown the cut-up tomatoes in oil. Season (salt, pepper, Cayenne, garlic). Reduce. When the tomatoes are cooked, add three-quarters of a litre of water. Incorporate the bouquet garni. Simmer for 20 minutes.
Serve on the slabs, which have been crisped; add the creme fraiche.
Cut each slice into 2 cm-thick fillets. Cook on a grill or stove, for four on each side. Serve on croutons with the parsley butter.
Remove the stems from the leaves. Wash the leaves several times, then boil them in salted water, uncovered, for a quarter of an hour (around 2 litres of water for 1 kg of spinach). Drain. Squeeze, sift and arrange spinach. The water must be salted 10 g per litre.
Mix the spinach with the grated gruyere. Pour the valor of the 50 g of melted butter on the plate. Put in a pre-heated oven for 10 minutes. In the style of an urbanist, empty 4 eggs, previously poached, on the plate from the oven. Garnish with red pepper.
See you soon,
Guy
Above is the letter from Guy Debord to Raoul Vaneigem, detailing the Situationist menu that must have been a distraction for them in the mind-numbingly boring hours spent in the Belgian countryside after May 1968. It is lifted from Not Bored and if you visit the page you can see Alice Debord's notes.
For a thousand reasons I love Guy Debord, and for a thousand other reasons I love cooking. Having thought this was a good idea, I'm now having second thoughts. Boil spinach for 15 minutes? I saw a perfectly normal looking boy buying a frozen lobster in the supermarket yesterday, and wondered what he'd do with it. Of the things I love about Debord I adore the fact that he is a shameless romantic in many ways - the recurrent use of photos of his perfect love Eliane Papai, his devotion to places, ideas and people whilst saying he isn't in the least afraid of ruins, and expelling people left, right and centre from the SI; I love his refusal to admit he is wrong, his massive intelligence, his beautiful writing style, all his ideas. I also love his love of food.
I'm not sure however, about his cookery. I've been thinking about this for a while, and I'm not really convinced that someone that clever would write a recipe and then not include one of the ingredients in the method - I'm referring here to the lack of celery in the soup I will be cooking tomorrow. But maybe the recipes aren't, like other things, completed in their totality. I'm not for one second imagining that Debord came up with the recipes, although given his song writing maybe I'm wrong. The man who said 'I do the revolution, she [his wife] does the washing up' but who could eat and drink like one of the Borgias, well, obviously in an inspirational role, though I can't imagine him actually cooking. But I'd love to know if I'm wrong.
I'm especially interested in all this as it touches on the position of Michele Bernstein, my favourite Debord wife. Andrew Hussey, in The Game of War, writes that in the events of May Michele had largely retired from political life, and her main role seems to have been to act as Guy and Alice's cook, and I've been told by Andrew that Michele is a fantastic cook. Just as I love Guy for many things, I love Michele as well for so many reasons - her fierce intelligence, her novel writing, her sense of humour, and, yes, her cooking. Her feeding her estranged husband Guy, and and his new girlfriend, Alice, a huge meal on the first night of rioting in the Latin Quarter. And I'd really like to know what she cooked for them.
Comments
Post a Comment