We can already hear the lament that we too could join in on. Yet another chef’s monograph, a beautiful book celebrating the glory of these new heroes of the media with beautiful photos of dishes to impress your friends by casually leaving the thick volume on your coffee table. The English publisher Phaidon has become a worldwide specialist in this category, and the bible that they just published in honor of Italian star chef Massimo Bottura is no exception to some of the marketing rules that struggle to evolve.
Rule number one, the photos of dishes must allow the photographer to impose his design onto the design of the plate, a sort of double creation that casts yet another veil over the reality of the original creation by adding another layer of imaginary onto a dish that doesn’t really need the later in order to remain “readable”. This is probably supposed to awaken the taste buds of the sucker who, according to the second golden rule, devours every detail of the chef’s recipes and needs to be able to project himself as much as possible as an imitator of the master thanks to two essential tools: a written recipe and a photograph of the model.
Neither Lego nor Ikea, despite their knowledge and expertise in marketing, have every attempted to pull off such a scam. It would be as if a book dedicated to Picasso, to his use of pantone colors, the size of his brushes, the specificity of his materials and of his reproductions of the model, made the reader believe that he could reproduce the work of art himself with his own two hands. Phaidon isn’t completely unaware of the problem since on the last page, written in the reassuring five-font size, it warns the reader that “certain recipes require sophisticated techniques, special materials and professional experience in order to achieve good results.”!
And thus, has the die bas been cast for “Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef”? No. And for one reason only, which has little to do with publishing: Massimo Bottura’s unique personality. Because he is one of the few capable of finding ways around the two marketing traps by changing the actual function of the “recipe” and by ensuring that photographers Carlo Benvenuto and Stefano Graziani add meaning to the latter instead of merely shooting photos of the dishes and of the kitchen.
Those who have been lucky enough to cross paths with Massimo can honestly say without a doubt that within the realm of culinary stars, Massimo is the one who knows how to tell the best stories: the Italian way, which means in every language he has some notions of, but also with his arms, his hands, his eyes, and the necessary footwork. Massimo is a showman and the stories behind his dishes must be told in order to fully savor them. A recipe without a story, simply for the joy of cooking, could never succeed, as it would deny him of the necessary element of his artistic expression.
It begins with a cookie-cutter dialogue with artist and sculpture Maurizio Cattelan, making it a book that could be read by someone who has never tasted Massimo’s cuisine, and who will probably never make the trip to his Osteria Francescana in Modena, but simply has a soft-spot for Italy, its ingredients, its history, and its cuisine. The transition from oral to writing gives the skinny chef who gets easily carried away a clear advantage: it forces him to organize his thoughts, and even establish a typology and chapters so that the entire book doesn’t turn into a compilation of jumbled details. “Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef” is organized into four themes that can at times overlap, but remain coherent: “Tradition in evolution”, “Heroes of the working class”, “Image and resemblance” and “Come to Italy with me”.
Thanks to this, the reader is quite easily drawn into Osteria’s twenty years of history and into the life of this child from Modena who proclaims his bipolarism: the tradition of an Italian cuisine that is infinitely rich and his passion for contemporary art, shared for the most part by his wife Lara Gilmore. The technical aspect of the recipes was therefore shoved to the end of the book in order to leave room for their background and their role in the complex puzzle that is Italian cuisine today. From each chapter we will retain the “Cappuccino”, “Bread, butter and anchovies”, “Snow under the sun” and “How to burn sardines”. Dishes that go beyond the story of their creation and become a part of the greater history of Italian society. A couple of photographical references to records and novels put this work into a new perspective and make “Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef” a true reference.
English version available to order here
French version to be released in April 2015
Photography : Per Anders Jorgensen
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