Salvador Dali's Golden Cookbook

Let’s pretend we’re in kindergarten and today is Show and Tell. I’m in the front row sitting cross-legged on the floor, hand flying in the air, (“Pick me! Pick me!”), so excited I’m coiled up tighter than a Slinky. What I brought today is gold and shiny with bright colorful pictures and big words that make grown-ups laugh. I’ve been holding this treasure for several years and have never listed it because I refuse to pay anyone a commission on it. Last spring I took it to the Akron Antiquarian Book Fair where it garnered numerous admirers, some of whom visited it multiple times, but, alas, it found no takers, due to its bright, shiny price tag– which is actually reasonable at $350. Even though I still don’t plan to list it, I do think it’s high time I shared the outrageous glory of the thing.

The book is Les Diners de Gala by the one and only Salvador Dali, published in France in 1973 and named for his wife Gala. The art is a Muligatawny stew of drawings, paintings, collage and photos, each more jaw-dropping than the next. Collectively it leaves even the most psychedelic reefer dream ever recorded dusty and gasping for breath at the side of the subconscious. By his own admission Dali loved “everything gilded and excessive”, so the book more than fits the bill of fare from its glittering golden dustjacket to its back endpapers which explode with visions of wine bottles, grapes, apples, oranges, cherries, lettuce, bones, and body parts. Interesting body parts.

But diners and cooks do not live on images alone. They also need  prose, in this instance ladled up in great splotches of purple and oozing rivulets of honey and vinegar. Chapter Two, les cannibalisms de’latiumne, begins, “The Crayfish of Paracelsus has to be served along with the heads or torsos of small hot-blooded martyrs as a gesture of homage to Gilles de Rais (Giles of Retz) whose most delightful ejac….” Well, let’s just let it go at that.

This IS kindergarten, after all.