Pat Badani’s seven-day meal plan includes a recipe for greens that calls for “a measure of moral evaluation.” She recommends that, on day two, readers serve a particular protein when “the wriggling stops.” On Tuesday, when it’s time for “Cultures and Ferments,” the directions read:
She connects her attraction to the most popular room in the house to her childhood growing up in a large Italian family in Buenos Aires that gathered each Sunday after church when she and her two brothers helped their Nonna roll out and shape the gnocchi before lunch. “We talked and talked, and drank and drank, and everything went on until very late, and everybody went home and started their Monday-to-Friday ritual.”
The bakery, as it turned out, was the legendary Poilâne, then under its second generation master baker Lionel Poilâne, who’d famously collaborated with Dali to sculpt an entire bedroom suite out of sourdough. “He said, ‘I love the idea. You have my bread. You have my ovens. You have my bakers. The only rule is you have to get along with my bakers.’ He probably thought I would be there for what? A month?”
She had no intention of writing a cookbook, but she did start thinking about the way artists have used food to promote political and social movements, particularly in the case of The Manifesto of Futurist Cooking by noted Italian proto-fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
“Most manifestos are dead serious,” she says. “Recipe books have a very authoritative tone, too. I’m not redoing Marinetti because I’m absolutely not promoting what he’s promoting. But he was outrageous. They were all outrageous. They used humor to shock people into action. And that is something I really do enjoy.” v
