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Guidelines are a good thing when you’re working on a new recipe. Without them, it’s easy to feel paralysis in the face of so much possibility.
Here at Bon Appétit, guidelines for the food team are usually things like “recipes for salmon,” “one-pot dinners” or “dishes inspired by recent travels.” They’re prompts to get our wheels turning, culinary umbrellas we can ideate underneath. But every so often, the denizens of the test kitchen receive a story premise that blows up our usual process (in a good way!). In the May installment of the magazine, our art and design issue, such a feature presented itself, entitled “Bite at the Museum.”
Have you ever looked at an abstract impressionist painting and tried to figure out what food it could represent? Until recently, I would have said, “Me neither!” But that was the ask—that we treat contemporary works of art as the jumping off points for new recipes, and work backward to develop dishes that look as close to the original paintings as possible.
Of course, the hardest work in achieving these gorgeously copycat photos fell to the food and prop stylists and photographer (Michelle Gatton, Christine Keely, and Heami Lee, respectively), who meticulously arranged each ingredient, surface, and light to best emulate the art. In the test kitchen, our job was to translate the works into food to begin with, keeping seasonality, make-ability, and personal perspectives in mind. Here’s how we got there:
“Radishes!” I shouted, the second I laid eyes on this piece by Judy Chicago. I was certain nothing else in nature could provide the same round shape and bright, bold color. But radishes alone do not a recipe make, so I set out to create the rest of a salad that would make sense hidden beneath a shingled radish roof. After playing with a few components, I decided that the radishes (cut in a few different ways) could carry the team, alongside torn boiled eggs, briny olives, and a punchy mustard vinaigrette.
My coworker Shilpa Uskokovic’s first idea was to interpret the small rounds in this piece as chickpeas, in the form of a green-tinged chana masala. But in considering the story as a whole (spoiler alert: we use chickpeas elsewhere) the team decided to go with a seafood moment instead. For Shilpa, the background color was reminiscent of Jean George’s spring pea soup, so she made a spinach version (prepared, like the soup, with just a handful of ingredients in a blender) to plate under an array of simply seared scallops.
“Sometimes literal is best,” says my colleague Jesse Szewczyk. When he noticed we didn’t have a Neapolitan cake already on the site, he brought this image to the team as something we might feature in the art and design issue. And when “Bite at the Museum” was conceived, his pitch fit nicely with the premise. “It’s maybe the most practical interpretation of the assignment,” he says of the tri-flavored cake that uses one batter, doctored up with cocoa powder and freeze-dried strawberries. “But I liked that I had very specific guardrails.”
I spent a long time looking at Summer View before coming to falafel burgers. The shapes inspired sandwich thoughts, but it wasn’t until I remembered former BA staffer and cookbook author Zaynab Issa’s great black bean smashburger on the site that a riff took shape in my mind. Canned chickpeas became the base for an herby falafel mix, flattened into patties and seared in a hot pan. The other colorful layers became toppings: cucumbers, lettuce, and a harissa-spiked mayonnaise.
If anyone was going to go drink with their work of art, it would be Shilpa. “I’ve done 16 million frozen drinks this year,” she says. Blueberries were the obvious choice (look at those vibrant orbs!), but in blending them, she found the resulting color too burgundy-esque, rather than the purple of the painting. “I looked up purple drinks online and the Aviation cocktail popped up,” Shilpa says. Thanks to the inclusion of creme de violette, it was the closest to the color of the art of anything she’d seen. Shilpa tapped clear spirits and additions (vodka and white wine) to ensure the hue and flavor of the liqueur shone through.
A funny wrinkle about print media is how far ahead we have to develop recipes to ensure they can hit mailboxes and newsstands at the proper time. In thinking about recipes for the May issue, we had to remind ourselves in the doldrums of winter that spring produce would be in abundance when the story went live. I ran with the idea of what would be on offer at the farmers market in developing a dish to look like Krausner’s bold work. Spring’s favorite fruit duo, strawberry and rhubarb, seemed like the vibe, with dollops of orange marmalade to mimic the bright swipes throughout the painting.
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