The Futurist Cookbook

The Futurist Cookbook

I have lived on this planet almost all my life, and I thought there was not much more that could surprise me. 

Of all the intriguing, charming, and horrifying things on view in Poster House’s current exhibition The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy, the one I see people stopping to photograph most often is a small volume at the back of the gallery: La Cuisine Futuriste (The Futurist Cookbook) by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. It is open to a page featuring a chef giving a salute of a kind most commonly used by ancient Roman dictators, 1930s Blackshirts, and certain interstellar-ambitious tech nerds.

It’s a rather shocking sight for the contemporary viewer—as we were curating the show, there was no shortage of debate about whether it’d be appropriate to display the image at all—but in reality, an illustration of a chef giving what would soon become the Fascist salute is one of the least alarming aspects of Marinetti’s text.

Marinetti was, by most current standards, out of his mind. Simultaneously brilliant and insufferable, his place at the head of the Futurist movement was secured, in part, by the fact that its followers were never quite sure if he was a genius or simply mad—or if he was actually serious. Those closest to him suspected that all of these things were true. His poetry was abstract; his art was obscure. And his cookbook is in lockstep with both: “you think, you dream,” Marinetti urged, “and you act, according to what you drink and eat.” He urged followers to avoid stultifying pasta at all costs, insisting that it made Italians dumb and lazy, and claiming that anyone eating a “pyramid of pasta will find within the gloomy satisfaction of stopping up a black hole,” a charge his cultural brother, Benito Mussolini, took up in earnest in both his policy and his prose. “Only a Futurist meal,” Marinetti insisted, “can lift his spirits.” His Cucina Futurista (literally, Futurist Cuisine), lays out dozens of dishes that are artistic endeavors as much as culinary ones, almost all of them far more lyrical than useful. He insisted that cutlery should be avoided entirely—goodbye forks, so long spoons!—and that condiments should be tossed right out with them, vowing to remove “everyday mediocrity from the pleasures of the palate.”  

I decided to spend a day making a few of the recipes in this book, this ridiculous book, that ensorcels so many visitors to The Future Was Then. The recipes are vague—they are to cooking what interpretive dance is to storytelling—and I have only made eight dishes because there are, frankly, too many potentially inedible foodstuffs in Marinetti’s text to take on rationally or sensibly. I could, for example, have made “Diabolical Roses”—the deep-fried heads of red roses in full bloom—or “Milk in a Green Light,” consisting of a large bowl of cold milk with a couple teaspoons of honey, dark grapes, and red radishes illuminated by a green light, served with a beverage of mixed mineral water, beer, and blackberry juice. There’s a recipe for vegetable mush with airplanes on it, too, and others requiring musical accompaniment or women reading poems while you eat. With real commitment I could have gathered friends or, perhaps, taken hostage a free-love colony or a poetry reading, and presented the cookbook’s “Tactile Dinner”: a multicourse meal in which each guest is given a set of pajamas made from a different material: one gets sponge, another felt, a third sandpaper, and so on. Once all the guests have arrived, they’re escorted to an unlit room where, unable to see, they’re made to choose their dinner partner according to how much they enjoy the feel of the other’s jammies. 

So here we have but eight Futurist dishes, because at a certain point one begins to suspect that they are merely playing a practical joke on themselves, and also because it becomes more and more obvious as one goes on that these people—the Fascists, the Futurists, whoever— definitely deserved to lose World War II.  Let’s say I stopped then because it was more practical to do so, and not just because I don’t want the wider world to know about my sandpaper sleepwear.

Let’s get into it:

DIVORCED EGGS

Divide some hard-boiled eggs in half and remove the yolks. Put the yolks on mashed potatoes and then the whites on a purée of carrots. 

If there’s one recipe from The Futurist Cookbook known to the wider world, it’s probably this one: like most of the recipes in the book, it’s made from the meager ingredients commonly available to the ordinary Italian during the Fascist period, and, in many ways, lacks in fundamental “Italianness,” for want of a better word. Philosophical more than edible, it’s (like all the recipes in the book) scant in detail. I’ve followed the same rules in all of these as theater companies do with Shakespeare productions: if it doesn’t contradict the text, it’s fair game.

This is a bland, bland meal, and a gutsy banner item for people claiming that pasta will make you dull. Marinetti maintained that his favorite meal was “steel chicken”—a roast chicken stuffed with ball bearings—and that his disciple Mussolin’s favorite was “garlic salad”—thick slices of dozens of cloves of raw garlic, lemon juice, and olive oil, without any lettuce or other vegetables. 

Divorced eggs are less flavorful than either, and in spite of its minor thesis, I can’t help but feel I’m on just another terrible Italian family journey. In 1944, my great-grandfather was taken from his home in Italy to the Kaufering concentration camp, and I bet he still had better food there than this.

CARROT + TROUSERS + PROFESSOR 

(recipe by Farfa, the Futurist Poet of National Record)

A raw carrot standing upright, with the thin part at the bottom, where two boiled aubergines are attached with a toothpick to look like violet trousers in the act of marching. Leave the green leaves on the top of the carrot to represent the hope of a pension. Eat the whole thing without ceremony!

Contrary to the recipe, I’ve removed the carrot tops here because I, in the year 2025, cannot possibly aspire to the 1920s Fascist hope of a pension. Marinetti insisted this was a mockery of the professorial class he despised, the intelligentsia he was sure was driving Italy to ruin.  The professor, he declared, is among the “smelly gangrene” of history-obsessed professions from which “the land must be freed.” Following those Shakespearean rules, I parboiled the eggplants rather than doing a full boil on them so there was at least some hope of them retaining their strength. It was shocking how fast the purple ran out of them, and to where I do not know: the water remained uncolored and it was as if the pigment in this dish—like the flavor in all of them—had just dashed right out of the room.

Anyway: many of the recipes in Marinetti’s book are just penis jokes he’s convinced are clever and that he’d like you to think somehow represent government satire.

HEROIC WINTER DINNER 

A perfect cube of beef, marinated in liquor, and served on various peppers. And snow. 

Chew each bite for one minute, blow on a trumpet between bites.

The recipe calls for the diner to play a trumpet between bites which, in my case, was but two. It was important to Marinetti, in this and other recipes, that the sound happen between bites and not during the eating itself, “so as not to distract the sensitivity of the tongue and palate but to help annul the last taste enjoyed by establishing gustatory virginity.”

The last-minute plating idea—to use the Fascist-era helmet of my Uncle Nino, whose grandkids don’t want it and have thus left this bellic albatross in my care for decades—made the whole thing feel suitably solemn. 

Since I did not have a trumpeter—or anyone on hand to toot and honk at my beck and call—I simply played a tune on my computer, a sad little YouTube file of a guy playing a single, somber note, the way at American military funerals these days they just have a fella holding a bugle with a little speaker shoved in there. At the end of each bite, I had the same thought: does this appropriately honor the beef?  Someone should honor the beef. Someone should thank the beef for its service.

CUBIST VEGETABLE PATCH

Cubes of celery, carrot, peas, onion, and cheese.

These are the entire instructions. Other items on Marinetti’s menu involve shouting, music, instruments, naked people. For this one, it’s simply a list of small, annoying, unpleasant foods in which, because I’ve got a love of prime numbers so extreme that if it were to get any worse I’d need to take a daily pill, I felt a need to indulge.

I feel like Joe Rogan would approve of this meal. And if I live a thousand years I will never get this time back.

THE EXCITED PIG 

A skinless salami served upright on a dizzying blend of hot black coffee and eau de cologne.

This meal—again, a genital joke masquerading as political art—made me do two things: first, wonder how in the world these deeply unserious people were ever given charge of a country for decades. But secondly:  fear the forever-stench of a stinking salami in a puddle of hot coffee and cologne in my photo studio. It smelled like a gigolo the morning after.

I contemplated, in a spirit of Italian pride, slightly tilting the salami: Pisa makes millions a year on such errors, so why can’t I?  But seriously, somebody fetch Marinetti to explain this to me— what is the metaphor here? Is Italy the salami? Am I the salami? Is this somehow antisemitic?

I did not eat this. I did not drink this. Drinking cologne can make you go blind. Drinking cologne can kill you. Poster House has a whole exhibition about this very topic called Just Say Nyet  opening in the fall of 2026. I encourage you to check it out. 

ITALIAN BREASTS IN THE SUNSHINE

(Formula by Marisa Mori, the Futurist Aeropainter)

Form two firm spheres of almond paste. Place a fresh strawberry at the center of each one. Then pour some zabaglione onto the plate and some dollops of sour cream. The whole may be sprinkled with strong pepper and garnished with sweet red peppers.

More jokes. While a person could make an argument that this is the only “Italian” dish in the book—it resembles a Sicilian confection called “Minni di Virgini” or Virgins’ Breasts, made of marzipan and cheese in the same shape—the sour cream and hot pepper render it, once again, a philosophical exercise. And not one you’d want to put in your mouth.

TENNIS CHOP

A formula featuring a veal cutlet cooked in butter and cut in the form of a tennis racket. An anchovy with a slice of banana on top forms the handle. Cherries soaked in liqueur and rolled in ricotta, egg, and cheese form a ball.

Perhaps the most ghastly looking of the batch, but also the most similar to actual food; I had to swap the veal for beef to overcome a shortage at the store, but otherwise this silly, stupid, inane, thesaurus-challenging meal was…not bad. The anchovy and banana were, shockingly, not as terrible together as you might fear, the liquored cherries and ricotta were a delightful pairing, and if one breaks this whole thing out into not one ugly war crime but three separate dishes, it’s actually acceptable even in its whimsy. How can this be? Have the Fascists finally got a hit on their hands? What rough homunculus, his hour come round at last, slouches toward Predappio, craving to be born?

DEVIL IN BLACK KEY

Polibibita (“poly-drink” or cocktail).

Two quarters orange juice, one quarter grappa, one quarter liquid chocolate, and a floating hard-boiled egg yolk.

Nope! Phew, moral crisis averted, the Fascists still stink. The Futurist Cookbook has many cocktail recipes and this one, easily among the most plausible (a lot of them involve inedible items) and least insane, is still a terrible idea. Marinetti’s obsession with eggs where they don’t belong continues—why, oh why, must this have a floating egg yolk in it?–and the thinnest sip made me gag. This is like one of those things you’re forced to drink after picking the fuzzy end of Truth or Dare at a Junior High School party.  

This experiment certainly made it easy to understand why nobody seems to have looked back fondly on the era of Italian Fascist cocktail parties. Marinetti famously declared that “art can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice” and in this, his famous book of culinary art, he certainly lived up to his own standard. 

After I made eight of these silly recipes, I retired from silly, dead Marinetti and his ridiculous cookbook: in reality, it took all day. And it was tiring. And a little scary. And I celebrated its end by making myself a big,

big,

wonderful,

bowl of pasta.