The other day I watched the movie “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” for the 3rd time.
The actress Rebecca Hall is my favorite and as a character in the movie. I prefer her more than Penélope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson. But Javier Bardem undoubtedly played a masterful role…
There is a line in the movie:
“Only unrealized love can be romantic”
I think there is a lot of truth and accuracy in it.
Now, my question is: “Can an unrealized chef be top-notch and can he provide a transcendental gastronomic experience, somewhat “romantic” for those who prepare his dishes…!?
Below are some cited texts from an interesting book with essays related to architecture and gastronomy:
EATING ARCHITECTURE
edited by Jamie Horwitz and Paulette Singley
MIT ed. 2006
Delectable decoration: TASTE AND SPECTACLE IN JEAN-FRANÇOIS DE BASTIDE’S LA PETITE MAISON
Rodolphe El – Khoury
“Taste was not only identified with the natural ability and, more or less literally, with the sensory organ for perceiving the beautiful – “le sens interne du beau”: “It is the sixth sense in us, the organs of which we cannot see. The purpose of aesthetic perception was also attributed to taste, “which is nothing other than the rapid and perceptive discovery of the degree of pleasure that each thing should afford us”.
Gastronomy and eroticism have overlapped since the tasting of the forbidden fruit, but the oral proclivity for eros was particularly pronounced in the eighteenth century, when the debaucher was commonly known to combine sexual excess with gastronomic pleasure.
Despite its undeniable ocularcentrism, the aesthetic discourse of the enlightenment repeatedly appealed to the mouth to demonstrate the immediacy and acuity of aesthetic perception: “We taste a stew, and even without knowing the rules of its composition we can tell whether it is good.
The same is true of painting and other products of the intellect that seek to please us by touch.
The Surrealists were not particularly interested in architectural expression, but Salvador Dalí is one of the rare exceptions. Inspired by the architecture of Art Nouveau, Dalí pointed to the importance of edible buildings for creating a new poetic dimension of architecture.
Dalí connects the origin of pleasure in architecture with childhood from the point of view of oral pleasure. The tactile dimension of taste expresses the desire to learn through cannibalism; that is, to incorporate the outside world into oneself. This productive reasoning is based on instinct, just as the continuous oral tasting of childhood is an instinctive part of cognitive appropriation.
Voltaire’s article “Goût” in the Encyclopédie is also based on a rhetorical (even aphoristic) comparison of “the ability to distinguish the taste of our food” and the sense of beauty and defects in all the arts.”
He thus writes that taste is “like the tongue and the palate: a ready and unreflective discernment, sensitive and persistent in appreciating the good, violent in rejecting the bad, often lost and uncertain, not even knowing whether to be satisfied with what is presented to it, and sometimes formed only by habit.”
Taste is therefore the fundamental prerequisite of genius; character is the imprint or mark left by genius in a work; taste, in turn, is the receptive faculty that can discern character.”