a Dali homage to holiday feasting & celebration

Depressed over reviewing a chronology of deaths in 2016, wonder | wander | women decided to lift our spirits with more holiday food and feasting.

This newly reissued cookbook of Salvador Dali was the perfect antidote!

“Les diners de Gala is uniquely devoted to the pleasures of taste … If you are a disciple of one of those calorie-counters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, close this book at once; it is too lively, too aggressive, and far too impertinent for you.” ~ Salvador Dalí

Although this would more fittingly belong to our wonder | wander | world blog, it was just too delish to wait until then.

Besides which we needed our fix of upliftment and inspiration N O W!

Celebrating the holidays with these wild and wondrous parties hosted by the artist with his wife and muse, Gala is fabulous fun.

Featuring the famously flamboyant couple and their culinary curations over lavish legendary meals, ostentatiously opulent parties, and notorious nocturnal gatherings. Some of the recipes even seem deliciously doable.

“When I was six years old I wanted to be a cook,” Dali once professed, although it wasn’t until his late sixties that he channeled his childhood fantasy into Les Diners de Gala - a lavishly illustrated cookbook, originally published in 1973 and featuring Dalí’s intensely erotic etchings and paintings.

The twelve chapters each cover a specific class of dishes - from exotic courses to fish and shellfish to vegetables - rendered with a surrealist twist both gastronomically and aesthetically, but nowhere more so than in the tenth chapter, dedicated to aphrodisiacs.

“Surrealist fans and kooky cooks will enjoy TASCHEN’s re-issue of Salvador Dalí’s 1973 cookbook, Les Dîners de Gala. Illustrated with Dalí’s bizarre, erotic work and dinner spreads shot in garish 1970s tones, this is a legitimate cookbook…” ~ theartnewspaper.com, London