Andy Warhol’s Satirical Cookbook Ridiculing Haute Cuisine Goes Up For Auction
Image via Vicki L. Miller / Shutterstock.com
Andy Warhol might have shared a similar sentiment with home cooks jaded from whipping up meals during the pandemic. Back in 1959, before his rise to fame, the graphic designer worked on a humorous cookbook poking fun at haute cuisine.
The cookbook, Wild Raspberries, will soon go on sale at auction house Bonhams for an estimated price of US$30,000 to US$50,000. It is just one of 34 color copies self-published by Warhol, and features an autograph addressed to fashion editor DD Ryan.
Wild Raspberries is named after the Ingmar Bergman film Wild Strawberries, and was written to make light of cookbooks of the 1950s that taught readers how to cook up French-inspired meals. Warhol’s friend, interior decorator Suzi Frankfurt, supplied the text, while his mother contributed calligraphy with purposeful misspellings. They then enlisted schoolboys to color the illustrations and got rabbis to bind the book.
Recipes include ‘Omlet Greta Garbo’, which is supposed to always “be eaten alone in a candlelit room,” ‘Gefilte of Fighting Fish’, a dish that involves submerging fish in seawater and making them battle each other “until they completely bone each other,” and ‘Seared Roebuck’, which claims that roebuck “shot in ambush” is superior to roebuck “killed after a chase.”
Frankfurt told the Observer in a 1997 interview that the friends thought the cookbook would sell in the “thousands,” but they only ended up selling 20 copies. The remainder were passed to friends as gifts.
Evidently, the cookbook’s charm has risen over the years. Darren Sutherland from the books and manuscripts department at Bonhams told the Guardian that it “perfectly capture[s] the puckish nature of much of Warhol’s work… [it is] a wonderful glimpse into a playfulness that follows him throughout his development as an artist.”
In 1959 #AndyWarhol published a (parody) cook book - Wild Raspberries, created by the artist and his friend Suzie Frankfurt. pic.twitter.com/nz84YU1LdC
— The Great Curate (@greatcurate) August 6, 2020
[via ARTnews, cover image via Vicki L. Miller / Shutterstock.com]
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