The starter makes it clear that this will be no ordinary meal. Expect to be served an olive, a quartered fennel bulb and a kumquat, while the fingers of your free hand stroke morsels of velvet, silk and sandpaper. At the same time the scent of carnations will be sprayed into the room and your ears will be assailed by “wild jazz”, Wagner and aeroplane noise.

Diners will be able to sample this “Aerofood” and five other courses for one night only at the British Library this March, in a banquet staged in homage to a forgotten gastronomic cult: The Futurist Cookbook.

The cookbook was published in 1932 by Filippo Tommasso Marinetti, a poet, novelist, critic and early Fascist who once fought a duel with a critic.

It outraged conservative Italians by suggesting a ban on pasta and was derided as the work of a group of attention-seeking, prankster artists.

Giorgio Locatelli, the acclaimed Italian chef who is overseeing the menu for the British Library banquet, believes that Futurist cuisine should not be dismissed so lightly.

“They were visionaries,” he toldThe Times. “They believed that all five senses must be excited in a meal. None of the dishes described in the book gives quantities or cooking temperatures – they are more like thoughts of recipes. It will be interesting to sit people down and make them eat this stuff.”

Marinetti first came to prominence in 1909 when he published The Futurist Manifestoon the front page of Le Figaro. It glorified war, speed, anarchy, and destroying museums and libraries in an attempt to create a new“ way of life for the young century.

The ideas were debated and often mocked across Europe but made little impact. Then in 1932, La Cucina Futurista detonated national uproar.

Marinetti believed that traditional Italian cuisine was a manifestation of everything smug, lazy and bourgeois. His most notorious suggestion was to outlaw pasta, which he claimed induced lethargy, pessimism, nostalgia and neutralism. Speeches and serious discussion at the table were forbidden.

Marinetti’s philosophy and recipes also anticipated many culinary developments, from the emphasis on presentation in nouvelle cuisine through themed restaurants and low-carbohydrate diets to the application of scientific techniques like those practised today by chefs such as Heston Blumenthal at the Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire.

Typical Futurist dishes included meat broth sprinkled with champagne and liquor and decorated with rose petals, or the deliberately obscene-looking porco eccittato, a whole cooked salami upended on a plate with coffee sauce mixed with eau de cologne.

Fascism is off the menu at the event. The dress code is “Classic or 1930s with a Futurist twist” and tickets cost £75 each.

Benito Fiore, chairman of the Italian Academy of Cuisine in London, is hosting the event to support the British Library exhibition Breaking The Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937. He said: “Marinetti was a really fantastic person but his food was awful to eat. We are trying to make it edible.”

Inspired by chef who was anti pasta

Aerofood Fennel, olive, candied fruit or kumquat and a strip of cardboard to which are attached velvet, silk and sandpaper Tomato rice balls Saffron and tomato risottos made into balls filled with meat, cheese, salami, pinenuts or raisins, dipped in breadcrumbs and deep-fried
Alaskan salmon in the rays of the Sun with Mars sauce Grilled salmon on grilled tomatoes with anchovy fillets interlaced in a chequerboard pattern
Elasticake A ball of puff pastry with red wine zabaglione, a stick of liquorice and a prune

Source: Giorgio Locatelli

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