Taste, Presence and the Language of Bread

Original:

“The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure no slight pleasure.” Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Translation of the quotation as presented in the manuscript:

‘The art of eating well is no small art, and the pleasure is no small pleasure.’

Andrei Gritskov’s free adaptation:

‘The art of eating well —

is no minor art.

And the pleasure here is no trifle.’

“Cooking is an art, but you can eat it too.” Marcella Hazan

Translation of the quotation as presented in the manuscript:

‘Cooking is art.

But you can eat it.’

Free adaptation:

‘Cooking is art.

It simply disappears into taste.’

Taste as a state of attention Andrei Gritskov

I increasingly think of taste not as a result, but as a state. Tasty or not tasty is too simple a question. It belongs to the ‘liked it / did not like it’ category. Convenient, but superficial. The real question is different: were you attentive at that moment?

Montaigne wrote that the art of eating well is no small art. He said this long before gastronomic rankings, celebrity chefs and beautiful presentation. He was not talking about food. He was talking about the quality of presence.

Marcella Hazan put it even more precisely: cooking is art that you can eat. That ‘can’ contains an important thought. Genuine gastronomic art disappears. It does not seek to remain. It works in the moment. Food art does not begin with the plate.

And certainly not with the price.

It begins with a pause.

With silence before the first bite.

With a sense of the difference between what you expected and what is actually happening. When food makes you more attentive, it stops being merely food. It brings you back to reality. To the body. To the feeling of ‘here and now’. And it is at this very moment that art begins.

Everything else — presentation, technique, complexity, rare ingredients — may matter. But it is secondary. Like the frame around a painting. A good frame does not prevent you from seeing what matters. A bad one distracts you.

For me, the criterion is simple.

If taste restores attention, it is food art.

If it does not, it is simply food. Even if it is very beautiful.

The symbolism of food and wine in painting

In art, symbolism is not the only key to understanding, but it is usually where the discussion begins. A painting is read slowly: object by object, sign by sign, until the image begins to speak.

To understand painting, you need to know its language. What the depicted things mean, where their meanings originated and how the artist used them to construct a narrative. For a painter, food and objects are what metaphors are for a writer. They do not explain directly; they suggest, deepen and enrich the story.

Fruit

Fresh fruit in painting signifies life, youth, energy and fertility. The apple is one of the most heavily charged symbols. In the Christian tradition, it is associated with knowledge, temptation, the Fall and seduction. It is no coincidence that the Latin malum means both ‘apple’ and ‘evil’. In this way, the fruit became an image of forbidden knowledge and human vulnerability.

In other cultures, the meaning changes. In China, the apple is a sign of peace, while in a number of traditions it symbolises joy and wisdom.

The fig evokes the Garden of Eden and the first experience of shame, but in antiquity it is associated with Dionysus — wine, ecstasy and loss of control — and with Priapus, a symbol of unrestrained desire.

Grapes carry a double meaning. They represent both the blood of Christ and Bacchic intoxication, festivity tipping into excess.

The pomegranate is the fruit of Venus, a sign of desire and fertility. The quince also belongs to this circle of symbols, embodying the feminine principle and abundance.

Spoiled, rotting fruit, by contrast, reminds us of the inevitability of the end. Of the fact that everything living is subject to time.

In Carlo Crivelli’s painting, the Madonna and Child hold an apple. Beside them are a cucumber as a sign of the Resurrection, and a carnation and cherries as foreshadowings of the Passion of Christ. There are no accidental details here. Each fruit is a word. Each detail is a meaning.

‘What man cannot do, bread can.’

Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 1942

Bread is the quintessence of human food.

Its history underlies a significant part of human history: it is perhaps the simplest, yet most fundamental, element of everyday life and nourishment. Bread connects people with culture, tradition and religion.

For centuries, bread was a powerful political and economic ‘weapon’. From Ancient Rome onwards, those in power closely monitored its availability. Roman bakers, for example, were strictly regulated and controlled by the state. The Roman state went as far as nationalising the baking industry.

In France, more than fifteen hundred years later, recurrent famines became one of the factors leading to the French Revolution.

In the Old Testament, wheat and bread symbolise abundance and fertility. In the New Testament, bread becomes a symbol of God’s supreme gift to humanity: eternal life, the body of Christ in the Eucharist:

‘Take and eat, for this is my body.’

This realist panel painting demonstrates Dalí’s mastery of traditional painting before his turn towards Surrealism. Bread is a foundation of Catalan life. By suffusing objects with mysterious light, the artist turns the composition into an object of deep contemplation. Think of Vermeer and his still lifes: the same virtuosity of realism can be seen here. A simple composition of bread in a straw basket on a cloth stands out dramatically against a dark background. Dalí followed the Spanish still-life tradition in which a domestic scene becomes an occasion for spiritual reflection.

The Basket of Bread, Salvador Dalí, 1926, oil on wood panel.

Dalí painted another Basket of Bread in 1945. This is how he explained the difference:

‘Bread has always been one of the oldest themes of fetishism and obsession in my work — the first, and the one to which I have remained most faithful. I painted this same subject 19 years ago. If you compare the two paintings very closely, you can study the entire history of painting right here: from the linear charm of primitivism to stereoscopic hyper-aestheticism.’

The Basket of Bread, Salvador Dalí, 1945, oil on panel, 13 × 17 cm (3 × 4 inches).

Meaning:

1) Bread is not food. Bread is a ‘nexus of civilisation’

The text presents bread as a connection between ‘culture–power–religion–survival’. It is literally about the life of society: where there is bread, there is order. Where there is no bread, storms begin — Rome, France.

2) In religion, bread = life, gift, sacrifice

The Old Testament: abundance and fertility.

The New Testament: no longer simply nourishment, but a symbol of the supreme gift and Eucharistic meaning — the body of Christ. Bread thus becomes a sign not of the stomach, but of metaphysics.

3) For Dalí, bread is a personal ‘obsession’ and an instrument for discussing art

Dalí makes the simplest object into an object of contemplation.

More subtly still, when comparing the two paintings — 1926 and 1945 — he speaks less about bread than about the evolution of the language of painting: from simplicity of form towards ‘hyper-aesthetics’, an almost optical effect of presence.

4) The principal conclusion for contemporary gastronomy and food art

To be honest, this is a direct warning:

symbols on a plate work only through attentiveness.

Bread can be served as a ‘side dish’, and it will remain silent.

Or it can be served as a sign of home, memory, survival, faith and labour, and it will begin to speak.

‘Bread as language’

Andrei Gritskov. Bread is one of the few foods that it is almost impossible to serve ‘just like that’. It says something anyway. Even when it is silent.

In this sense, bread is a language. An ancient, uncompromising and very honest language. It connects people with home, work and tradition. With things repeated from generation to generation. But bread is also about power. The history of bread is a history of control. Whoever holds the bread holds the peace. It is no coincidence that states regulated bakers in antiquity, or that bread shortages triggered revolutions. People rarely rebel over philosophy. Over bread, however, they do so regularly.

There is a third layer too: religion. Here bread ceases to be ‘food’ and becomes a symbol of life, gift and meaning. At a certain point, it begins to speak about what matters most, without unnecessary words.

Dalí particularly captivates me in this respect. He once wrote:

‘What man cannot do, bread can.’

This is not about cooking. It is about bread’s ability to do something we have forgotten how to do: connect the simple with the eternal.

For food art, this is a good test of honesty.

Bread is an ideal indicator.

If you serve bread as a backdrop, a backdrop is what it will be.

If you understand exactly what you are saying through it — home, memory, work, scarcity, abundance, faith, care — it becomes a statement.

Bread does not like posturing. It cannot be ‘sold’ through presentation.

It works only through meaning and attention. Perhaps that is its strength.