Spoerri Reads Rumohr. The Spirit of Culinary Art Revisited

Two centuries ago, Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, one of the leading German art historians of 19th Century Art connoisseurship, believed that cuisine could be analyzed according to Winckelmann’s notions of style. He used similar expressions codified by the German archaeologist to define and give a structure to Greek art. However, Rumohr’s treatise on culinary art, Geist der Kochkunst (The Spirit of Culinary Art, 1822), was rather unfortunate for his polemic against the over refinement of French cuisine. In the 1960s, Daniel Spoerri reads Rumohr’s book and quotes it repeatedly in his Gastronomic Itinerary for a couple on a Greek island, through countless mixing together of footnotes and decontextualizing heterogeneous sources. The gastrosophic – not scholarly – treatise Geist der Kochkunst is minutely examined and revisited in a form as unsystematic as a diary: the diary of the artist and his partner’s life in the island of Symi, registering each recipe, meal, snack, drink of any kind prepared by the couple, recording the intentionality of an everyday experimental countercuisine. Looking back to scholarly-like sources (Rumohr, Athenaeus of Naucratis), Spoerri significantly chooses two unusual examples of ‘cookery-books’ quoting heterodox sources) but with neither distance, nor authority principle, with the attitude of a Universaldillettant. The essay proposes a backwards, palindrome reading of Spoerri’s Journal (starting from the footnotes, going chronologically backwards to the sources and cross-references) as the ideal way to decrypt the reasons of the book, the spirit of culinary art, the dialogue – without distance – between the artist, the English translator, their intertwined sources.