Frozen in time: Salvador Dalí’s dinner parties, Paris, 1973

The artist’s foray into food and cookery was just as surreal as his paintings, as his recently republished book Les Dîners de Gala illustrates

Salvador Dalí’s late-life foray into cookbook writing would not be to everyone’s tastes, even the artist himself acknowledged. Dieters and the health-conscious, especially, he warned away. “Close this book at once,” he orders in the introduction to Les Dîners de Gala from 1973, when he was 68. “It is too lively, too aggressive and far too impertinent for you.”

Yes, Dalí, the surrealist master, once compiled a cookbook and it was the culmination of a lifelong fascination with food. As a child, he determined he would be a chef and, even after he chose to pursue art as his career, the edible would be a recurring feature. On arrival in New York in 1934, he waved a two-metre-long baguette at paparazzi. He loved the “logarithmic curve” of cauliflowers, and in December 1955, drove from Spain to Paris in a white Rolls-Royce Phantom II jammed with 500kg of the brassica.