[MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOR: Throughout history, food has served subject matter, inspiration, and, of course, sustenance for artists.

Food has also been the art on a number of occasions.

Today, we are exploring the gastronomic adventures of a most distinctive, distinguished, and delightfully deranged artist, known around the world by just two syllables, Dali.

We're working with a reprint of Dali's 1973 cookbook, "Les Diners de Gala," named after the extravagant dinner parties he would host with his wife and muse, Gala.

There's an introduction to this approach to eating an entertaining or Dalinian gastro-aesthetics by Dali's associate and hype man Pierre Roumeguere.

There follows a caution that the book is, quote, "uniquely devoted to the pleasures of taste."

If you are a disciple of one of those calorie counters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, it says, "close this book at once."

It features 10 chapters of elaborate menus and recipes drawn from the leading French chefs of the famed Paris restaurants of the day, such as Maxim's, La Serre, and La Tour D'Argent.

It's chock-full of sumptuously '70s food photography and fantastical illustrations by Dali.

While many of the recipes might be difficult for a home cook to attempt, or contain hard-to-source ingredients, we found one recipe that seemed to capture the right level of Dalinean excess, while also being within the realm of possibility, bush of crayfish in Viking herbs, from famed Paris restaurant, La Tour D'Argent, open since 1582.

Not without its challenges, to be sure.

They explain, in small print above, that after giving us this recipe, the chef decided that he wanted to keep the exact ingredients a secret.

We present the recipe anyway for its reading pleasure.

So we're going to piece this together as best we can.

The recipe asks us to prepare a fumet, the French term for fish stock, but gives no amounts, so we're also using this quick and easy fish stock recipe from Daniel Gritzer that's posted on "Serious Eats."

We're to start with two pounds of fish bones and heads of lean white-fleshed fish, like snapper or bass, which I called a local fish market to request.

They said they could get grouper for me, which I accepted.

But, after unwrapping it, I realized quickly, it wasn't bone so much, mostly skin and grouper flesh with little tiny pin bones in it.

Not ideal, but since they didn't charge me and we live nowhere near the ocean, I can't really complain.

So let's pretend these are fish bones and cover them with cold water, as we're asked, stirring in two tablespoons of kosher salt and letting them stand for an hour to rinse away any areas of blood in our hypothetical bones.

As our fish soak unnecessarily, we're going to prep our veg, upping the amounts from the recipe so we yield more stock and try to make up for our lack of bones.

First we dice a yellow onion, then a large fennel bulb, followed by three leeks, which we halved lengthwise and gave a good rinse before mincing.

Next up, four stalks of celery diced, and then four cloves of garlic, which we give a good whack, remove the little green sprouts, since they're supposedly bitter, but it probably doesn't matter, and then roughly chop.

We're going to go ahead and drain and rinse our fish parts, since there are no bones really from which to remove blood, and then head over to the range to heat two tablespoons of olive oil in a large stockpot.

In go all of the veggies, which we'll stir until they begin to soften.

After that, in goes our fish, which we stir around a bit.

And then add in two cups of dry white wine.

After this, we move back to the original Dali non-recipe recipe, which, along with white wine, calls for vermouth.

We add half a cup.

And cognac, which we don't have, so we're going to sub in some less fancy brandy.

This might be an excessive amount of alcohol for a stock, but it seems Dalinian and is going to cook off anyway.

When it begins to steam, we add in water to cover it all.

And then in goes parsley, tarragon, dill.

This is the Viking part.

And then salt.

And precisely 10 peppercorns.

The whole thing is going to be ruined if it's not exactly 10.

As we bring this all to a bare simmer and let it cook for about 20 minutes, it's time to get to the why of all of this and learn a bit about its instigator.

Dali was born in Figueres, Spain in 1904, with this really long name that I'm going to share on screen rather than mispronounce in Catalan.

After his expulsion from the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid where he befriended Luis Bunuel and Federico Garcia Lorca, young Dali escaped to Paris, met Picasso, and also the founder of Dada, Tristan Tzara.

There he contributed to surrealist publications and was welcomed into the surrealist ranks by André Breton after the success of his shocking 1928 film, "Un Chien Andalou."

Dali made the film in collaboration with Bunuel, basing it on images from their dreams, a hand crawling with ants from Dali's, and, from Bunuel's, a cloud slicing the moon in half like a razor blade slicing through an eye.

Informed by Freud's then new psychoanalytic theories, the surrealists were attempting to explore the depths of the subconscious through writing and visual art, rejecting the rational and tapping into the powerful thoughts and desires and dreams that lie beneath.

We know some people who made a cool video about it that you should check out.

Dali's name became synonymous with surrealism, although, they would give him the boot by 1934.

And he contributed some of the group's most memorable images and concepts, including his paranoic, critical method, a process he used to systematize confusion, deliberately disorienting his state of mind in order to look at the world in a new way, bringing together disparate images that he would later paint, calling them his hand-painted dream photographs, and disparate objects as well.

In the summer of 1929, Dali had met Gala, the then Russian-born wife of artist Paul Éludard.

And within a year, the two were inseparable, and married by 1934.

Without Gala, Dali said later in life, he would be at the bottom of a pit, full of lice and drops of melted wax.

The couple moved to New York to escape World War II, and there Dali's notoriety ballooned to even greater proportions.

In 1948, they returned to Port Lligat, Spain, where they spent most of the next 30 years, except for winters spent in fine hotels in Paris and in New York City.

The couple was known for their opulent, imaginative dinner parties, attended by many celebrity guests.

And Dali's work continued all the while, expanding from painting to jewelry, fashion, furniture, and a dream sequence for a Hitchcock film.

By the time of the cookbook, he was a household name, as well known for his antics, as his art.

Now that it's simmered long enough, we're asked to skim the scum off the surface of the stock, which I presume you might have more of if you actually have bones in your broth.

After scum skimming, you'll pour the whole thing through a fine-mesh strainer and push through to make sure you're extracting as much flavor as possible.

You can now discard everything but the stock, or do, as I did, and pull out the fish to feed to your dog.

We're going to pour the stock through the strainer one more time as we put it back in the stock pot to make sure we got out any stray bits, which it turns out we do have.

Now that that's ready, it's time for a new segment on art cooking.

And, for it, you're going to need a very special kitchen implement, a box cutter, because a mystery box has arrived, folks, and I am going to unbox it.

Oh, and make sure you've got your stock simmering, which I had forgotten.

But back to the box, which I've carefully opened to find no messages or instructions.

There is a bag, but I can't seem to find where it originates.

A wise person would have maybe made a cut in the bag, but I did not.

I just sort of slid the contents out and soon realized my folly.

Oh, there's the opening.

Oh.

Oh.

It's the live crayfish, of course, which were no mystery to me, really, since I ordered them in advance from a crawfish farmer in Louisiana and timed this whole shebang around their availability and arrival.

But while the contents were not a mystery, they were, nonetheless, surprising, not only in the way they so dramatically unfurled from the box, but also how lively they are, no doubt because I just shocked them out of their cold slumber.

As we attempt to get this situation under control, I start to feel a tremendous amount of guilt for what I'm about to do, which reminds me that Dali was raised by a devoutly Catholic mother and once blamed the religion for his feelings of guilt surrounding sex.

He initially followed in the footsteps of his atheist father, shocking many with his scandalous portrayal of corrupt priests in [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE] and because of another 1929 work he so delicately titled, "Sometimes I Spit With Pleasure on the Portrait of My Mother, the Sacred Heart."

But by 1949, Dali had drifted back to the church, even having a private audience with Pope Pius XII in 1949, who blessed his recent painting depicting Gala as the Virgin Mary.

Dali considered himself a religious mystic, reinterpreting Christianity through the lens of modern science.

His paintings from the '50s explore this position, which he called nuclear mysticism, and follow a classical style influenced by Italian Renaissance masters.

I'm distracting, of course, from the matter at hand, which is the terrible reality that I have to dispatch these crayfish as quickly as possible.

Releasing them into the Indiana winter would not be wise.

I am reminded of David Foster Wallace's brilliant 2004 essay, "Consider the Lobster," in which he confronts the brutal reality of lobster death.

And while these are not lobsters, they're freshwater cousins.

And while I eat animals all the time, I, nonetheless, feel sorry and seek repentance for my sins.

Dali's recipe has us poach the crayfish in the broth for 20 minutes.

But to make this faster, we set up additional pots of boiling water and accomplish our feat in batches.

Then we pull our cooked crayfish and allow them to cool.

We're instructed to chill them overnight, so we wrap them up, put them in the fridge, and break for the day.

24 hours later, our crayfish are cool, we're feeling chipper, and we're ready to assemble this sucker.

We're going to start with the topper.

And you'll need a nice ripe December tomato, a lemon, and a truffle.

First we cut the lemon across the middle in a zigzag pattern, like the picture, and then do the same, a little less successfully, to remove the stem portion of the tomato.

We ordered some whole black truffles, preserved in salt, because the price was right and they were the best reviewed truffles that weren't insanely expensive.

We picked out the largest one, threaded it onto a metal skewer.

We didn't have one with a fancy silver finial like the picture.

Followed by the tomato, and then a lemon.

Now we set that aside and put on our serious face to figure out the engineering of our crayfish bush, starting with a platter, followed by a bowl.

At La Tour D'Argent in Paris, all of this would be silver, of course.

And then I weight down the bottom with a bag of raw rice, one bowl facing down and then another facing up.

Into that one, I put a Styrofoam topiary cone, which I've wrapped in plastic, something I'm positive did not happen at La Tour D'Argent, but heck.

I then fill the base of the bowl with the smaller crayfish.

And then when I reach the lip, start to use the bigger guys and let their claws hang over the side, as in the picture.

I stack and stack, following the picture to the best of my ability.

Phew, this is hard work, guys.

I'm getting warm.

It's a good thing I have on my "All Art Was Once Contemporary" Art Assignment t-shirt, available for purchase at DFTBA.com.

But back to work.

I add in some curly parsley and continue my stacking, then use toothpicks to affix the crayfish to the cone.

I'm deeply curious how they accomplish this at the restaurant in a way that would be pleasant for the eating process.

Anyway, Dali is quoted in the cookbook as saying, "In fact, I only like to eat what has a clear and intelligible form.

If I hate that detestable, degrading vegetable called spinach, it's because it is shapeless, like liberty.

The opposite of spinach is armor.

I love eating suits of arms.

In fact, I love all shellfish, food that only a battle to peel makes it vulnerable to the conquest of our palate."

The book is rife with such descriptions of Dali's approach to gastronomy, which he considers a high art and calls, quote, "The most delicate symbol of true civilization."

With this cookbook, Dali hoped to present to us not the usual drab work of cookery, that field earmarked by mediocrity and characterized by having been reduced until now to its bare physiological attributes, but, instead, a new world, revealed to us in a witty shower of intellectual exuberance and dionysiac jubilation.

For as ridiculous as this crayfish tower might seem, as I constructed it, my feelings of guilt for these creatures lifted.

Instead of being dumped on a table, covered in newspaper, which has its merits, to be sure, these crayfish are being presented in a grand and celebratory manner, showing off their magnificent suits of armor.

This is food taken very seriously.

Dali is quoted in the book as saying, "I know with ferocious exactitude what I want to eat."

Gastronomy takes on a spiritual dimension for Dali.

The book compares the creation of this high cuisine to a ritual that, quote, "sublimes and transcends the profane into the sacred, events into rituals, ingestion, digestion, assimilation, into lethargy, transubstantiation, holy communion, and mass."

It goes on but is perhaps best summarized by this statement by the artist, "The sensual intelligence housed in the tabernacle of my palate beckons me to pay the greatest attention to food."

This process and this object are truly ridiculous.

It's not necessary to boil your crayfish in fish broth and construct them in a bush with a truffle on top in order to enjoy them, but I did enjoy them, and I enjoyed this process tremendously.

Dali was 68 when he published this book, and a larger-than-life figure, a master of self-promotion, a courter of controversy, derided by his critics as having peaked in his youth, and descending into commercialism and greed.

But the mythos of Dali and the reality of Dali are presented in this cookbook as one.

Here, we are granted access into this world.

We paid the greatest attention to food, and the results are triumphant, transcendent, and positively Dalinesque.

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