Piero Fornasetti Fleming Joffe Porcelain Recipe Plate, Calcutta Minestone. 1960s.

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Culinary Satire: Fornasetti's 'Calcutta Minestrone' Recipe Plate
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This is an exceptionally rare and humorous Piero Fornasetti Porcelain Plate, part … Read more Culinary Satire: Fornasetti's 'Calcutta Minestrone' Recipe Plate
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This is an exceptionally rare and humorous Piero Fornasetti Porcelain Plate, part of a limited promotional series created for the New York leather goods firm Fleming Joffe. Titled "Calcutta Minestrone," it satirizes both culinary snobbery and the conventions of recipe illustration.

• Design and Subject:
The plate features a whimsical but meticulously drawn illustration of a large lizard or monitor, surrounded by the ingredients for a complex soup, including a pumpkin and carrots. The text details a lengthy, preposterous recipe where the lizard's body is the main, and absurd, ingredient:
"The food faddist is a pathetic creature... He is insensitive to the artistry of cookery... cooking, though perhaps a humble and homely art, is nevertheless an art, for the cook is fundamentally, like the artist, is to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts."

• Aesthetic: The design showcases Fornasetti's signature mid-century graphic style, combining realistic, naturalist illustration with surreal textual commentary and a strong black-and-white print accented with the color of the porcelain itself.
• Marking: The reverse is typically marked with a Fornasetti factory stamp, identifying it as one of the highly collectible mid-century pieces.

• Artist/Designer: Piero Fornasetti (1913-1988)
• Title: Calcutta Minestrone
• Series: Fleming Joffe Recipe Plate Series
• Date: circa 1960s
• Material: Transfer-printed Porcelain
• Dimensions: 10 1/4 inches Diameter

Historical Context: High Art and Corporate Wit

This plate is a fascinating product of a unique collaboration between a visionary artist and an unusually sophisticated corporate client.

Fornasetti's Satirical Voice
Piero Fornasetti was renowned for using everyday objects as a vehicle for irony and philosophical commentary. The "Calcutta Minestrone" plate, like others in the series, uses the format of a genuine recipe to deliver a humorous, wordy manifesto about the nature of cooking, art, and the absurdity of food faddists. This piece is less about food and more about the pompous intellectualism of the mid-20th century, all delivered on a luxury piece of tableware.

The Fleming Joffe Patronage
The plates were created as exclusive New Year's gifts for the clientele of Fleming Joffe, a New York company specializing in exotic leather goods. Fornasetti created a total of fourteen different "improbable recipe" designs over seven years for the firm, establishing a legacy of corporate patronage that valued wit and high art.
Notably, Fleming Joffe's creative circle included other major figures: they commissioned advertisements and showroom designs from Andy Warhol, and combined his drawings with the light verse of poet Ogden Nash. This commission thus places Fornasetti in a rare and distinguished group of artists connected to a single, progressive mid-century American client.

References
• Fornasetti, Barnaba (Editor). Fornasetti: The Complete Universe. Milan: Rizzoli, 2010. (Documents the Fleming Joffe promotional plates and the theme of the "decidedly improbable recipe").

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