Fornasetti Fleming Joffe Recipe Plate, Snake a La Cleopatra

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Fornasetti Fleming Joffe Recipe Plate, Snake a la Cleopatra
Italy, 1960s–1974

A snake winds four times around this plate in … Read more Fornasetti Fleming Joffe Recipe Plate, Snake a la Cleopatra
Italy, 1960s–1974

A snake winds four times around this plate in black and gold, having swallowed a string of pearls at one end and holding a fork in its jaws at the other. Written in the white spaces between its coils, in Fornasetti's own hand-lettering, is a recipe for cooking it. The recipe is entirely serious in tone and entirely absurd in substance, and it tells you to remove the hide and save it for shoes.

Best line on the plate, buried in the middle of the method: let it simmer during the day slowly while painting. Fornasetti wrote a recipe for a painter's working day and put it on a dinner plate.

These were never sold. A New York leather company gave them to its best clients as New Year presents, two a year for seven years, boxed in a case made to look like hide. The same company had Andy Warhol doing its advertising. Hang it in a kitchen, a dining room or a study, or lean it on a shelf where people will pick it up and start reading — which they will, because everyone does.

Dimensions
Diameter: 10¼ inches (26 cm)

A Little History
Piero Fornasetti (1913–1988) made something over eleven thousand objects from his Milan studio, most of them built on old engraved illustration put somewhere unexpected. This series of fourteen recipe plates was commissioned by Fleming Joffe Ltd. of New York, a small dealer in exotic skins, and the other designs are just as improbable: Python a l'Orange, Coquille Crocodile, Elephant Ear Soup, Tortoise Risotto. One is named for a synthetic leather DuPont launched in 1963, which was a joke at the expense of the client's own competition.

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