Depending on how you regard Carlo Cracco, the Italian chef is either a culinary visionary unafraid of pushing the envelope in pursuit of innovation, or someone who has leant too far into the avant-garde and has a touch of the genius madness to him. The cover of his striking new book does nothing to dispel either of these views, depicting a clown sat at a table overflowing with dishes, knife and fork aloft and with a large grin on his face.
In fact, Cracco in Galleria, which tells the story of how the chef upped sticks from his Milan restaurant on Via Victor Hugo and opened in the city’s Galleria di Milano, an impressive building built in 1861, does much to show Cracco as both a visionary and something altogether more eccentric. Forget the clown, other images depict Cracco staring seriously into the camera with miniature cutlery and crockery stuck to his face, and another of him supposedly being hit round the back of the head with a frying pan by chef Luca Sacchi. This isn’t your ordinary cookbook, thanks largely in part to creative studio TOILETPAPER that worked on the project and which is known for its vivid, witty and often surreal images.
What it is then is a visually stimulating book that attempts to illustrate the mind - as well as the cooking - of Cracco. As the Vincenza-born chef says himself at the beginning of his book: “If you’re not a creative person, the Milanese won’t even look at you, so we try to have our say every day, working tireless to come up with recipes that don’t just repeat the tired old Italian stereotypes.”
Few would dare accuse Cracco of anything so banal. Dishes that appear in the book include tongue terrine in a brioche crust, where boiled veal tongue is served in millefeuille form between layers of pear mostarda, fresh pear, black truffle and slices of lardo, and a dish of nori, veal tongue and date, designed to elaborate on the centuries-old Italian tradition of boiling meat (il bollito). Others include a signature marinated egg yolk, the restaurant’s version of butter, and a tomato, mozzarella and basil salad that looks more like a cocktail (pictured) than a salad and which contains capers, dried anchovies and oregano and which is described as a ‘brand new perspective’ on classic Italy.
As with the chef’s elaborate and artistic style of cooking, his book is bold, colourful and flamboyant - a feast for the eyes. Dishes are portrayed in various eye-caching ways - on a gloved mannequin’s hand; defying gravity on a vertical plate; bone marrow in the place of the handset of an old phone (pictured) - with the use of cross sections and close ups emphasising the attention and technique required to bring his vision to the plate.
Whether anyone will try their hand at the collection of recipes within the book - his section on sauces is actually very useful - is besides the point. Books on fine dining restaurants and their chefs all too often focus on the skill and technique required to make the various dishes but lose something else in the process, that sense of imagination, flair, creativity and inspiration that underpins everything about their approach. This cannot be said of Cracco in Galleria. Flicking through its pages, the next more colourful and striking than the last, you feel you have taken a stroll into the mind of Cracco and will want to taste the dishes as made by the man himself.
You may not get the clown, but Cracco in Galleria has a rare sense of humour - and showmanship - that makes it one of the most singular cookbooks of the past decade.
Cracco in Galleria
Carlo Cracco with Luca Sachhi, TOILETPAPER and Gabriele Zanatta
Standout dish: Timbale flammand
Number of pages: 288
Publisher and price: Phaidon, £44.95