It was a mid-week school day in Madras. The bell had just rung, declaring the start of the next lesson. My class trooped downstairs to the art room. The teacher had already drawn the assignment on the board. I have forgotten what exactly the drawing was of, but I remember it was the kind of thing that was less exotic in an Indian setting, like a dancing peacock, leaping tiger, blooming lotus, or a Ganesh with droopy eyelids. We spent the next forty minutes recreating it on paper and queued up to his desk to get our work marked. Tutting and clicking, he delivered judgement on our malformed reproductions – Bs and Cs mostly, the odd A. The boy standing in front of me handed over his sheet. His drawing had taken up barely a third of the page, the remaining space filled with an oversized, multicoloured, 3D-fonted signature. The teacher flew into a rage. Even the greatest artists make their signatures unobtrusive, he roared, marking a proportionately oversized D without even giving the drawing a glance.
I wonder what he would have made of the trend in contemporary art for artists to place long, tedious and often sanctimonious explanations next to their work. There was a time not that long ago when all we had was the title, discreetly placed to leave interpretation to the eye of the beholder. Has the market now become more competitive to require this add-on guff as a differentiator? Or is it simply a sign of the times we live in where everything has to be overexplained?
Sometimes, a little explanation is not such a terrible thing. We wouldn't have given the candy pink squiggle on King's Road a look in, if the description hadn't told us it morphed into the word Love when viewed from a certain angle. The sculpture was among the installations scattered across Kensington and Chelsea for a summer-long outdoor exhibition. We walked the length of the road. Many of the displays were familiar animal sculptures which had been displaced from other parts of London. But I didn't feel too shortchanged, inspired by an exhibit called Tutti Frutti to make the eponymous ice cream.
The new series has now been named! Welcome to Cuisine en Plein Air, thanks again to the branding muse Rachel who has gone cross-channel this time and injected a little Gallic vim into her method.
I chopped a handful of green, yellow and red glacĂ© cherries. I whisked together ½ cup each of milk powder and milk. I poured 1 ½ cups of whipping cream into a mixing bowl and beat with an electric whisk until stiff peaks had formed. I added a dribble of vanilla extract, mixed, then poured in the milk mixture and mixed again. I tipped two-thirds of the cherries into the bowl and folded them into the cream. I poured the cream into a tray and sprinkled the remaining cherries on top. I covered with clingfilm and left the tray in the freezer overnight.
I returned the tray to room temperature for a few minutes. I scooped, topped with more chopped glacé cherries and served. The absence of sugar in the recipe, whether intentional or fortuitous, was an excellent call; the sweetness of the fruit alone was enough to handsomely carry the dish. A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom!
Krishnan
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