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The creator of the blog “Salad for President,” Julia Sherman has long found inspiration in artists. Her new book, Arty Parties: An Entertaining Cookbook, offers advice for hosting a memorable gathering. What follows is an excerpt from the book, out October 26.
Tom Sachs is always working, and lunchtime is no exception. More method acting than entertaining, per se, the midday meal at his New York studio is just another scene in the integrated performance of Tom Sachs’s existence. Once a week in his Chinatown space of twenty-eight years, an army of eager art school grads, uniformed in utility overcoats and Nike × Tom Sachs sneakers, pauses for “rice and slop.” This is Tom’s crude description of a proprietary food group that encompasses anything saucy, filling, and flavorful enough to carry a plate of performance-enhancing carbs. Today we are feasting on his very favorite iteration: Louis Armstrong’s recipe for red beans and rice. Prized for its economy, accessibility, and cultural heft, he tells me, “It’s the most efficient meal on earth, but it has soul.” Efficiency with soul—Tom Sachs’s oeuvre in a nutshell.
Walking through the obsessively cataloged racks of materials and supplies feels less like perusing an art studio and more like exploring the biodome, a place where one is expected to enter and never leave. On a Monday morning, a dozen hardworking employees pass through the bunker-like kitchen, grabbing coffee and snacks before they scatter to solder, saw, and weld countless playful endeavors, from a scrappy Chanel manicure station to the trappings of a modern Japanese tea ceremony (think matcha whisk attached to the tip of a drill gun like an animated exquisite corpse). When the handmade collides with the industrial, hot glue, sharpies, and duct tape are the humble ingredients for ambitious works of art. It’s the arte povera of our time. There is no limit to what can be made here, from beans and rice to a mock mission to Mars.
On this Monday morning, I sit with Claire, the designated Food Systems Manager, as she executes her assignment to make an affordable, streamlined meal for twelve hungry assistants and one very particular boss. (It is worth noting: Claire is not a professional cook by any stretch.) Per Sachs’s request, she is decoding a type-written recipe for red beans and rice from Louis Armstrong’s 1952 autobiography, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans. Armstrong is Sachs’s personal idol. “I’ve studied everything about [him],” he explains, “he represents the positive side of the darkest tragedy of American history, and the art of the African diaspora—the joy and love and the magic of it. Without Louis you wouldn’t have rock ‘n’ roll, hip hop. . . . There are so many good things about his life, and this recipe is one of them. He even signed his letters ‘red beans and ricely yours, Louis.’”
This is Claire’s first time preparing this dish, but Armstrong’s recipe has a longstanding legacy in the studio. Rice and beans were integrated into Tom’s elaborate 2012 Park Avenue Armory show, a simulation of a space launch that reimagined every aspect of the Mars Rover in a four-week-long seamless endeavor. A cart serving Armstrong’s recipe (beans selected and anointed by Martha Stewart herself) provided a meaningful meal for “astronauts” and the audience alike. Tom adds, “At NASA’s headquarters in Florida, they all share red beans and rice after a successful launch.” So, to get their collective head in the game, rice and beans were served for studio lunch on a weekly basis for the entire year leading up to the show.
Minutes before the clock strikes 1 p.m., Claire fills wonky pinch pots scribbled with the NASA logo with economy toppings—shredded cheese, tortilla chips, avocado, sour cream, and summer sausage. The beans sit on the stove next to the sacred rice cooker. (Tom assures me, one of the first steps to becoming a successful artist is to “get a good insulated rice cooker.”) An assembly line of hungry assistants snakes through the galley kitchen. They serve themselves and gather snugly around the center table. Work is the topic of conversation—impending deadlines, product collaborations, shipping dates for an upcoming show in Tokyo. When the meal is finished, silence falls and the final choreography ensues—forks are dropped in unison into a center enamelware dish that is circulated counterclockwise to receive any last scraps of food, each plate stacked on top of the last. Tom looks at me and reiterates, “Feeding oneself can, of course, be an art, but sometimes we just have to get it out of the way.”
Reprinted from Arty Parties: An Entertaining Cookbook by Julia Sherman. Photos by Julia Sherman. Published by Abrams.
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