Jackson Pollock’s Artful Eating

“Dinner With Jackson Pollock: Recipes, Art, and Nature”

By Robyn Lea

Assouline, $50

“Dinner With Jackson Pollock: Recipes, Art, and Nature” is not so much a cookbook as it is an assemblage, or collection of memories, imagined scenarios, and help from friends. The second half of the title is a more apt description of the book: “recipes, art, and nature,” for they are most certainly the primary focus and the “meat” as it were of this good-looking, well-researched tome.

The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center is one of the best and most revealing artists’ residences one can tour. Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West has the same atmosphere, that of the artist/writer having just stepped out for a dip (or a drink!), all the tools of their trade in place, jazz records scattered about by the stereo, and the kitchen visible nearby. Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s property is exquisite in its simplicity, rich in landscape and water views, but fairly sparse as a structure. (For their first year in residence they lived with only a coal stove for heat and cooking.)

When Robyn Lea, the book’s photographer and author, began her research, only 16 recipes turned up. But as she and the center’s director, Helen Harrison, began digging deeper, they found recipes squirreled away inside books and magazines; family recipes, especially from Pollock’s mother, Stella, a prolific cook, and well-spattered pages in “The Art of Fish Cookery” and “The Pocket Cookbook.”

Pollock was well known for his baking skills; his recipes are written carefully and neatly on unlined paper. Krasner’s, on the other hand, are scribbles on envelopes, haphazard and careless, accurately indicating that she wasn’t too fond of cooking.

Entertaining was another thing entirely. During their 11 years together in the house in Springs, Krasner put together lots of dinner parties for fellow artists. After Pollock’s death in a car accident, she bought a bigger dining table and continued to court collectors and curators, keeping the Pollock and Krasner flame burning bright.

Jackson Pollock’s family had an 18-acre ranch in Chico, Calif., and another when they moved to Phoenix. His father grew everything, his mother cooked everything, and Jackson’s job when a mere tot was to collect the hens’ eggs every morning. So it’s not surprising that he was an avid gardener in Springs and loved clamming in Accabonac Harbor. He was especially proud of his eggplants and would present them like jewels to friends.

While the recipes on the whole are not particularly unusual or different, they are evocative of the time and provide a glimpse into the couple’s lives. Yes, a cherry upside down cake is made with canned cherries, but they always were in the ’40s and ’50s. And a poached pear recipe concedes that Krasner probably made it with canned pears. Actually, she was an imperious delegator of culinary duties for parties. She would give a recipe to a friend, tell him or her exactly how it should be presented on the platter, and then have the friend make it and deliver it to the party.

Pollock, like most bakers, was meticulous in his bread baking and pie making. His apple pie won first place at the Fisherman’s Fair one year, and people would clamor and bid for it well in advance in subsequent years. In perusing the recipe, it looks like a good one in that he cooks the apples before placing them in the pie shell, which is labor-intensive but does cut down on fruit shrinkage once baked in the pie. The crust is also all butter, not a combo of butter and shortening, which means it would have been difficult to work with but oh so delicious.

Reading about their friends and their parties felt familiar as well. Their friend Lucia Wilcox (or Lucia Anavi-Cristofanetti, Lucia Kabbaz, or just plain Lucia) was also a great friend of my grandparents. Berton Rouche and Jeffrey and Penny Potter were friends with my parents, as well. Lucia would make Syrian-style picnics for her husband, Roger, and Pollock to take to the beach. They would clam for hours, while enjoying her stuffed grape leaves, hummus, and baba ghanoush.

There are recipes from Rita Benson, Elaine de Kooning, Hans Namuth, and John and Josephine Little. Pollock helped John Little fix up his Duck Creek Farm where Mr. Little planted a kitchen garden and fruit orchard.

The photography in the book is beautiful. There are a few vintage images of the couple together, one of them doing dishes, he with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Some pages have a snippet of a Pollock painting contrasting with an image of a recipe — green and white spatters across from a pea salad with Russian dressing or a recipe for cornbread across from a very yellow detail of his studio floor. “T.P.’s Boat in Menemsha Pond” looks as delicious and abstract as the creamy lobster stew on the next page. Krasner’s “Milkweed” is color-coordinated with a close-up of a can of Pittsburgh paint.

Of course it would be foolish to ignore the demons that possessed Mr. Pollock, even in a “cookbook,” because some of the “cures” offered by a pharmacist of that time play a part in the recipe collection. In an attempt to cure him of his alcoholism, it was suggested he subscribe to a diet of a soy-based emulsion, salt baths, mineral injections, Brussels sprouts, dandelion juice,  raw vegetables for lunch, and cooked vegetables for dinner. Perhaps a diet suitable for a Puritanical vegan of today, but sadly not something that would have cured his disease.

“Dinner With Jackson Pollock” is large, heavy, and padded like a coffee table art book. But open it up and you will find it is spiral-bound, with scraps of recipes, photos, and anecdotes, just like a homey collection of family and friends’ recipes would be. Jack the Dripper may have never found peace or a cure for his drinking, but as this book demonstrates, his time in Springs had moments of deep friendship, quiet clamming, and memorable meals shared around a little mosaic table, laden with homegrown vegetables, fruit, and bread from his own hands.

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