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Lee Miller is known as one of the great models, muses, and photographers of the twentieth century, a status soon to be affirmed by the movie “Lee,” starring Kate Winslet, and a major show at Gagosian, “Seeing Is Believing: Lee Miller and Friends,” which will hang her work alongside that of Man Ray, Max Ernst, and more. But after the Second World War, shattered by what she’d witnessed as a combat photographer, Miller hid her photos in the attic of Farley Farm—the centuries-old house in Sussex where she lived with her last husband, the Surrealist artist and curator Roland Penrose—and suppressed her undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder in an orgy of entertaining and cooking. Some sample dishes: Cauliflower Breasts (cauliflower heads in pink mayonnaise and caviar), Gold Chicken (a bird covered with gold leaf), and Penroses (mushrooms topped with pale-pink foie-gras blossoms). Vogue once termed her food “Surrealist cuisine.”
The other day, three people held a Zoom meeting to discuss the opening party for the Gagosian show, which will re-create one of Miller’s farmhouse lunches in a Fifth Avenue mansion. Michael Moore, the gallery’s global-events director, joined Alice Garretti, of Acquolina Catering, and Ami Bouhassane, Miller’s granddaughter, who was beaming in from her Farley Farm office, formerly a guest room where her grandparents had put up friends like Picasso.
“Alice, do you want to talk about food first or design first?” Moore asked.
“Maybe start with design,” Garretti said. A native of Milan, she perched before the screen in a sleek black jumpsuit. “We need to start sourcing all the pieces for displaying the food and the furniture and whatnot. I just wanted to make sure that I correctly interpreted the book.” She and Moore had been sharing a copy of Bouhassane’s hard-to-find book “Lee Miller: A Life with Food, Friends & Recipes.” It’s filled with photographs of the Penroses’ visitors, including the chef James Beard, who once called the couple “the maddest people in the whole world.”
Garretti raced through her ideas: wooden kitchen tables piled with cookbooks (Miller owned more than two thousand), jars of preserved vegetables, and mid-century cooking gadgets. To create “that Surrealist component,” she said, she had sourced Toby jugs, decorative ceramics, and candles shaped like French pastries. For serveware, Garretti was considering “slipwork pottery and traditional Victorian ceramics, and then maybe some very ornate silver.”
Bouhassane nixed the Victoriana. “She didn’t really use Victorian plates,” she said. “It was more artist slipware and Picasso plates.”
“O.K., let me try to get my hands on those,” Garretti joked.
The silver was problematic, too. “The only silverware that she had on her table was the silver King Kong,” Bouhassane said, referring to a plastic toy that Miller had covered in silver and sometimes displayed in a vitrine.
But Bouhassane was on board with much of the rest, including the pastry candles and a duck-shaped tureen. “The duck is brilliant!” she said. “I love him! That would be completely her thing! He is super cute.” She added, “Not so much the pumpkin.”
“Even though it has a little rabbit foot coming out of it?”
“I think that’s just a little bit kind of too trying-a-bit-too-hard, if you know what I mean,” Bouhassane said, keeping her long-dead grandmother’s vision on track. “She’s more subtle than that.”
They turned to the menu. Garretti suggested dishes that Miller typically served for Sunday lunch—smoked fish with horseradish; trifle; green chicken, stewed in celery, leeks, parsley, and peas. “I could use the soup tureen, the duck, to ladle out from,” she ventured. Bouhassane approved.
There would also be Gold Chicken, Penroses, and food inspired by Miller’s time in Cairo in the mid-nineteen-thirties—when she was married to a wealthy Egyptian engineer—including a dessert called Persian Carpet, in which caramelized oranges are strewn with colorful syrups and crystallized flowers.
“That sounds brilliant!” Bouhassane said. “But what are you thinking of serving the Persian Carpet on?”
Garretti hadn’t thought that through.
“Well, that’s the only thing that she used to serve on a silver platter,” Bouhassane said. “But the silver platter was a plate that she stole from Hitler’s apartment. It’s got his initials on it. In the recipe book, there’s a photograph.”
At the end of the war, Miller and one of her lovers, the Life photographer David Scherman, had joined in looting Hitler’s lair in the Bavarian Alps. They’d recently documented the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau. Back in England with Penrose, she also used her trophy for serving drinks. Miller noted at the bottom of the recipe, “It has Hitler’s initials and an ugly eagle on it. No one notices.”
“I was thinking it was just like a regular silver tray,” Garretti said. “We could also not do that.”
“It’d be nice to do it,” Bouhassane said.
“Alice, I think we should go steal one somewhere,” Moore said, “and use it in the spirit of Lee.” ♦
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