Can a recipe become a work of art? From the futurist "Carneplastico" to nouvelle cuisine, the story of the gastronomic cutting edge. Are you a conservative or a progressive at the table? The last echoes of Futurism came to the kitchen in 1931 when Marinetti and Fillìa published The Manifesto of Futurist Cooking, a manual for a good and proper table. This abolished knives, forks and pasta, encouraged people to accompany meals with music, poetry and fragrances, and reinvented the Italian gastronomic vocabulary by introducing terms that are still in use today. "Carneplastico" is the mainstay of the gastronomic neo avant-garde against pasta. The pure shape and the pleasure of an architectural balance brought to the table had a decidedly revolutionary flavour in the Italy of the early 1930s, which saw Pellegrino Artusi as the stovetop prophet. "Carneplastico" is "a large cylindrical meatball made of roast veal, stuffed with eleven different kinds of cooked vegetable... arranged vertically in the centre of the plate, crowned with a layer of honey and supported by a ring of sausage that rests on three golden balls of chicken". After the Futurist fury, it was the turn of Nouvelle Cuisine and the great chefs who led the way. Every dish became a refined combination of shapes, colours and flavours. We come full circle with Ferran Adrià, the father of molecular gastronomy. He was the first chef invited to participate as an artist in dOCUMENTA, one of the most prestigious contemporary art shows. In his restaurant, Elbulli, Adrià makes experimentation into an art form. He combines flavours, shapes, consistencies, colours and temperatures like no one ever dared to do before: polenta ice cream, vegetable nougat, caramelised ravioli with Fisherman's Friend sauce, solid coffee. And if Futurism came from art to the kitchen, for Adrià the path is in the opposite direction: El Bulli is being transformed from a restaurant into a foundation for gastronomy research.

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