‘Eating Sea Urchins’: The lost collaboration of Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel
Sea urchins are notoriously hard to come by. Once abundant along the Mediterranean, these delicious Echinoderms (what kinda’ derm?) are easily caught in shallow waters with handheld nets. On the islands in the Bay of Naples, for example, it’s not uncommon to hear children squealing with excitement as they seize a particularly sizeable specimen, soon to be served on a bed of linguine tossed in olive oil. Sea Urchins were the favourite dish of famed surrealist Salvador Dalí, who even starred in a film about catching and preparing them directed by Luis Buñuel.
Menjant Garotes was discovered in a biscuit tin belonging to Dalí’s sister, Ana Maria, shortly after her death. This touching home movie features the Dalí family catching and eating sea urchins in the Spanish town of Cadaqués, a stone’s throw from the artist’s eccentric home in Portilligat. Shot around the time of L’Âge d’Or, the film offers the wannabe sea urchin hunter various instructions on how to succeed. These are divided into several chapters, or “secrets”.
In Secret Number Four, “the secret of the sea-urchin slumber,” Dalí instructs us on the optimal conditions for catching these fruits of the sea. “To begin with, you will eat three dozen sea urchins, gathered on one of the last two days that precede the full moon, choosing only those whose star is coral red and discarding the yellow ones,” he begins. “The collaboration of the moon in such cases is necessary, for otherwise not only do you risk that the sea urchins will be more empty but above all that they do not possess to the same degree the sedative and narcotic virtues so special and so propitious to your approaching slumber.”
He continues: “For the same reason, these sea urchins should be eaten preferably in the spring — May is a good month. But in choosing the time, you must make the gathering of the sea urchins coincide with the precise moment when the first tender new beans are picked, and this varies according to the years. These tender beans, prepared in the manner called à la Catalane, are to be the second course of your meal, and I guarantee you that this is a dish worthy of the ancient gods and quite Homeric, for I am convinced that the Greeks of antiquity were acquainted with it and therefore that they were also familiar with chocolate—for, strange as this may seem, the tender beans à la Catalane are in fact prepared with chocolate as a base.”
Sadly, Menjant Garotes is not available to watch online. You can watch another of his home movies below.
