Magic on the Menu: Where Are All the Magical Food and Beverage Experiences?

Magic and dining have long been popular forms of entertainment. What is more, both involve some kind of transformation, and yet while the more theatrical aspects of dining have grown in popularity in recent decades, there is a surprising paucity of magical food and beverage experiences out there. In this article, we trace the historical appearance of food and drink and culinary items in the performance of magic. We also review some of the more magical elements of food design that have appeared on menus in bars and restaurants in recent years. We introduce the edible lightbulb dish from the menu at Kitchen Theory Chef’s Table and link it to the stage magic of Derren Brown. We also discuss some of the reasons as to why magical food experiences might be rare in the context of dining. In so doing, our hope is to highlight an intriguing area for future research and innovation. Along the way, we identify some possible candidate approaches for the introduction of edible magic onto the menu in the context of modernist cuisine.

Verzauberte Moderne

„A magician isn’t a juggler, but an actor playing the part of a magician,“ said Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, founder of the first magic theater in Paris. In the transition to modernity, stage magic was a catalyst and battlefield of the conflict between the development of bourgeois culture and the rationalization process in the course of scientific progress on the one hand and the desire for myth, exoticism and spectacle on the other hand. Although it is highly theatrical, stage magic is a marginalized form of art. Sophie Oldenstein examines stage magic in the 19th and early 20th centuries from the perspective of theatre studies. Among other things, she analyzes the scenic practice and trick technique of stage magicians and contextualizes them with the societal, cultural, social und scientific discourses of the period of investigation.

Knots

Chapter 2 concentrates on a crucially catalytic episode in the history of cultural higher space and on a particularly pregnant form at the heart of this episode: the series of experimental seances conducted by the Leipzig-based astrophysicist Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner with the medium Henry Slade and the knot that Zöllner proclaimed as experimental evidence of the fourth dimension. This chapter outlines Zöllner’s theoretical position and its sources; his allegiances and feuds; the experiments themselves and their legacy. Zöllner drew higher-dimensioned space into occultist discourse, a field in which it can still be discerned. This shift requires the mobilization of different resources: attention to the historical phenomenon of popular spiritualism and its discourse networks; consideration of the relations between professionalizing science, spiritualism, and stage magic; and the negotiation of the knot, an object that is thing and idea, form and material, mediator and terminus.