In January 59th, flying from Milan to Chicago, Callas spent several hours in Paris. Thanks to a report in the France Soir newspaper (the artist was accompanied by a crowd of French journalists on the plane), we know that, it turns out, the main purpose of her swift march was … dinner at the Chez Maxim’s restaurant. The meticulous reporter wrote everything down by the minute.
«20.00. Walking walk from the hotel to the restaurant.
20.06. Callas enters the spacious ground floor room and sits at a table set in her honor for fourteen people.
20.07. Panic in the kitchen: 160 flat oysters have to be opened in minutes. Callas only has an hour for lunch.
20.30. She is delighted with the dishes: the most delicate oysters, seafood in grape sauce, then the dish named after her “Lamb Saddle by Callas”, a soup of fresh asparagus and – the highest delight – the soufflé “Malibran”.
21.30. Noise, din, flashlights … Callas leaves the restaurant … “
It was also recorded that the guest ate with excellent appetite and did not hide from others that he enjoyed the meal.
At the time of the described event, the name of 35-year-old Callas thundered on both sides of the ocean, and not only in a narrow circle of opera lovers, which is generally atypical for this “outdated” art. In today’s language, she was a “media person”. She rolled up scandals, flashed in the gossip, fought off fans, complaining about the costs of fame. (“Up there, it’s very uncomfortable … The rays of glory are burning everything around.”) In the eyes of those around her, she has already turned into a “sacred monster,” but she has not yet taken the most deafening step: she did not leave a millionaire for the sake of a billionaire – not because of money, but for great love. But the main explanation: Callas sang, like no one before or after, and she had fans – from the Queen of England to embroiderers.
If in the XX century someone could claim the title of prima donna, it was she, the magnetic Mary. Her voice (magical, divine, exciting, similar to the voice of a hummingbird, sparkling like a diamond – what epithets have not been picked up by critics!) And her biography, comparable to the ancient Greek tragedy, belong to the whole world. And at least four countries have the most serious reasons to consider it “theirs”.
First, the United States, where she was born – in New York, on December 2, 1923, in a family of Greek emigrants, having received a long name at baptism – Cecilia Sophia Anna Maria. Together with her father’s difficult to pronounce surname – Kalogeropoulos – it was not at all American, and soon the girl became Maria Callas. Callas will return to Mother America several times: in 1945, as a student – to take singing lessons, in the mid-50s, already a star to solo on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, and in the early 70s – to teach.
Secondly, Greece, the historical homeland, where, after the gap between her parents, Maria moved in 1937 with her mother and older sister. In Athens, she studied at the conservatory and entered the professional scene for the first time.
Thirdly, Italy, its creative homeland. In 1947, 23-year-old Callas was invited to Verona to perform at the annual music festival. There she also met her future husband, a brick manufacturer and philanthropist Giovanni Battista Meneghini, who was almost thirty years older. The city of Romeo and Juliet, and after Milan, where in 1951 Maria began to sing at the famous Teatro alla Scala, and the old Sirmion on the shores of Lake Garda, will become her home.
And finally, France. Here the queen of bel canto experienced one of the most grandiose triumphs of her life – in December 1958, performing for the first time at the Paris Opera with a recital. The French capital is her last address. In her Paris apartment on September 16, 1977, she met an untimely death – without love, without a voice, without nerves, without family and friends, with an empty heart, having lost her taste for life …
So, four such dissimilar from each other of its main states. Although, of course, in the nomadic life of the artist there were much more countries and cities, and many turned out to be extremely important, memorable, and fateful for her. But we are interested in something else: how did they influence the gastronomic preferences of the prima donna?
Suitcase of recipes
“Cooking well is the same as creating. Anyone who loves the kitchen also loves to invent, ”said Callas. And again: “I take up any business with great enthusiasm and am convinced that there is no other way.” This also applied to the kitchen. She began to cook in earnest when she became a married lady. Signor Meneghini, her first man and only legitimate husband, loved to eat, moreover, due to age and obesity, food, Italian happiness, almost replaced sex for him.
In his exaggerated memoirs, Meneghini described the delicious dishes his young wife, who discovered her culinary talent, indulged in delicious dishes. And supposedly at the stove, for some time now, she spent much more time than at the piano. However, here is a photograph from 1955: “Maria Callas in her kitchen in Milan.” The singer froze with a mixer against a backdrop of ultra-modern-looking built-in wardrobes.
Having become the wife of a wealthy gentleman and gaining more and more fame, and with her fees, Maria more and more often visited restaurants.
Moreover, during the tour. Having tasted this or that dish somewhere, she did not hesitate to ask the cooks and immediately wrote down the recipes on napkins, menus, envelopes, and wherever necessary. And hid it in her purse. She collected these recipes everywhere. From Rio de Janeiro she brought a method of making chicken with avocado, from New York – black bean soup, from Sao Paulo – feijoado, from the chefs of the Milanese establishment Savini, where she visited regularly, she learned the standard recipe for risotto in Milanese. Even when she traveled with Onassis on his palace-like yacht, she still did not escape the temptation – collectors will understand her! – ask the main cook in order to replenish your collection with a recipe for cheese cream with white truffles.
Several years ago, the Italian publishing house Trenta Editore published the book La Divina in cucina (“Divine in the kitchen”) with the subtitle “The Hidden Recipes of Maria Callas”. The story of the appearance of this cookbook is intriguing: a suitcase was allegedly recently found that belonged either to Callas herself, or to her major domo, filled with handwritten recipes. The book includes about a hundred. It is far from the fact that Maria at least once embodied all this culinary wisdom personally, and over the years she has decisively abandoned many of her favorite dishes, including pasta and desserts. The reason is banal – weight loss.
Art requires sacrifice
It looks like a dream, a fairy tale or, as they would say today, a PR move. So after all, photographs have survived – eloquent witnesses of the miraculous transformation of the “elephant” into an antique statue. From childhood and almost to thirty years, Maria Callas was overweight, and then quite quickly, in a year, she lost almost forty kilograms!
She began to “seize” offenses when she was still a girl, believing, and probably rightly, that her mother does not love her, clumsy and short-sighted, giving all the attention and tenderness to her eldest daughter. Shortly before his death, Callas wrote with bitterness: “Since the age of 12, I worked as a horse to feed them and satisfy my mother’s exorbitant ambition. I did everything as they wanted. Neither my mother nor my sister now remember how I fed them during the war, giving concerts in the military commandant’s offices, spending my voice on something incomprehensible, just to get a piece of bread for them. “
“Music and food were the outlets in her life,” writes one of Callas’s biographers, Frenchman Claude Dufresne. – From morning to evening she ate sweets, honey cakes, Turkish delight. At lunch I ate pasta with gusto. Soon – and who will spoil us better than ourselves – she stood behind the stove and came up with her favorite dish: two eggs under Greek cheese. This food could not be called light, but the child needed such a high-calorie diet to sing well: in those days, many were of the opinion that a good singer cannot be thin. This explains why the mother of the miracle child did not interfere with her daughter’s addiction to food. “
By the age of nineteen, Maria’s weight exceeded 80 kilograms. She was terribly complex, learned to hide figure flaws under the “correct” clothes, and to those who dared to scoff, she answered with all the strength of an explosive southern temperament. When one day a stage worker at the Athens Opera House released something ironic about her appearance behind the scenes, the young singer threw the first thing that came to hand at him. It was a stool …
The Second World War died down, there were fewer problems with food, and Maria added another twenty kilograms. Here is how Meneghini, her future husband and producer, describes her impressions of her first meeting in the summer of 1947 at the Pedavena restaurant in Verona: “She looked like a clumsy shapeless carcass. The ankles of her legs were the same thickness as her calves. She moved with difficulty. I didn’t know what to say, but the mocking smiles and contemptuous glances of some of the guests spoke for themselves. ”
And although Meneghini is assigned the role of Pygmalion in the fate of Callas, this is only partly true: if his vociferous Galatea herself did not want to get rid of the shackles of fat, hardly anyone would have been able to influence the obstinate diva. It is known that the director Luchino Visconti gave her an ultimatum: their joint work on the La Scala stage is possible only if Maria loses weight. The main incentive to give up sweet, flour and many other products, to torture herself with massage and Turkish baths was for her only a thirst for new roles. In creativity, and with the appearance in her life of the billionaire Onassis and in love, she suffered from the same bulimia, gluttony, gluttony.
Callas destroyed the excess weight in the most radical way – by swallowing a tape helminth, in other words, a tapeworm. Perhaps this is just a legend, a nasty anecdote. But, they say that at that time she began to write “we” in letters, meaning herself and the worm. It is possible that the tapeworm was wound up in her body from a diet where the main dish was tartare – finely chopped raw meat with spices and herbs.
“She loved to eat, especially cakes and puddings,” testifies Bruno Tosi, president of The International Maria Callas Association, “but ate mostly salads and steaks. She lost weight by following a diet based on iodine-containing cocktails. It was a dangerous regime affecting the central nervous system, it changed its metabolism, but from the ugly duckling Callas turned into a beautiful swan. “
The press, which once made jokes about her generous body, now wrote that Callas had a slimmer waist than Gina Lollobrigida. By 1957, Maria weighed 57 kilograms and was 171 centimeters tall. The director of the New York Metropolitan Opera, Rudolph Bing, commented on this: “Contrary to what usually happens to people who suddenly lost weight, nothing in her appearance reminded me that just recently she was an incredibly fat woman. She was surprisingly free and at ease. It seemed that the chiseled silhouette and grace came to her from birth. “
Alas, “just like that” she did not get anything. “First I lost weight, then I lost my voice, now I lost Onassis” – these words of the later Callas confirm the opinion that the “miraculous” weight loss in the end had a catastrophic effect on her vocal abilities and her heart. At the end of her life, La Divina wrote in one of her letters to the perfidious Onassis, who preferred the widow of President Kennedy to her: “I keep thinking: why did everything come to me with such difficulty? My beauty. My voice. My short happiness … “
“Mia cake” by Maria Callas
What you need:
- 2 cup sugar
- 1 glass of milk
- 4 eggs
- 2 cups flour
- 1 vanilla pod
- 2 tsp with a heap of dry yeast
- salt
- powdered sugar
What to do:
Bring the milk to a boil with a vanilla pod cut in half lengthwise (the seeds must be scraped into the milk with the tip of a knife) and removed from the heat. Separate the whites from the yolks. Grind the yolks white with 1 cup sugar. Pour hot milk in a thin stream, stirring occasionally. Sift flour, mix with yeast and salt. Gradually add flour to the milk and egg mixture, stirring gently. In a separate bowl, beat the whites into a fluffy foam, gradually add the remaining sugar, continuing to beat. Add the whipped egg whites to the dough in small portions, knead with a spatula from top to bottom. Transfer the resulting mixture to a greased and floured baking pan with a hole in the middle. Bake at 180 ° C until the cake rises and the surface turns golden, 50-60 minutes. Then take out the cake, put on a wire rack away from drafts. When it has completely cooled down, it will easily be removed from the mold. Serve with powdered sugar.