Several years ago, French food stylist Marc Bretillot filmed his version of the Pollofiat (Fiat chicken), a recipe based on a "formula" from the 1932 cookbook La Cucina futurista.

Marc Bretillot’s recipe for the Fiat chicken instructs ambitious cooks to roast a chicken and stuff it with a red sabayon, and then cover the bird with silver dragées, French chocolate-covered almonds. The final touch: decorate the chicken with cocks’ combs.

But if your future (meal) is looking a little hazy, or you can’t seem to muster the enthusiasm to ingest cock’s combs or beet foam, set your sights a little closer to the kitchen and away from the laboratory. The following recipe isn’t named for a French car, Renault, but for my friend Renaud, a theater actor who happens to use exclusively edible ingredients in his dishes. Renaud told me he found this recipe in a book about Japanese food, and then he peppered it considerably with his dad’s own homemade hot sauce. And unlike the Fiat chicken, you don’t have to concoct this dish on a moving assembly belt.

ingredients:

 1 3-lb. (1.7 kg) chicken, cut into parts and skinned, or 1.2 lbs. (500g) chicken breasts, cubed
 1 medium red onion, or several spring onions, chopped (100g or 1 cup)
 3 tbsp. toasted sesame oil (the kind in Asian groceries)
 2 tsp. ginger oil, or 1 tbsp. chopped fresh ginger
 1 tsp. Sriracha sauce, or other favorite hot sauce
 ¼ cup miso
 3-5 cloves garlic, minced
 2 tbsp. Shao Xing cooking wine
 4 tbsp. sake
 ½ tsp. salt
 fresh chopped cilantro, to taste
 skewers, if using chicken breasts

how to make it:

The day before you want to eat the chicken, prepare the marinade: combine in a medium bowl the onion, sesame and ginger oils, hot sauce, miso, garlic, wine, sake, and salt, and mix well to break up the miso paste. Place the chicken parts or cubes into the marinade, turning them to coat well. Cover the bowl and refrigerate.

The next day, fire up your barbecue a good half hour or 45 minutes before you’re ready to cook. If you’re cooking bone-in chicken parts, adjust the grill rack about 8-10 inches above the flames, which should be quite low by this time. Adjust the grill rack lower if you’re using chicken breasts.

Remove the chicken from the marinade. If you’re using chicken breasts, thread the cubes onto skewers to make kebabs. Grill the chicken kebabs for about 3-4 minutes, then turn them and grill the other side for about the same length of time. If you’re using chicken parts, the grilling will take longer: about 10-15 minutes per side.

May you always remain humble in the face of potential salmonella poisoning: scrape the remaining marinade into a casserole and bring it to the boil, adding a little water to thin it if necessary. Now you’re ready to serve this lovely marinade alongside the grilled chicken. Bon app.

serves 4-6

 Filippo Thommaso Marinetti, an Italian writer of volcanic energy and ambition, launched his series of futurist manifestoes after the turn of the last century, and La Cucina futurista, or Futurist cookbook, written in 1932, was part of his all-encompassing artistic and political program. Rivaling cubism, and then inspiring the dada movement in France, futurism wholly embraced the industrial revolution in all its speed and technological agitation; the automobile was its reigning symbol. Marinetti’s personal ideals included the glorification of war and of violence in general: "Let’s murder the moonshine!" was the title of one early manifesto. Despite the unsavory aspect of its fascist politics – Mussolini was a personal friend of Marinetti’s – futurism was very much a total art, touching on all aspects of culture, including painting, architecture, music, cinema, interiors, fashion, and even food.
 
 The futurist aesthetic removed ordinary objects from their human context. Just as a speeding train was regarded as a work of art, the art of eating was just that: food was separated from its conventional and useful purpose as human fuel. Marinetti’s aesthetization of edibles included the outright rejection of pasta. He claimed that the Italian staple induced lethargy and nostalgia in the eater. Marinetti’s goal was to fight the paralysis of pastism, and he championed antipassatista, a term he cleverly interpreted as "anti-past" as well as "anti-pasta". In his opinion, eating pasta closed the eater’s mind, since laborious digestion drained precious energy from the brain, energy which would be better utilized in intellectual pursuits.
 
 The overriding principle in futurism’s food follies was originality and tactilism: shock value served to enhance the senses and elevate dining to an art form. Meals sometimes began with dessert, or food would be passed around so that people could smell, but not eat, the dish being placed under their noses. Diners were occasionally asked to touch rough objects such as sandpaper or steel wool while chewing, and music was tolerated only to the extent that it was pertinent to the meal’s content. One recipe entitled "Raw meat torn by trumpet blasts" instructed the eater to alternate between biting food and blowing forcefully into a trumpet. (I wonder how many half-gnawed pieces of steak the trumpet players found in their instruments after the event?) Forks and knives were occasionally banned from the table so diners were forced to touch their food, an important tenet of tactilism. In contemporary food culture, The Fat Duck’s proprietor Heston Blumenthal would call this "multi-modal eating," meaning simply that it involves all the senses. The team of enthusiastic chefs and experimentalists up at FoAM in Brussels called their recent event, Open Sauces, a "synaesthetic" dinner. And – quick, now – who said the following: “The real basis [for my inspiration] is the five senses. When customers wait one year and travel 3000 km to come taste a white bean foam, they’re not doing it because they’re hungry. They come for a tactile, gustative, and visual experience. They come for pleasure, but also to be surprised, for the emotion.” Did you guess Spain’s own post-futurist, Ferran Adrià?
 
 So, apart from the era, and of course, fascism – although the maniacal reasons for which current chefs roast their own employees aren’t far from it – what really does separate futurism’s aesthetic from contemporary experimental foodways? Modern-day diners in search of gustatory virginity can try Paris’ darkest restaurant, Dans le noir?, if they want to heighten their other senses by eliminating sight for the span of just one evening. Purists can follow artist Sophie Calle’s monochromatic model by eating only orange food for one month. If you think that lethargy isn’t caused by pasta, but by a generalized palatal boredom (in this day and age of such blasé tongues) then you can always try waking your dormant tastebuds by gleaning inspiration from the current kitchen avant-garde: how about a beet foam, or hot ice cream? Or, if you’re just searching for visual inspiration, the Futurists are on display at Beaubourg.