For Picasso, the question of steak and potatoes was essentially architectural. In his earlier meals, the entire flavor range suggested a gastronomic palette of geometric leftovers, though these works were saved from formulaic reduction by an irrational light achieved through chopping, dicing and mashing.

In the meals from the end of 1909, particularly the lunches, Picasso seemed to plan in terms of fundamental vegetarianism; the effect of shimmering energy and indeterminate form was the consequence of making each course a little snack, rather than a whole meal--a dietary joke that unlocked a whole new dimension of post-prandial energy.

The first truly great cubist lunches were prepared by Picasso in the summer of 1910. Before then, it had been said, primarily as a result of the cooking of Georges Braque, that cubist meals banished flavor and replaced it with mass. But no longer. Picasso's lunches from that summer were a panoply of Mediterranean lucidity. No meals could be more gastronomically articulate, yet at the same time more flavorfully withdrawn and suggestive. They looked like what Whistler might have produced had he given up parboiling and mastered the Cuisinart.

The most remarkable instances of Picasso's ability to conjure up a gustatory presence from a negligible cupboard were the three cubist banquets he prepared in the autumn of 1910. Even in these multiple viewpoint preparations, the ingredients are never comprehensive or conclusive, and the small, varying facets register only tiny, fastidious changes in the cook's outlook.

These meals didn't set out heroically to gastronomize a new space and a new time; they demonstrated instead the power of a small set of cliches--- a tilted wedge that means "cheese," the repeated wavy horizontal strokes and ovoids that mean "bacon and beans"--- to conjure up an entire meal.

The revelation of subtlety and humanity in the seemingly hermetic cubist cuisine is the real triumph of Picasso's cooking. Cubist cookery thus recalls less the austere self-sufficiency and the ground-clearing ambitions of other early modernist cooks than the real spirit of early potluck--- the marriage of wild speculation with an essential empiricism that shies away from any certain or conclusive statement, and makes each course, from soup to nuts, say "What is this?" rather than "This again?"