The food of love

Long live the great Lanza. It is 50 years (yesterday) since Mario Lanza died and, in commemoration, and in preference to writing something new, this is a diamond-polished opportunity to drag out the Barlines top five opera related foods. We like this game. Here goes:

Presumably ever since people recreationally stretched their leftovers over the bits of wood they were eating off there has been a link between music and food. One discerning clergyman during the enlightenment said that heaven was the sound of 'eating paté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets'. Not the sound of moaning virgins, vanquished infidels or the cadences of the spoken mass, mind, but actual brass instruments.

Many great singers have had a weakness for the pies, and we have heard singing teachers with our own ears endorsing fat as a backdoor route to a natural support and superior sounding vocal chords. Some said that the slimline Maria Callas lost something after she shed the pounds. Deborah Voigt, having lost 100 of them following gastric bypass surgery, said that her singing is no longer 'as effortless'. Some have been cruelly consumed by their appetites, like Mario Lanza, mayherestinpeace, who drank champagne like water. On the other side of the pros arch, we won't go as far as to say that English audiences are dead until they get a few fingers inside them, but anyone who has been to Garsington or Glyndebourne or, indeed, taken a hip flask to a cinecast, can attest to a certain alco-dramatic synergy. Anyway here are the Barlines top five opera-related foods.

1. Tournedos Rossini. No contest, Barlines' all-time number one greatest musical gourmand happens to be our second-favourite bel canto composer. Place a seared fillet steak on a fried crouton, then drown it with foie gras, truffles, demi-glace sauce and madeira. Apparently the recipe was the composer's own, and it was he who gave it to Adolphe Dugléré, chef at the Café Anglais in Paris, a man Rossini later dubbed Le Mozart de la cuisine. In Larousse Gastronomique, you will find entries for omelette Rossini, scrambled eggs Rossini, soft-boiled eggs Rossini and roast chicken Rossini, all of which involve smothering the principal ingredient with foie gras, truffles and demi-glace. The encyclopaedia also credits the composer with inventing a way of stuffing macaroni with foie gras by means of a silver syringe. The story goes that Rossini once said that he only cried three times in his life: when his first opera was booed, when he first heard Paganini play the violin, and when he dropped a truffled turkey in a lake whist picnicking.
2. Georges-Auguste Escoffier's creations in the Savoy kitchens in honour of Dame Nellie Melba are well known – serve your peaches on a bed of vanilla ice cream and add raspberry purée (although originally spun sugar was used instead) and you have Peach Melba. Make your toast thin, dry and crispy and ditto. The three-octave diva once had a serious food-related sense of humour failure when Enrico Caruso, clasping her tiny hand under the table, during a performance of Bohème, in order to pronounce it frozen, pressed a hot sausage into it. The offending piece of meat was hurled across the stage in disgust.
3. Bizet's Omelette. A brilliant spoof of stilted bel canto ensemble writing, the Omelette quartet is from the composer's early opera Dr Miracle. Written when he was 19, for a competition organised by Offenbach, it has long outlived the other 70-odd contenders.
4. Spaghetti alla Caruso. A great commercial ambassador for Neapolitan food to New York, the tenor had a particular fondness of chicken livers. Recipes for the sauce vary, but you can't go far wrong if you fry some mushrooms in butter with some onions and garlic, deglaze the pan with a glass of wine, turn the livers in some seasoned flour and sautee separately while the wine reduces, then add around a tin of tomatoes with some tomato puree before adding the livers. Season and garnish with parsley.
5. JD Wetherspoons' Chicken Korma. Most of the standard venues for small touring opera companies have a J D Wetherspoon round the corner. Forget the idea of not eating before a show, from our own experience most of the band and singers will be in there about an hour and a half before curtain-up.