Artist's Palate: Carsten Höller's Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb

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meat hanging against a grey background and floor with coloured ladder to the left, red gloves, fruit and kitchen utensils on the floor
(Image credit: Zachary Zavislak)

Carsten Höller, the Belgian artist who put slides in Tate Modern’s turbine hall, professes not to have a favourite dish per se. Which might have put a bit of an existential downer on this month’s artist’s recipe page. Luckily, ol’ Carsten is made of more complex stuff than those whose favourite food is for eating. He has a favourite recipe that is a non-recipe. How we laughed. His dish is one that sort of appears in Harry Mathews’ short story, Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double). This begins as a recipe (marinate the lamb for five or six days in 2 quarts of white wine, 2 quarts of olive oil and the juice of 16 lemons) before becoming a shaggy-dog story about a blacksmith’s son and a shepherdess. It’s worth knowing that Mathews liked to hang out with Georges Perec, the laugh-a-minute writer who composed a novel without using the letter ‘e’. Good luck finding the mouthless freshwater fish for the stuffing.

Read Harry Matthews' short story here.

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Photography: Zachary Zavislak. Interiors: Maria Sobrino