Gala and Salvador Dalí in costume at a Surrealistic Night in an Enchanted Forest party at the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey, 1941. Julian P. Graham Collection of Photographic Negatives. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley Library Digital Collections.
In December 1972, guests arriving at the Château de Ferrières, the French country estate of Baron Guy de Rothschild and his wife, Marie-Hélène, encountered a scene that seemed to defy reality. The château was illuminated to appear as though it were engulfed in flames. Inside, household staff dressed as cats prowled the grand staircase, while an elaborate maze of cobweb-like ribbons stood between the guests and the evening’s festivities. Those who lost their way could enlist the assistance of a feline attendant.
The evening’s eccentricities began with the invitations. Against an image of a cloud-dotted sky, the text was printed in reverse, requiring guests to hold the card up to a mirror to decipher the details of the Rothschilds’ Dîner de Têtes Surréalistes. Even the dress code departed from convention, calling for “black tie, long dresses and surrealist heads.”
The evening was an extravagant expression of Surrealism’s fascination with dreams, absurdity, and the unexpected. Yet for the artists and writers associated with the movement, such experimentation was hardly confined to lavish social occasions. It extended to the objects they created, the clothes they designed, the food they prepared, and even the games they played. As the holiday season nears, their unconventional approach offers inspiration for reimagining the familiar traditions of the season.
At Ferrières, Le Goût Rothschild took on a decidedly Surrealist guise. Fur-covered plates, taxidermied tortoises, and other improbable decorations transformed the dining room into a theatrical setting. Such details recalled the work of Surrealists like Méret Oppenheim, who famously covered a teacup, saucer, and spoon in fur in 1936. That same year, her Ma gouvernante (My Nurse) presented a pair of upturned high-heeled shoes, bound together and arranged on a silver platter like a trussed bird.
Salvador Dalí and his wife, Gala, brought a similarly theatrical sensibility to entertaining. In 1941, the couple hosted A Surrealistic Night in an Enchanted Forest at Monterey’s Hotel Del Monte. For the event, Dalí reportedly requested 4,000 burlap sacks, 2,000 pine trees, 24 headless mannequins, and the largest bed in Hollywood. The ballroom became a forest, with animal-headed mannequins stationed behind the guests and a long dining table extending from the enormous bed, on which Gala reclined. Among the centerpieces were ice sculptures of animals, a live porcupine in a cage, and an assortment of pumpkins, squash, and melons.
For artist and designer Quentin Jones, founder of House of Quentin, the holidays offer an opportunity to embrace that same spirit of reinvention. “I think the festive season is a good excuse to be a little more playful,” she says. “If your vases or bowls have faces, every time you fill them with flowers, fruit, or foliage, they get a joyous new hairstyle.”
While the Rothschilds used baroque lighting to create an extraordinary spectacle, a similar sense of drama can be achieved on a more intimate scale. JJones favors wall-mounted candles, particularly those incorporating Surrealist motifs such as hands or eyes. “It feels strangely decadent, yet absurd,” she says. More generally, she advocates lighting the dining room entirely by candlelight. “It creates an immediate sense of theater and makes any night feel like a celebration.”
The Surrealists’ appetite for experimentation even extended to the food itself. At Ferrières, an ostensibly traditional menu featured dishes with decidedly uncanny names, including “extra lucid soup,” “goat cheese roasted in post-coital sadness,” and “Lady and Sir Loin.” Green bread accompanied the meal, while dessert took the form of a reclining nude sculpted from sugar. At Dalí’s enchanted forest, guests were served sole in satin high-heeled slippers, while another course arrived beneath a silver cloche that, when lifted, released an array of live frogs.
Dalí’s fascination with the pleasures and peculiarities of eating found its greatest expression in his 1973 cookbook, Les Dîners de Gala, and its companion volume, Les Vins de Gala, published four years later. Combining elaborate recipes with his own fantastical illustrations, the former celebrated food as an intensely sensual experience. As Dalí warns in its opening pages, “If you are a disciple of one of those calorie-counters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, close this book at once; it is too lively, too aggressive, and far too impertinent for you.”
The recipes themselves are no less extravagant, ranging from frog pasties and veal cutlets stuffed with snails to elaborate arrangements of seafood. Among the more theatrical offerings is "Mussels Surprise", in which the shells are filled with rice, saffron, cream, and caviar, then tied shut. When the strings are cut at the table, the mussels spring open to reveal their contents, turning the simple act of serving dinner into a performance.
For Mina Stone, food editor at Cultured magazine, chef, and cookbook author, the sensory experience of a meal begins well before the first bite. Color and aroma, she suggests, are as important to its appeal as flavor, and even the simplest ingredients can produce striking effects. Beets stirred into yogurt yield what she calls a “natural hot pink,” recalling the Shocking Pink made famous by Surrealist fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, while crushed pistachios from Greece, Turkey, or the Middle East offer an almost neon green.
Stone also finds something inherently Surrealist in the forms of certain foods. Oysters and shrimp, for example, are “clean and cold,” with an almost otherworldly appearance. “Those creatures are all surreal, just by their nature,” she says, likening them to insects of the sea. It’s a fascination Dalí shared: his famous Lobster Telephone (1936) brought together two seemingly unrelated objects, transforming a crustacean into an unlikely household accessory. Stone finds another source of visual intrigue in romanesco, with its intricate, repeating geometric patterns. “It’s a fractal,” she explains. “You’ll look at each little cone, and it goes on forever and ever and ever.”
A theme can also provide the freedom to depart from traditional expectations, Stone explains. Recalling a dinner she devised around a friend’s collection of darkly imaginative short stories, she describes the pleasure of interpreting the material through food, without feeling constrained by the conventions of a traditional menu. The experience gave her “a total sense of freedom,” she recalls, and the realization that “I can interpret this however I want.”
That freedom wasn’t limited to the table. For A Surrealistic Night in an Enchanted Forest, Dalí encouraged guests to arrive dressed as figures from their dreams, primitive animals, or inhabitants of the forest. The resulting costumes were as fantastical as the setting itself: one guest wore lettuce on his head; another balanced a pineapple atop a wire basket. Dalí himself wore a black leotard adorned with anatomical illustrations of the heart, lungs, and kidneys, while Gala presided over the festivities wearing a white unicorn's head.
At the Rothschilds’ Surrealist Ball, art provided a more explicit source of inspiration. Marie-Hélène de Rothschild wore an enormous stag’s head adorned with diamond tears, while actress Jacqueline Delubac concealed her face behind a green apple in homage to René Magritte’s The Son of Man (1964). Hélène Rochas, the fashion and perfume executive, appeared with a gramophone headdress designed by Yves Saint Laurent, and art patron Charlotte Aillaud wore a copper mask created by Claude Lalanne. The intersection between Surrealism and fashion wasn’t new: decades earlier, Dalí had collaborated with Schiaparelli on creations such as the Shoe Hat (1937), which transformed an everyday accessory into an improbable piece of headwear.
The evening’s entertainment could be every bit as theatrical as the costumes and décor. At the Hotel Del Monte, Dalí staged a macabre Dance of Death, in which two performers emerged from a wrecked automobile, wrapped in bloodied bandages, before jumping into a routine choreographed by the artist himself. The unsettling spectacle was a far cry from commonplace dinner entertainment.
For those seeking a less elaborate form of amusement, the Surrealists’ fondness for parlor games offers plenty of inspiration. Among their best-known inventions was Exquisite Corpse, in which participants took turns adding drawings to a folded sheet of paper, concealing their contributions until the finished composition was revealed. In Would You Open the Door?, guests considered whether they would admit an imagined visitor — perhaps a famous artist, literary hero, or historical villain — and explained their choice. Other games, including Questions and Answers and One Into Another, similarly encouraged players to abandon conventional logic and embrace the possibilities of chance.
Few holiday gatherings could hope to rival the extravagance of the Rothschilds’ ball or Dalí’s enchanted forest. Yet their example offers a welcome alternative to the familiar conventions of holiday entertaining, encouraging hosts to approach even the most established traditions with a sense of curiosity and invention. The pleasure lies not in reproducing the Surrealists’ extravagance but in adopting something of their spirit. After all, the most memorable gatherings are often those in which something goes delightfully off script.