It’s not only the way to one’s heart that is through the stomach. Gabriele Edlbauer and Julia S. Goodman, two artists living and working in Vienna, take a humorous look at the communicability of chicken dishes in their artist book If You Can’t Say It with Words, Say It with Chicken. Similar to the “Engagement Chicken” published by US cookbook author Ina Garten, the 18 recipes included in their book are intended to help readers address emotionally charged announcements.  In making the publication, the authors drew on their very different cultural backgrounds (Jewish-American-Polish-Russian on the one hand and Catholic-Austrian on the other) and developed not only the recipes, but also props, sculptures and in many cases even the tableware, in order to give the dishes additional weight through the artistic serving suggestions. Whether on a seagull-strewn beach in the Hamptons in New York, a sterile doctor’s office in Vienna or a friend’s dimly lit bathroom, the emotional states associated with the recipes led the artists to choose extremely specific, not to say idiosyncratic, locations in which to photograph the dishes. The result is an artist’s cookbook with the humorous and at the same time sincere invitation: “It doesn’t have to be all on you, let the chicken do the talking!”

Verlag Kettler, 136 pages, ISBN 978-3-98741-119-9, edition of 500