Professor Butter Beard and Andy Warhol’s “Campbell Soup Cans”
“I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.” – Andy Warhol (referring to Campbell Soup)
“Sometimes you just crave a chocolate chip cookie,” says my friend Cait. “Everything you make is so fancy. How about just a regular chocolate chip?” Well, I agree. When I crave a cookie, it is the memory experience of being in my grandmother’s kitchen. The big windows open to the smells of spring dirt being turned over in the vegetable garden and washed laundry waving on the clothesline. All the baking ingredients being gathered on the red Formica kitchen tabletop. Clicking the paddles into the ancient hand mixer. Staring into the oven through the yellowed oven door window, watching for the perfect moment to pull the trays and swoon over the delicious aroma. Then counting the seconds until you can pop the first bite into your mouth without burning your tongue on hot melted milk chocolate.
I would make them again. And again. And again. I would imagine them every Friday as I walked home from grade school, knowing that after I sneaked a 4pm viewing of “Dark Shadows,” our father would pack my brother and I into the car to drive to Gramma Mac’s big house for the weekend. Dad was the football and basketball coach, so there was a game every Friday and then the coaches and their wives would gather for vodka/tonics and a late dinner. By then, my brother and I would be nestled on Gramma’s big sofa, bowls of popcorn at hand, ready to watch “Bewitched” and then the evening horror movie with “Houlihan and Big Chuck,” knowing the cookies were close at hand on that red Formica kitchen table.
Comfort foods demand to be eaten again and again. I understand Mr. Warhol when he talks about lunch bowls of Campbell Soup every day for twenty years. Although, I must say, it took me decades to learn to drink it in a mug as opposed to a bowl!
Mark Rozzo, writing for Vanity Fair writes, “On February 22, 1987, Andy Warhol died at age 58 following a gall-bladder operation at New York Hospital. That day, in something of a cosmic coincidence, Irving Blum, the Los Angeles gallerist who in 1962 had given Warhol his first solo exhibition as a fine artist, was busy preparing to ship the 32 paintings from that show to the National Gallery, in Washington, D.C. for a new Warhol retrospective.”
For nearly 25 years, Blum had owned the works, keeping them in their original slotted crates and occasionally hanging them in his dining room in a large grid (four rows of seven or eight across). They depicted soup cans—more to the point, the 32 varieties of Campbell’s condensed soup that were available in 1962, from “Bean with Bacon,” to “Cheddar” and “Tomato.” Blum, after watching Warhol work on the paintings in his Manhattan studio while pop songs and arias blared simultaneously from a record player and a radio, took the chance of inviting the relatively unknown Warhol to show the whole set at his Ferus Gallery, on North La Cienega Boulevard.
A year earlier, Warhol, according to Rozzo, believed he was about to have his big breakthrough with a batch of paintings inspired by comic books, but Roy Lichtenstein had beaten him to the punch. “He did it so much better,” Warhol admitted. While searching for a new plan, the interior designer Muriel Latow charged Warhol $50 for one idea: make paintings of money. She then tossed in a second idea for free: Campbell Soups.
The Ferus Gallery opened its show of Warhol’s 32 soup can paintings on July 9, 1962. According to modern art historians, this one-man exhibition marked the West Coast debut of Pop Art. Rozzo writes, “It was a big-bang moment for Pop and for everything that came after. It was also the big-bang moment for the artist himself: the night Warhol became Warhol.”
I grew up on those soups. I can remember opening the kitchen cupboard and seeing stacks of the cans standing just like the grid created by Blum and Warhol. I never grew bored with them, just like I never ever grew bored with chocolate chip cookies. My recipe has morphed over the years, but just as Dorie Greenspan writes, “I’ve been making these cookies for decades. If they look like Toll House Cookies, it’s because that recipe, the mother of so many chocolate-chippers, was my starting point.” Soup and cookies. You are right Cait. Sometimes you just crave a little comfort.
Butter Beard’s Dark Chocolate Chip Cookies
Five dozen cookies
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp chili powder
1 tsp fine sea salt
1 cup granulated sugar
2/3 cup dark brown sugar
8 ounces (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 Tbsp instant espresso (hydrated in 1 Tbsp warm water)
2 tsp vanilla paste
2 large eggs, room temperature
12 ounces dark chocolate chips
2 cups toasted nuts, coarsely chopped (I prefer hazelnuts)
1) Toast the nuts in a non-stick skillet, shaking often, and then cool them completely and coarsely chop. (I prefer hazelnuts, but try pecans, almonds, walnuts or pine nuts)
2) Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and line your sheet pans with parchment paper.
3) In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, chili powder and salt.
4) In a small bowl, hydrate the instant espresso powder in the warm water. Set aside.
5) In a standing mixer, mix the granulated and brown sugar with the paddle and then cream with the room temperature butter.
6) With the mixer on low, add in the espresso, vanilla and then the eggs – one at a time.
7) Add the dry mix and mix on low until evenly combined.
8) Remove the bowl from the mixer and fold in the chocolate chips and the chopped nuts.
9) Portion (I use a scoop) onto the sheet pans – one dozen per pan – at least two to three inches apart.
10) Bake six minutes, rotate the pans, and bake for five more minutes until the cookies puff and then deflate.
11) Cool on the pans for five minutes and then remove to a wire rack to cool completely.
Warhol at work on a soup-can silkscreen at the Factory, New York City, 1965. Left, Photograph © The Nat Finkelstein Estate; Right, By Steve Schapiro.
