Bobby Baker performance

2 April 1974
St Martin’s School of Art, London

Framed as a commentary on the pros and cons of sentimentality, Sweet and Sour was Bobby Baker’s earliest use of the cookery demonstration format as a framework for a performance. It began with 50 boxed marzipan roses that were sent out to people as invitations. At the performance proper, Baker worked with a mobile kitchen to create sweet and sour pork balls and crystallised roses, which she served to her audience with glasses of rosé to a soundtrack that included a voiceover of poet George R Sim’s ‘Billy’s Dead and Gone to Glory’.