Hash fudge and a fish for Picasso

Alice Gorman looks inside the legendary cookbook of Alice B Toklas

Alice B. Toklas wrote one of the bestselling cookbooks of all time. One reason for its popularity was the inclusion of stories of her 39-year relationship with the great modernist writer Gertrude Stein. Another was its recipe for hash fudge, which made Toklas an icon of 1960s counterculture.

This other Alice died when I was three years old. (The B, incidentally, stands for Babette.) When I realised The Alice B Toklas Cook Book had been published 70 years ago in 1954, I decided it was finally time to become better acquainted.

Toklas was born in San Francisco in 1877. She studied piano at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1907, when she was 29, she travelled to Paris and met Gertrude Stein the day after she arrived. It was love at first sight.

In the book Stein wrote about their life, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Stein has Toklas say: “I was impressed by the coral brooch she wore and by her voice.” The brooch is now in the collections of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge UK, and appears in Pablo Picasso’s famous portrait of Stein.

The women moved in together and presided over one of the most renowned literary and artistic salons of the time, entertaining Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Picabia, Henri Matisse, Edith Sitwell, Natalie Barney, and many others.

Surrealists rubbed shoulders with cubists and modernists, the exchange of ideas lubricated by delicious food and drink. Toklas was in charge of catering, but they also employed a series of cooks for the day-to-day.

In the 1920s and 30s, Paris was crawling with American migrants or “expats”. Stein and Toklas were a tourist attraction. If you had an introduction, you could visit 27 Rue de Fleurus and its incredible art collection.

In WWI, Stein and Toklas drove delivery trucks. In their 60s when WWII began, they decided to wait it out. By this time, Stein was increasingly unwell with stomach cancer. Stein and Toklas moved to the country, but continued to receive visitors and entertain.

Stein died in hospital in 1946 with Toklas by her side. Toklas said in a letter to a friend that it was the end to all happiness. It devastated her. But it also allowed her to come into her own. She started to put together the cookbook that made her practically a household name.

Toklas’ literary output was two cookbooks and a memoir.

The Alice B Toklas Cook Book was much more than a collection of recipes. It was also semi-autobiographical. It included observations of the differences between French and American food cultures, culinary tales involving their famous friends, and stories of wartime life.

In his book The Gourmands’ Way – Six Americans in Paris and the Birth of a New Gastronomy, Justin Spring called it a “brilliant, deftly comic hybrid”.

Janet Malcolm, in her 2007 book Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, says that “most of Toklas’ recipes were and remain too elaborate or too strange to attempt”. The sentiment is echoed by other commentators. Is this a fair assessment?

Certainly, there are recipes like the “hen with golden eggs”, where a boiled chicken is stuffed with mashed potatoes shaped into eggs and fried in butter until golden. With the extras arranged around the chicken on a platter, reduced boiling liquor enriched with butter and cream is poured over.

“This is an amusing way to present a chicken,” Toklas wrote: “a delicious dish”.

For Picasso, Toklas cooked a whole fish and covered it with a design of red mayonnaise, sieved hard-boiled eggs, truffles and herbs. Picasso “exclaimed at its beauty”, but commented that it was more in Matisse’s style than his own.

But then there were recipes as simple as this:

Mutton roasted and basted with port is out of this world. Try it.

So what about the “haschich fudge”? It wasn’t actually an original Toklas: the recipe was contributed by Brion Gysin, in a section of the cookbook with recipes from many of Stein and Toklas’ friends.

Gysin was a Canadian experimental artist, who moved to Paris in 1934. He was expelled from the Surrealists by the autocratic control freak André Breton. In 1954, he opened a restaurant in Morocco.

The fudge does not actually contain hashish, the resin extracted from the cannabis plant. The recipe recommends foraging for wild cannabis sativa or cannabis indica and grinding the dried leaves to add to the fudge.

After the censored fudge recipe was finally published in a 1960s US edition of the book, it was transformed into the all-American brownie.

In 1968, the year after Toklas died, Peter Sellers starred in the movie I Love You Alice B Toklas. A conservative lawyer is given hash brownies by a young woman and turns into a hippie. He tries to return to his conventional life, but finds that he can’t do it any more.

In the final scene, he leaves his fiancée at the altar and runs into the street, saying “there’s gotta be something beautiful out there! There’s got to be. I know it!”

While Stein gradually became part of the literary canon, Toklas entered the annals of popular culture. In the 1990s, both women were elevated to the ranks of the celestial when craters on the planet Venus were named after them.

 

Alice Gorman is Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence