Last month I read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Which, as we discussed, was actually written by Gertrude Stein. "Gertrude's writing, Alice's voice", as Elodie Barnes expresses it.

This one IS by Alice B. Toklas (the B stands for Babette, by the way). It was published in 1954 (eight years after Stein's death, and 13 years before Toklas's), and it became one of the bestselling cook books of all time...


This is the 1960 edition I borrowed from Internet Archive. The cover art (The Cock and the Knife, 1947) is by Pablo Picasso

It was written, says Toklas, during a bout of jaundice, as "an escape from the narrow diet and monotony of illness". She had long thought about it, though, and had long been a devotee of recipe books: "When I was still a dilettante in the kitchen they held my attention, even the dull ones, from cover to cover, the way crime and murder stories did Gertrude Stein". Even during World War II, when food was in short supply, she found solace in reading elaborate recipes in huge cook books: "Through the long winter evenings close to the inadequate fire the recipes for food that there was no possibility of realising held me fascinated -- forgetful of restrictions, even occasionally of the Occupation, of the black cloud over and about one, of a possible danger one refused to face."

She definitely had the savoir-faire to create such a work (US culinary expert James Beard describes her as "one of the really great cooks of all time"). But while Stein was alive, Toklas held back. Stein was the writer.

Toklas was devastated by her partner's death, but it allowed her to emerge from Stein's shadow sufficiently to contemplate creating a book. And financial pressure was an additional motivation.

The format she lighted on, which alternates recipes and reminiscence, is highly engaging. Toklas is not afraid to enthuse -- "Mutton roasted and basted with port is out of this world. Try it" -- but she is also very down to earth. She's very honest, for example, about the violence required by cooking in the days before we started to routinely buy fish and poultry ready-killed: "Murder and sudden death ... can never become acceptable facts. Food is far too pleasant to combine with horror. All the same, facts, even distasteful facts, must be accepted and we shall see how, before any story of cooking begins, crime is inevitable. That is why cooking is not an entirely agreeable pastime."

But she's also very funny, even about this. Having faced down her first carp, she recalls: "The carp was dead, killed, assassinated, murdered in the first, second and third degree. Limp, I fell into a chair, with my hands still unwashed reached for a cigarette, lighted it, and waited for the police to come and take me into custody..."



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THE RECIPES

There are lots of little gems here:

-- Aspic de Foie Gras, Salmon Sauce Hollandaise, Hare a la Royale, Hearts of Artichokes a la Isman Bavaldy, Pheasants Roasted with Truffles, Lobster a la Francaise, Singapore Ice Cream, Cheese, Berries and Fruit -- this is a lunch menu served in a private home... And what is Singapore Ice Cream, you might ask? Ah well, there's a recipe... It seems the secret is diced ginger ("as completely drained as possible of its syrup"), and chopped pistachio nuts. It sounds a little like kulfi to me... On a related note, the recipe for "coconut marmalade" -- sugar, coconut, and eggs -- sounds as though it might make something resembling kaya...

-- "Marinate for an hour 100 frogs' legs in 1 cup olive oil and 1 teaspoon salt..." I find the idea of dealing with 100 frogs' legs quite overwhelming...

-- "Long ago the Figaro which was then the newspaper read by the fashionable world asked well-known society women to contribute recipes which were to be printed in a special colum. When Madame Pierlot was asked to be one of the contributors she sent the recipe for Gigot de la Clinique." Not only do you marinate your leg of mutton, but you also inject it with cognac and orange juice...

-- There's a lovely chapter concerned with tracking the origin of gazpacho... After eating a couple of different versions in Spain, Toklas searches for a cook book with a recipe. "Oh, said the clerk, gazpachos are only eaten in Spain by peasants and Americans." Toklas and Stein have gazpacho in Malaga and Seville, in Cordoba and Segovia. Friends in France say what she is describing is chlodnik, a Polish iced soup. No, said others, it's the Turkish cacik. Or again maybe the Greek tarata. Toklas's theory is that these recipes had gone from place to place with armies: "Had the Poles passed the recipe to their enemy the Turks at the siege of Vienna or had it been brought back to Poland much earlier than that from Turkey or Greece? Or had it been brought back by a crusader from Turkey? Had it gone to Sicily from Greece and then to Spain? It is a subject to be pursued." And she gives us recipes for seven Mediterranean soups, all to be served ice-cold.

-- Hot chocolate, as served by the Red Cross nuns to the wounded in Nimes in World War I: "3 ozs melted chocolate to 1 quart hot milk. Simmer for 30 minutes; beat for 5 minutes."


For the French food is an art, Toklas tells us. For the Malaysians, too... This is Pulau Ketam, 2012, famous for its seafood

-- Some of the dishes she describes have delightful names: Scheherezade's melon; Mutton chops in dressing-gowns; Omelette in an overcoat; Giant squab in pyjamas (a squab is a young pigeon); Chicken in half mourning; Green peas a la good wife...

-- The transformation of the recipe for "Dulce" from Senora B (who had been courted by General Sherman no less) is a good example of Toklas's art. It starts out like this: "In a huge copper pan put quantities of granulated sugar, moisten with cream, turn constantly with a copper spoon until it is done. Then pour into glasses. Senora B. said the longer it cooked the better the flavour would be." Toklas develops her own (more specific) version: "Put 2 cups sugar and 1 cup thin cream in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Then at once lower the heat and cook very slowly, stirring continuously for about an hour. It will become heavy and stiff and will have the colour of its flavour. There are people who like it a lot." This "stirring continuously for about an hour" is not untypical... Many of these recipes sound like very hard work...

-- The chapter entitled "Little-Known French Dishes Suitable for American and British Kitchens" reveals "the real right way for French fried potatoes".

-- There's a wonderful chapter containing recipes from friends. I liked the sound of Mary Oliver's Wedding Anniversary Ice Cream: "Take 12 crystallised mint leaves, 1 cup creme-de-menthe, 1 oz crystallised ginger, 1 quart thick cream and freeze." I could do that... And Princess D. de Rohan contributes a recipe entitled "Hot toddy for cold night (attributed to Flaubert)". You need 2 jiggers of Calvados and 1 jigger of apricot brandy (and, yes, I had to look up what a jigger is, and it turns out it's a shot, ie 1.5 ounces). Here's what you do: "Warm over flame. Slowly pour in a jigger cream. Do not stir. This is the recipe of the eighteenth-century Auberge du Vieux Puits at Pont Audemer."

-- This is also the chapter that famously includes Brion Gysin's "haschich fudge (which anyone could whip up on a rainy day)". Gysin was a British-Canadian painter, writer, and performance artist, and his fudge consists of dried fruit, nuts, spices, butter, sugar -- and "a bunch of canibus sativa", pulverized: "This is the food of Paradise... It might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies' Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR [Daughters of the American Revolution]... Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient. Obtaining the canibus may present certain difficulties..." This was the recipe that later "made Toklas an icon of 1960s counterculture"... But at the time it caused a big stir in America. (Actually, the fudge doesn't contain "haschich", which is the resin extracted from the cannabis plant. Rather, it suggests foraging for wild cannabis sativa or cannabis indica, and grinding the dried leaves.) There's a lovely clip here, in which Toklas reads the recipe, and discusses the problems its inclusion brought. She swears it was all innocently done... Yes, Alice. Of course it was.


The Folio edition, 1993, with illustrations by Natacha Ledwidge

THE REMINISCENCES

I don't think that anyone who reads this book can doubt that Toklas was a good writer in her own right. Look at this bit of description, for example:

"We stayed on at Saint Remy; summer was over, autumn was even more beautiful. If the mistral howled it not only made the sky bluer but all the landscape more vivid. One day we walked to a small Gothic chapel. In a bare field there was a single very large leafless and symmetrical Japanese persimmon tree heavily laden with its deep-orange fruit, silhouetted against the brilliant sky. It remains one of the loveliest of memories."

There's a lovely, lyrical section on the vegetable gardens at the beautiful old house where they lived for a while: "For fourteen successive years the gardens at Bilignin were my joy, working in them during the summers and planning and dreaming of them during the winters... The small strawberries, called by the French wood strawberries, are not wild but cultivated. It took me an hour to gather a small basket for Gertrude Stein's breakfast... The first gathering of the garden in May of salads, radishes and herbs made me feel like a mother about her baby -- how could anything so beautiful be mine... There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown."

She's dauntless is Alice... Butchering things, removing pests (with the aid of "determination, newspapers, a broom and pincers"), climbing up on stacked wine cases to gather beans... Nothing defeats her.


Bilignin

Toklas's book is full of little windows onto the past. Famous names are scattered throughout, of course: Sherwood Anderson; Thornton Wilder; Pablo Picasso (she decorated a bass for him, and he "exclaimed at its beauty", but said the colours were more appropriate for Matisse...); Scott Fitzgerald, whom they visited in Baltimore, and "who, with tea, offered us an endless variety of canapes, to remind us, he said, of Paris". Also during their trip to the US, "at an epicurean dinner at Miss Ellen Glasgow's I was paralysed to find myself placed next to Mr James Branch Cabell, but his cheery, Tell me, Miss Stein's writing is a joke, isn't it, put me completely at my ease so that we got on very well after that."

And what a great answer to the problem of airline food: "We were to fly out to California and the restaurant packed us a box of food that was the best picnic lunch ever was. It would be a pleasure to be able to order something approaching it when taking a plane today." How wonderful... It sounds a little like the amazing bento boxes the Japanese buy to eat on the train. But can you imagine doing that on a plane today? Think how long it would take to get all those lunch boxes through security...

There are a few recollections of World War I, when she helped Stein with her distribution work (but much of this era has already been covered in The Autobiography).

She also offers us several amusing stories about procuring staff (increasingly difficult in Paris between the wars). One femme de menage leaves because she's terrified by the avant-garde pictures in the studio... Another quits because she had been used to working for Americans, and Stein and Toklas "lived French". After several changes of personnel, Toklas says, "we commenced our insecure, unstable, unreliable but thoroughly enjoyable experiences with the Indo-Chinese". She refers throughout this section to "Chinese cooking". Presumably she means Vietnamese cooking, but I'll defer comment on this until I've read The Book of Salt [POSTSCRIPT 21 May: Here is that post.] Of course, the outbreak of World War II puts paid to such domestic arrangements: "The old life with servants was finished and over."



Where she really stars is in her account of life in occupied France. It's a wonderful mix of tragedy and practicality. The beginnings: "The main road was filled with refugees, just as it had been in 1914 and in 1917. Everything that was happening had already been experienced, like a half-awakening from a nightmare." But then she gets back to describing what she did with the two uncooked hams that they'd been able to procure from the village...

We're presented with a fascinating account of provisioning in the Bugey (a region between Lyon and Geneva) in those dark years: Rationing, requisitioning, bartering, gardening (and dealing with the gluts -- there's a recipe that involves 28 lbs of tomatoes); and despite everything, hunger for a while, until the black market organizes itself; after hunger, monotony; and from time to time they have Germans billeted in their home.

Food is a way of resisting, however. At one point the Germans prohibit fishing. But their butcher has access to crawfish, and brings quantities. The recipe for "Swimming crawfish" involves 60 of the things... She describes two village shopkeepers: "They said it was their patriotic duty to sell what the Germans forbade. In which case was it not mine to purchase what they offered?"

By the autumn of 1943, however, everyone is impatiently waiting for the invasion and liberation. One lovely anecdote: "When the Resistance derailed the engine of a train entirely composed of huge vats of Spanish wine destined for Switzerland our Mayor, fearing he would be unable to safeguard it, requisitioned the wine. He divided it among the 250 members of the local Occupation Forces and the 1,500-odd inhabitants. We each received twelve quarts. Gertrude Stein's and my share were put aside for Liberation festivities. The servants, no mean connoisseurs, reported that it was indeed very good."

Next, they have Italians billeted on them. They sell her cigarettes on the black market (the Germans allowed a tobacco ration to men but not women). And the officers give them three pounds of Parmesan, with which they make fondue. There's a sad coda, though: "The Italians stayed until their country accepted the Armistice. When they heard the news, they tore up their military papers and left singing. There were about six hundred Italian soldiers in the neighbourhood and the frontier was only 125 kilometres away. We hoped they would cross it safely. Later we heard that they had all been killed by the Germans."

Eventually, Paris is liberated. Gertrude Stein goes off to speak to the US from the American radio station set up in Voiron. Meanwhile, Toklas makes "liberation fruit cake", which sounds excellent. "A fruit cake should have an inch of almond paste spread over the top before frosting the entire cake," she decares. But she can't get almonds, so she uses hazelnuts instead.

How sad that Stein died the following year... All the joy of liberation, and then they just had one more year together.


Stein and Toklas, 1934

*_*_*

The closing paragraphs are first moving, and then roguish:

"Our final, definite leaving of the gardens came one cold winter day, all too appropriate to our feelings and the state of the world. A sudden moment of sunshine peopled the gardens with all the friends and others who had passed through them. Ah, there would be another garden, the same friends, possibly, or no, probably new ones, and there would be other stories to tell and to hear. And so we left Bilignin, never to return.

"And now it amuses me to remember that the only confidence I ever gave was given twice, in the upper garden, to two friends. The first one gaily responded, How very amusing. The other asked with no little alarm, But, Alice, have you ever tried to write. As if a cook-book had anything to do with writing."

This ironic little sally brings up the question of voice... Justin Spring recounts how this might have been a challenge for Toklas:

"As she prepared to write her own cookbook, Toklas was grappling with another, more fundamental problem: her identity as a writer. Throughout their life together, Stein had been the writer, and Toklas had no desire now to usurp her deceased partner in that role. Moreover, there was the question of confidence: Toklas had not published anything since she was seventeen, when she had 'sold a joke for five dollars to Life.' And, in truth, since the 1933 publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Toklas’s voice actually seemed to belong more to Stein than to herself, for Stein had captured it so brilliantly in that fine and amusing bestseller... Given such a precedent, could Toklas come up with an equally brilliant narrative strategy, one that could respond to Stein with the same playfulness that Stein had once responded to Toklas -- and with an equal (and equally tacit) testimony that, above all else, the two were one?"

Her recipe/recollection format -- light and amusing, enthusiastic but self-deprecating, full of loving but understated anecdotes about her dead partner -- seems to answer that question with a triumphant affirmative.



*_*_*

Food scholar Alice McLean is quoted here as saying that Alice and Elizabeth David "claimed the pleasures of gastronomy previously reserved for men".

If that's true, then one oddity, for me, is that it's strangely anti-feminist at times. Early on, for example, we're told: "In France it is not unusual for some man in the family not only to be interested in the menu and the cooking of it but occasionally to wish to supervise or even cook a dish. This raises the standard of cooking in the home, the mistress is spurred to greater effort by a constant gentle criticism." Rex Stout comments in a 1954 review: "Living so long in France is, I suppose, an acceptable excuse for advice so flagrantly un-American, but doesn’t Miss Toklas want American housewives to buy her book?"


Millie von Platen's illustration for Stout's article (and I've seen photographs of Toklas in a hat very like this one...)

She also praises a restaurant in Columbus, Ohio: "The cooking was beyond compare, neither fluffy nor emasculated, as women's cooking can be, but succulent and savoury."

This is a minor quibble, though. All in all The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book is a triumph of its genre: "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."

Deservedly so.