Alice B.'s Cook Book

Hearing about the upcoming Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde exhibition at San Francisco MOMA, the scheduled August performances of Stein's and Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints inThree Acts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the just opened: Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, at the Jewish Contemporary Museum, inspired me to unearth my copy of The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. 

Gertrude Stein’s lifelong companion outlived Stein by just over 20 years. Stein died in Paris in 1946. That’s when, legend has it, she uttered her famous last words. She asked, as she was wheeled into surgery, “What is the answer?” Hearing no response, she continued, “In that case, what is the question?” 

A friend and I have a disagreement, but I say, for last words, that beats Oscar Wilde’s “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do,” or any of the other variations of that quote. But I digress.

Toklas is not known for famous last words but she had plenty to say in her 1954 Cook Book.  

One story goes that her publisher approached Toklas and asked her to write a cookbook. They were, according to some accounts, interested in hearing stories of Toklas and Stein and the life they led as much as—maybe even more than—the food. So, if Toklas wouldn’t mind, would she please drop a name or two about all the famous guests and interesting events.

And Toklas delivered.

As much a memoir as a gathering of recipes, her book was an immediate hit. Tradition has it that Toklas was almost at deadline and did not have enough recipes, So she asked friends. One friend, artist Brion Gysin—perhaps intending it as a joke— gave her a recipe of what he called haschich fudge. 

I searched my book, Index and page by page, figuring that it might be interesting to whip up a batch to taste test before heading over to the exhibitions. But—and you can see this coming—there was no there there.

That’s when I found that my copy of the Cook Book, is an American first edition. The London publishers left the fudge in, but before the American edition was published, the New York editors noticed the ingredient “canibus” [sic] and pulled the recipe.

It’s still possible to find the fudge, or what it is more popularly called “Alice B. Toklas Brownies,” on the Web. I’m not providing any links. You can Google it—for research purposes of course. 

Toklas’s recipes are written in a narrative style, not in the style of recipes we are familiar with today; they are a bit hard to follow. But the ingredients are certainly interesting.

Being a big fan of George Sand, I turned to what Toklas called Aurore’s Omelette. (Aurore was Sand’s name: Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin, later la Baroness Dudevant.)

Surely I could whip up an omelette. But not so fast. Aurore’s recipe called for eight eggs, sugar, and heavy cream, folded over a cup of candied fruit and marron glacé and candied cherries and covered with a sauce of cream, made with two more eggs and three more yolks and salt and two cups of milk and two tablespoons of butter and three powdered macaroons and that sprinkled with a half a cup of diced angelica and six more powdered macaroons and three more tablespoons of melted butter, all placed in a "preheated 550° oven only long enough to brown lightly.”

I'll stick to “The real right way for french fried potatoes” and the relatively simple Boeuf Bourguignon (I). But first I’ll fill up with the stories in the Cook Book and the pictures at the exhibition.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

Home | Contemporary Jewish Museum

http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2010/08/brion_gysin_bigger_than_life.html

There there.

Next week, San Francisco MOMA opens an exhibition of modern art once in the collection of Gertrude Stein and her brothers. 

For those who don’t know about Gertrude Stein’s collecting of modern paintings: Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec ..., and the salon she held at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris, befriending and hosting the cultural, literary, and artistic avant-garde, and American expatriates—she is credited for coining the term the “Lost Generation”— Stein is probably most well-remembered by her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, through Toklas’s Cookbook with her famous—or infamous—fudge recipe, and through Stein’s own aphorisms including her best known “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”

Stein is well known in Oakland for another aphorism, one that has been interpreted as a put-down of her childhood city—and of American cities in general. After years of living in Paris, Stein and her life companion, Toklas, were in the U.S. on a speaking tour. When she visited Oakland, her childhood house was no longer there, her neighborhood was not there, everything had changed. No wonder she wrote—in her own inimitable style— "... there is no there there."

Many of us can relate, as we move around in our lives and find Stein was right. No there there.

For a long time, before we all got smarter, before we could check things on the internet, those not in the know, especially those—and I was once one of them—who live across the Bay to the West, said that it means there’s nothing in Oakland.

The statement used to play havoc with Oakland’s sense of inferiority. But now we just play with Stein’s statement. We like to think we know what she meant.

A handful of years ago, Berkeley, the college town to the north of Oakland, decided to commission some works of public art at various sites where the border of Berkeley meets the borders of the cities surrounding it: El Cerrito, Albany, Emeryville. At the junction of Martin Luther King, Jr. Way and Adeline Street, just about one-tenth of a mile from the Oakland border, a sculpture in letters eight feet high spells out two words: HERE and THERE.

The artists, Steve Gillman and Katherine Keefer, meant it playfully. They said it refers to the literary heritage of the area. To the best of my memory, no one in Oakland objected. Yet, just before the sculpture was about to be installed, a controversy arose in Berkeley. Some of the city council members and at least one member of  the arts commission feared the sculpture was meant to signify the superiority of Berkeley over its neighbor. One council person even proposed adding more words and changing the message to: Here, There, and Everywhere. Nice. But not Stein, and without local historic and geographic significance. 

        But that's public art for you, always controversial, even when it isn't. 

Magna Carta at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco

On Saturday, at a wonderful Mother of the Year ceremony at the Oakland Rose Garden honoring the Editor Emeritus of the MacArthur Metro, a friend told me that the Magna Carta is in San Francisco at the Legion of Honor. Yes. That Magna Carta, the one we all remember from 1215 at Runnymede.

I intended to get right over to the Legion on Sunday and have some pictures along with a good story to relaunch this long-delayed Blog. But, arriving home Saturday afternoon, we found the doors open, the house burglarized, computers taken. All those good things that put a major crimp in one's plans.

So, I can't give you my take on the document or the exhibit. It is one of the Magna Carta copies that is considered to be an original. It's hand-lettered on parchment. Imagine doing that. Why, it's sometimes difficult enough for folks in our era to make a decent photocopy.

But those are some of the physical details. The real value of the document is what it stands for, and its inspiration for the U.S. founding documents, especially the Bill of Rights. Especially the right of due process. You know, the right we all enjoy not to be thrown in a dungeon without access to a lawyer, without being told the charges against us, without the right of habeas corpus, without a speedy trial. Whoops. Going too far. Forgot what century I was in for a moment.

And, o.k. I am being a bit sarcastic. But, I'm dead serious about wanting to see this document and to bask in its presence for a bit.

Meanwhile back to changing locks and passwords.


The Legion of Honor is open Tuesday through Sunday.

The Magna Carta | Legion of Honor