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.
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