For the #1954Club: The Alice B Toklas Cookbook

In 1907 Alice B Toklas left San Francisco for Paris. Her friend and travelling companion Harriet Levy knew the Stein family, and on 8^th September, just one day after they had arrived, she took Alice to visit Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo at their apartment on the Left Bank.

For Alice, meeting Gertrude was a coup de foudre, love at first sight. She heard alarm bells ringing in her head, and knew she was in the presence of genius. The next afternoon she and Gertrude walked in the Luxembourg Gardens and ate cakes and ices at a superlative patisserie. From that day until Gertrude’s death in 1946 they were inseparable.

Alice and Gertrude with their poodle, Basket

Alice believed, above all, that Stein’s genius must be nurtured and protected. She did everything for Stein so that Stein could work;

Everything Gertrude wanted, Alice tried to provide….her work of the day was to serve Gertrude. She was secretary, cook, publisher, housekeeper and ministering angel. (Diana Souhami, author of Gertrude and Alice [1991], in her introduction to the Folio edition of the Cookbook)

And this, of course, included all the food. The Alice B Toklas Cookbook records the numerous wonderful, extravagant meals they ate (or rather, Gertrude ate, as Toklas herself ate hardly anything), not only in the Stein apartment on the rue de Fleurus and at their country house at Bilignin in the Jura (where Alice readily spent an hour at dawn each morning just picking the strawberries for Gertrude’s breakfast, but told guests to pick their own) but also in restaurants far and wide, and at the homes of their many wealthy friends.  

Yet the Cookbook did not appear in print until eight years after Gertrude’s death, and Alice wrote it simply to raise money to pay her electricity bills (now there's an idea..). Gertrude had left Alice her entire art collection, a bequest that included work by many of the most important artists of the time, from Matisse to Braque and Picasso. Alice was free to sell any or all of the paintings, but she could not bear to – she felt that the collection must be kept intact to honour the woman she had loved for nearly 40 years. She had mooted the idea of a cookbook before, but Gertrude had ridiculed her and refused to countenance it; there was only room for one writer in their relationship, and it was not going to be Alice. Now that one writer was no more.

At the time of writing her book Alice was actually suffering from jaundice and having to stick to a very restricted diet – she complained to friends of ‘bending over an imaginary stove’ and of;

…nostalgia for the old days and old ways and for remembered health and enjoyment (which) lent special lustre to dishes and menus barred from an invalid table, but hovering dream-like in invalid memory.

She wrote the whole thing in just four arduous and ‘tormenting’ months and was not pleased with it when it was finished. She thought it dull. But whilst this may have been a difficult time for Alice, her book is the polar opposite of dull; it is instead an unusual and compulsively readable insight into the lives of two eccentric, determined women and indeed the entire artistic community in early 20^th century Paris. The recipes, fascinating as they are, are just part of it.

The chapters of the Cookbook are as eccentric in their titles and content as their writer; Food to which Aunt Pauline and Lady Godiva led us is all about Stein and Toklas’s adventures in Gertrude’s succession of cars. (She never learned to reverse ‘She said she would be like the French army, never have to do such a thing’), Dishes for Artists records the Tricoloured Bass she invented for Picasso (who was forever on a diet), while Recipes from Friends features, among contributions from people like Dora Maar, Francis Rose, Carl van Vechten, his wife Fania Marinoff, Pierre Balmain and Virgil Thompson, the notorious recipe (supplied by artist Brian Gysen) for Hashish Fudge (‘it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club’ wrote Gysen. It is said that Toklas’s UK publisher, Michael Joseph, had no idea what hashish was. When Gysen suggested that Gertrude’s experimental writing may have been drug-fuelled, Alice was shocked and furious.) Another contributor, the poet Mary Oliver, instructs one to;

Place two dozen plucked larks in an oven.

The Murder in the Kitchen chapter, meanwhile, discusses the necessary executions of fish and fowl and compares this to Stein’s love of crime stories. Alice’s description of killing a carp brings to mind the famous lobster scene in Julie and Julia.

While the book is stuffed with recipes, almost every one of which requires colossal quantities of butter, cream, eggs and alcohol (always ‘the best kirsch’,‘the best white Curacao’ and a panorama of liqueurs, many of which I’d never heard - Roselio, anyone?), its real charm lies in Toklas’s memories and anecdotes; almost every dish is placed in the context of where it was eaten and in what company. Alice and Gertrude knew everyone in the artistic circles of pre-war Paris; Stein held weekly salons, to which came Hemingway, Paul Bowles, Scott Fitzgerald and many more. She purchased the works of many emerging artists; there were so many paintings hanging on the walls that when, at the outbreak of the Second World War, she and Toklas made a lightning visit from Bilignin to Paris to try to protect them, they discovered that they simply could not lay them all flat on the floor. (On the same visit they failed to find their passports, but did unearth the pedigree papers for their pet poodle – later in the war these enabled him to claim his own rations.)

Toklas and Stein at home in Paris (image: Man Ray)

At the salons, it was Toklas’s job to provide the sustenance and to entertain the wives in a separate room, while Stein held forth to the men. The salons themselves were only set up (by Alice, who else?) because otherwise people kept dropping in at random and disturbing Gertrude’s work. Now they knew they must only come round on Saturday evenings. But if all this makes Alice sound like a doormat, she certainly did not see herself as such;

She was the power behind the throne…The gatekeeper to Gertrude Stein, the promoter of their fame, the shaper of their public image. (Diana Souhami)

In Paris and in the country the two women always (or at least until the outbreak of the second world war), had a cook. Alice ordered, (sometimes) shopped and supervised, but her main role was ‘to pass judgement on the finished dish’ (Souhami.)  It would have been unthinkable for them not to have help. Alice devotes an entire chapter to Servants in France, their idiosyncrasies, aptitudes and failings. Some stay, some don’t; one flounces out as soon as she sets eyes on the paintings in the studio (which Alice has forbidden her to enter.) After the departure of the last of three Breton sisters, Alice employs their first Chinese cook; her stories of Trac and his successors are hugely entertaining. When, in 1917, they return to Paris for just a few days and discover that their cook has left, they resort to hiring an hourly one. At one point they have a Polish cook, but complain that her food is ‘too heavy and too rich for a daily diet’ – this from someone who routinely lobs pounds of butter and pints of cream into every dish.

The recipes themselves are unlikely ever to be attempted by a modern cook – it’s hard to imagine Julia Powell working her way through these coronary-inducing dishes as she did those of Julia Child. Frogs’ Legs with Cream requires 100 frogs’ legs, butter, a cup of hot heavy cream mixed with half a cup of bechamel sauce, another load of butter – and some parsley. For Oeufs Picasso ‘eight eggs and half a pound of butter…rather more if you can bring yourself to it’ – and this was supposed to sit well with the great man’s special diet.

Picasso, Stein and Toklas at Bilignin

Not only are the recipes rich, they are written in the style of the time, one a million miles away from that of the 21^st century food blogger. Nothing is organised, little is explained – so, halfway through a recipe, Alice suddenly tells us that we should have marinated truffles in champagne two days previously. Preparations that should often have been started days before are thrown in at the last minute; no concessions are made, and I have to say I find this a refreshing change (to read, if not to follow.) In some ways Alice’s writing reminds me of Constance Spry, her cookbook being another of my old favourites.

And although most of the book is firmly rooted in France, Alice is just as enthusiastic about the food of the USA, and especially her own home state of California. She does not shy way from mentioning the downside of French cooking – the French, she says, stick rigidly to tradition and countenance little change, whereas Americans, for all their unfortunate predilections for ready meals and tins, embrace progress and innovation, and work with some of the finest produce in the world. Of a visit to the markets in New Orleans she says;

I would have to live in the dream of it for the rest of my life.

In 1934/5 Gertrude (but only after Alice had ascertained that the food would be to her lover’s liking) undertook a 7 month lecture tour of the US. Alice naturally accompanied her, making sure that everything was arranged for Gertrude’s comfort, from their crossing on the Champlain (in a stateroom, naturally - ‘we had the best French food’) to their suite at the Algonquin (of course!) While crossing the country they as usual stayed with wealthy, arty, people, all of whom seemed to welcome them with open arms. In other situations we might see this as cadging, but I imagine that Stein and Toklas were such good value as dinner guests that hostesses probably fought over their visits. The chapter about their time in the US could provide enough material for a separate book.

During the First World War the women were keen to do their bit. They drove all over the south of France for the American Fund for French Wounded, delivering supplies to hospitals mainly in Paris and the suburbs, and later opening depots at Perpignan and Nimes. And of course they did not stint themselves en route, staying at good hotels and finding excellent meals wherever they could. Plenty of friends were only too willing to accommodate them, but they did also spend a lot of their own money on the needs of soldiers and their families.

In the second world war, during the Occupation, the women were in the country. Alice was at first in despair over rationing and the impossibility of getting much meat – and most importantly milk, cream and butter;

The flummery cried for cream. So did we.

The vast vegetable gardens at Bilignin  - Alice’s domain and her pride and joy - were a comfort, and at the outbreak of hostilities she had also rushed to Belley to stock up on hams and cigarettes, just as her father had told her to do the morning after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Before very long, however, the ’blessed black market’ was up and running, and Alice had no qualms about taking advantage of it – though she was horrified when a shopkeeper, meaning to be both generous and circumspect, sent a package of cakes addressed to ‘the two American ladies.’ The French authorities had done everything they could to keep those ladies’ identities concealed, including destroying their official papers. For two Jewish women in occupied France, anonymity was a matter of life or death.

Alice was a chain smoker, and when she ran out of cigarettes she resorted to

…garden tobacco…we smoked anything we could roll except fig leaves, which had poisoned a friend.

Most of their French friends were in the Resistance; when one visited for lunch and asked how Alice had managed to obtain gelatine, which his wife could not get, she sent him home with twenty sheets of it. It was only much later that she learned what he really wanted it for; the production of false ID documents.

There is so much more in this glorious book, but I will stop here and let people read it for themselves. I came across my copy in the equally eccentric and wonderful Bog Myrtle café and bookshop on Skye. It was £8 and I dithered about buying it. In the end my husband bought it for me, and I am so glad he did; reading about Alice and Gertrude has been such a joy, and I treasure my beautiful 1993 Folio Society edition with its lovely illustrations by Natacha Ledwidge.

Images: Bog Myrtle Facebook page

The Alice B Toklas Cookbook was first published in 1954. A new edition was published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics in 2021; second-hand (and cheaper) copies of previous editions are also widely available online.