The famous pair with Toklas on the right.
Alice Babette Toklas left Seattle for Paris when she was
30 years old. In Paris she met Gertrude Stein. The 2 women were a couple for the
next 39 years, living through WW1 & WW2, the apex of The Lost Generation,
& a collection of very famous friends. They were positively partners.
Toklas was Stein’s secretary, editor, critic... & muse.
Their books' titles
were quite deceptive; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written Stein
& had next to nothing to do with Toklas & The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook,
although it contains recipes, was more a memoir of a life friends like Janet
Flanner, Picasso, Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, & Virgil Thomson, along a collection of over 300 recipes.
Toklas lived another 20 years after Stein’s death. At the
end of her life she was broke. The family of Stein claimed the famous paintings
& royalties. In those final years Toklas was plagued with financial difficulties.
She had no choice after Stein’s heirs took all the famous paintings left to her,
except to write a memoir.
The much renowned recipe for marijuana brownies started
when Toklas signed a contract with Harper's to write a cookbook in 1952. She
was a known as a very goodcook, but what Harper’s wanted was not so much
recipes but tales of her life with Gertrude Stein.
Toklas, then in her mid-70s, didn’t have enough pages to
call her tome a book. She added several recipes, including them that would become renowned: “This is the food of
Paradise. It might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies' Bridge
Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR, with euphoria & brilliant storms of
laughter, ecstatic reveries & extensions of one's personality on several
simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint
Theresa did, you can do better."
The editors at Harper's spotted the suspicious special ingredient-
canabis ingredients & cut the recipe out, but the publisher of the British
edition didn't. The press promptly went nuts. The London Times: "The late
Poetess Gertrude Stein & her constant companion 7 autobiographee, Alice B.
Toklas, used to have gay old times together in the kitchen. Some of the unique
delicacies that were whipped up will soon be cataloged, in a wildly epicurean
tome which is already causing excited talk on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps
the most gone concoction was her hashish fudge." The book would go on to be the best seller for either of the lesbian pair.
Here is the recipe: "Take 1 teaspoon black
peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon
coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of
stone dates, dried figs, shelled almonds & peanuts: chop these & mix
them together. A bunch of Canibus Sativa can be pulverized. This along with the
spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit & nuts, kneaded together.
About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake &
cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be
eaten with care. 2 pieces are quite sufficient. Obtaining the canibus may present
certain difficulties. It should be picked & dried as soon as it has gone to
seed & while the plant is still green."
Just a few years ago, I had an acquaintance (now living
in San Francisco with a rich boyfriend) that made a variation of this recipe.
With only one half of a serving, I was unable to raise my head off the pillow.
His advice: “Don’t sit down. After you eat one you need to go hiking or
dancing. Keep moving.” I was left
giggling, horny & hungry & unable to move.
Although Toklas converted to Catholicism late in life,
the pair of Jewish lesbians are buried next to each other in the Père Lachaise
cemetery in Paris.
The Toklas name would become a part of the vernacular of the pot smoking world.
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