Alice B. Toklas Cookbook

November 19, 2008

Have you ever read The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook?

It’s wonderful. Full of sinful, fatty recipes (butter is the most frequently used ingredient), but also witty commentary, musings, profiles of people, made by Alice B. Toklas.

Apparently, writer Monique Truong, came up with the idea for her excellent novel The Book of Salt– about Alice and Gertrude’s Vietnamese cook– after reading the recipe for Hashish (spelled Haschich in the book) Fudge (it’s on pg. 259). According to Truong:

It didn’t sound tasty to me, but I read the rest of the book anyway and found that it was less of a cookbook and more of a memoir. In a chapter called “Servants in France,” Toklas wrote about two Indochinese men who cooked for Toklas and Stein at 27 rue de Fleurus and at their summer house in Bilignin. One of these cooks responded to an ad placed by Toklas in the newspaper that began “Two Americans ladies wish . . . ” By this point in the cookbook, I had already fallen for these two women and for their ability to create an idiosyncratic, idyllic life for one another. When I got to the pages about these cooks, I was, to say the least, surprised and touched to see a Vietnamese presence—and such an intimate one at that—in the lives of these two women. These cooks must have seen everything, I thought. But in the official history of the Lost Generation, the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, these Indochinese cooks were just a minor footnote. There could be a personal epic embedded inside that footnote, I thought. The Book of Salt is that story, as told from the perspective of Bình, a twenty-six-year-old Vietnamese man living in Paris in the late 1920s. I have imagined him as one of the candidates who answered Stein and Toklas’s classified ad.

The cookbook is so rich with stories like this, and fantastic descriptions. Here Toklas talks about the hired help again– this time their housekeeper Caroline:

Caroline was not pretty, attractive and charming, but she certainly had a heart of gold. We always spoke of her to each other as Heart of Gold. She was perpetually sacrificing herself at the expense of her state of mind or her pocketbook.  Their prettiest sister, it had been discovered, was living with a married man. The family was outraged. Such a thing had never happened amongst them before. Caroline persuaded one sister and brother after the other to forgive her. [...] She told many stories of the life of the Breton village where she had been born and raised, of what could and did happen to the boys and girls and the married couples and the aged. She said the solutions of these stories was a question of the souls or sous.

The cookbook also gives insight into the relationship between Alice and Gertrude.

It’s a terrific, fun read. Full of history and characters.

And did I mention the book has recipes?

You must get it now.

I think it possibly inspired my recent dabbles into baking and preserving.

A week ago I baked a Banana Cream pie, including the crust and the meringue topping, from scratch.