Talking Toklas

About the fascinating Alice B and her cookbook. A simple recipe. A great vintage menu. And a very colorful gift.

I keep hearing about the new restaurant Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger have opened in Palm Springs, Alice B. It is, of course, named for Alice B. Toklas. It’s been a while since I’ve been in Palm Springs, but I love everything the two chefs have ever done, and I’m sure I’d like their newest restaurant.

I’ve been thinking about Alice B. Toklas a great deal lately. I’m on book tour for The Paris Novel, and one of the questions I keep getting is about my favorite cookbooks. Of course I talk about everything by Richard Olney (he’s a character in the book), but I always mention The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook as well. It’s a unique and captivating tome, utterly unlike any other. I am fascinated by both the book and the author, and when I was asked to write the introduction to the latest edition I did a great deal of research. I thought you might, perhaps, like to read it.

Alice B. Toklas was hungry.

She sat shivering in the single room she could still afford to heat in the Paris apartment she had once shared with Gertrude Stein. Surrounded by Picassos, Matisses and Cezannes, she contemplated her bare cupboard.

Food in post-war France was rationed. Black market prices were ruinous. And Alice B. Toklas was broke.

Stein had passed away six years earlier, leaving her companion of almost 40 years in custody of her art collection. But the terms of the will specified that nothing could be sold without the permission of the trustees – and the trustees were dragging their feet. And so, at the age of 75, Alice B. Toklas hatched a plan.

Americans were permitted access to the Embassy commissary - where food, liquor and cigarettes were sold at bargain prices - provided they had a legitimate reason.  “You may remember,” she wrote to a friend, “I’ve been trying to maneuver to be admitted to the American commissary. … it came to me if I could get recipes printed in some magazine I’d be as eligible as Richard Wright - so why not gather my recipes- make the cookbook and get a job.” 

It was the genesis of what went on to become one of the best-selling cookbooks of all time.

Toklas was a notable- and noted- cook, and she could easily have produced a straightforward book filled with a few fine recipes introduced by little headnotes.  If all she wanted was access to food, she could have written a conventional cookbook, a traditional cookbook, one like all the others. But Alice B. Toklas chose to write a very different kind of book, and her reasons remain mysterious. What exactly was she up to?

Thirty years earlier Gertrude Stein, convinced of her own genius and frustrated by her lack of “gloire”, had set out to write a best-seller. The way to do that, she decided, was to write a book ordinary people could understand. To distinguish it from her difficult modernist writing - the real work- she wrote in Toklas’ voice and called it an autobiography.  She ended The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas like this:

“About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, It does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it.”

Virtually everyone who ever met Toklas and Stein agreed that Stein filled the “autobiography” with stories that Toklas often told, capturing Toklas’ voice so convincingly that many believed Toklas had actually written the book herself.  “I am unable to believe that Gertrude with all her genius could have composed it,” said painter Maurice Grosser, “and I remain convinced that the book is entirely Alice’s work and published under Gertrude’s name only because hers is the more famous.” Nobody will ever know the truth about that, and it’s probably not important.  The lives of the two women were so closely intertwined that it’s difficult to think of one without the other.

They came from similar backgrounds; both were raised in California by monied Jewish families, both were educated, well-traveled and highly intelligent.  But while Stein was a large, warm, outgoing, and supremely confident woman, Toklas was tiny, birdlike and self-effacing.  She was also rather stunningly ugly, with a huge beak of a nose and an unabashed black mustache.  It was an ugliness with its own fascinating glamour, which Toklas played up by dressing in extraordinary clothing and extravagant hats. Her one beauty was her voice: poet James Merrill described it as “a viola at dusk”.

They fell in love almost the moment that they met, and their passion never abated. ‘It was Gertrude Stein who held my complete attention, as she did for all the many years I knew her until her death, and all these empty ones since then,” is how Toklas described her feelings. They never tried to hide their love, openly calling each other “lovey” and “baby” - and if they were ever troubled - by their families, their friends, or the authorities – it is not mentioned in either of their writings. Stein called Toklas “wifey” or “baby precious” while Stein was “Mr. Cuddle-Wuddle.” When Stein stayed up, writing late into the night, she left little notes beside her sleeping companion’s pillow. She signed them “Y.D.” or Your Darling.

As well she might, for Toklas expended all her energy in caring for Stein. “It takes a lot of time to be a genius,” Stein said as she allowed Toklas to do almost everything: cook, run the household, type the manuscripts, entertain the wives of the celebrated artists and writers who came to visit, and care for the many dogs that shared their lives. When a photographer wanted Stein to occupy herself in front of the camera, they had a hard time coming up with a single task she performed for herself. Everything he asked her to do – unpack a suitcase, answer the phone -turned out to be something Toklas did for her.  In the end Stein said, “I like water I can drink a glass of water all right he said do that.”  In a memoir written just after Stein’s death in 1946, their friend W.G. Rogers described Toklas this way: “She doesn't sit in a chair, she hides in it; she doesn't look at you, but up at you; she is always standing just half a step outside the circle. She gives the appearance, in short, not of a drudge, but of a poor relation, someone invited to the wedding but not to the wedding feast."

But appearances were deceiving: Alice B, Toklas was made of steel. Writer Naomi Barry remembered an afternoon in the kitchen with Toklas. “She once gave me some celery to string.  After ten minutes I handed it back, satisfied that I had removed every fiber.  She simply returned it saying tersely, ‘I said string it.’” 

Nobody knew the steely side of Toklas better than Stein, who sprinkled references to her partner’s toughness throughout The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.  Mentioning that St. Anthony, patron Saint of lost objects, was a special favorite she noted, “Gertrude Stein’s elder brother once said of me, if I were a general I would never lose a battle, I would only mislay it.” At another point Stein, writing in Toklas’ voice, says, “When I first met her in Florence she confided to me that she could forgive but never forget. I added that as for myself I could forget but not forgive.”

Listening to Toklas talk, I can’t help wondering if the cookbook might have been a way for this unforgiving woman to get a bit of her own back. The careful reader will uncover many little hints. There is, for instance, the moment when she finds herself seated next to author James Branch Cabell.  She is paralyzed with fear until Cabell leans over and puts her at ease. “Tell me Miss Stein’s writing is a joke, isn’t it?’” he asked.   “After that,” Toklas says innocently, “we got on very well.” And then, in her sphinx-liked fashion, she simply moves on.

There is also the matter of the book’s ending.

Two friends are discussing the notion of Alice writing a cookbook.  “The first one,” Toklas notes, “gaily responded, How very amusing. The other asked, with no little alarm, But Alice have you ever tried to write? As if a cookbook had anything to do with writing.”

And then, bam, she’s gone.  The book is over, and you are left to ponder her meaning. Some people (among them M.F.K Fisher), are convinced that this is Toklas being characteristically self-effacing. See, she’s telling you, don’t take this book too seriously. Ignore the words and stick to the recipes.

Really?

Toklas was an ardent, life-long reader of cookbooks. She liked them so much that Stein’s annual Christmas present was always a cookbook. Even at the height of the war, with great effort and at enormous expense, Stein managed to procure a rare cookbook for her partner. They read it together. Indeed, as Toklas sat down to begin her own book, she wrote to a friend. “Thank you for letting me see your mother’s cookbooks….I enjoyed them immensely – the one I liked best naturally had the most extravagant recipes – nothing one could possibly afford but that made reading it more romantic and more of an adventure. It has given me an idea for my own humble effort.  A cook book to be read. What about it.”

This is indeed a cookbook to be read. Open to a page – any page – and I promise you will find at least one sentence that opens your eyes and makes you see the world in new ways. Has there ever been another writer who would tell you that a custard has “the colour of its flavour,” or that a soup will “come beautifully limpid”? Her voice is remarkable. Alice B. Toklas dreams food onto the page with the words of a poet.  You can never anticipate what she is going to say - she surprises you at every turn; it is one of the great pleasures of this book.

When I was growing up my mother owned only two cookbooks. Sadly, the one that lived in the kitchen, the one she used, was Poppy Cannon’s The Can Opener Cookbook (which, like this one, was published in the early fifties).  Mom loved that book, loved Ms. Cannon’s concoctions; she especially cherished a cheese souffle made with Velveeta and canned white sauce. I doubt she ever opened Alice’s book, but had she done so she would have been appalled by the arcane ingredients: truffles, hare, nasturtium leaves!  Even Alice’s simplest recipes would have boggled Mom’s mind: her rice pudding calls for fourteen egg yolks. No wonder Alice’s book remained, its pages pristine, among the tomes on the living room bookshelves.

Why did my parents even have a copy? I never thought to ask, but it sat surrounded by the many Gertrude Stein books my father had designed, and I imagine he purchased it when he was working on What is Remembered by Alice B. Toklas. All I know is that I was a teenager when I stumbled upon it one rainy afternoon. By then I’d started cooking, and I opened the book, eager for new recipes.  Instead, I found myself captivated by a chapter called Murder in the Kitchen. “The carp was dead, killed, assassinated, murdered in the first, second and third degree,” I read. I was hooked.

I turned the pages, entranced by the tales of feeding Picasso and Picabia, and by Toklas’ descriptions of a French countryside where persimmon trees with orange fruit are silhouetted against a brilliant sky.  But then I came to this sentence and simply stopped, staring down at the page, wondering what it meant. Toklas is in Seville, searching for an authentic recipe for gazpacho. She enters a bookstore.  “Cookbooks without number, exactly eleven, were presented….” she says.  I read the words again. Without number is not exactly eleven.  Especially to a recipe writer. I felt as if Toklas was whispering in my ear, sending me a secret message. Pay attention, she was telling me. Everything here is not exactly as it seems.

The food she described sounded delicious, but to be honest, the recipes worried me. Dad’s first edition had a long list of errata glued to the first page. How could I trust a book that began by pointing out that a recipe for Green Peas a la Francaise was lacking 4 cups of shelled peas?  Or that the scampi recipe neglected to mention that you had to cook the scampi? The one recipe I did attempt was a total disaster: it was for some little cakes called visitandines, and the editors had not noticed that the sugar was missing.  (Unlike the omissions in the errata, that mistake has never been corrected.)

It was my loss.  Years later I learned that many of my favorite cooks revered Alice Toklas. Richard Olney was obsessed with her, as was Alice Waters; indeed, one of the most famous meals at Chez Panisse was Jeremiah Towers’ tribute to Toklas. I wish I’d been there: he served mushroom sandwiches, sole mousse with virgin sauce, gigot de la clinique, wild rice salad, and a tender tart. James Beard felt that the secret of her talent was “great pains and a remarkable palate,” and I found that was true.  As I began to cook the recipes I began to slow down, pay attention and take great pains. More than that, I began to trust my own palate.

But although I may have been late to the recipes, Toklas had given me something even more valuable: an entirely new way to think about cooking. She was writing about so much more than how to make a decent dinner. This book made me want to invite interesting people over to eat, find new markets to explore, plant a garden, travel the world. This was a cookbook that made me hungry for life.

I thought about all that when, at 22, I sat down to write a cookbook of my own. I was dirt-poor, living in a loft on the lower east side of New York City, and totally untrained, but I somehow managed to persuade a publisher to let me write a cookbook.  I knew from the start that it had to be more than mere recipes; I envisioned a book that would make readers want to go out and explore the world around them, tasting as they went. Looking back I see that what I produced was a  young and very naive version of Toklas’ book.  I was not consciously aware of it, but I wrote about the joy of going to market, the pleasure of following the seasons, the happiness that comes from cooking for friends. Like Toklas I wrote a book that is very personal and very much a product of its time.  Had I never read Toklas I probably would not have had the courage to allow my book to go meandering off in strange directions, but thanks to her I included chapters on anything I fancied: one on lemons, one on birthdays, even a chapter of recipes contributed by friends. And like Toklas I wrote about my artist friends: at the time I was teaching one of Warhol’s “superstars” to cook, and that too made its way into the book.

But Toklas’ influence on me did not end with the format of the book.  Because while most people come to Alice’s book to read about Matisse and Hemingway, and to fantasize about a long-vanished Paris, my own response was quite different.  I enjoyed seeing a long-gone France through Toklas’ eyes, liked visiting France before, between and just after the wars. But the chapter that truly captured my imagination was the one about the two women eating their way across America. 

After living in France for more than 25 years, Stein and Toklas came home. It was 1934, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas had been such a huge success that they embarked on a triumphant cross-country tour.  Stein was dreading it. What, she wondered, would they eat? They heard terrible tales of tinned vegetable cocktails and canned fruit salad. They almost didn’t come.

Things do not begin well. Although their first meal in New York is “very good in its way,” Stein decides to limit herself to a strict pre-lecture regime of oysters and honeydew melon. Toklas does not approve.  “From the beginning,” she sniffs, “the ubiquitous honey-dew bored me.”

But as they travel west, she is slowly seduced by the food. There is a gorgeous turtle soup that begins with sun-dried turtle meat.  Lamb is basted with sprigs of mint as it turns on a spit. The market in New Orleans is so wonderful she “would have to live in the dream of it for the rest of my life.” There she also encounters Oysters Rockefeller, which she says “makes more friends for the United States than anything I know.” In Texas she encounters the most beautiful kitchen she has ever seen, and by the time they reach California to indulge in “gastronomic orgies” (crabs, avocados, rainbow trout in aspic) she is calling it “God’s own country.” 

This America was even more exotic and mysterious to me than the France described in the book. It was certainly not the America I knew. Like most children of my generation I had come to think of our national fare as little more than one giant hamburger stand. Now I began to wonder if all those delicious foods were still out there, waiting to be discovered. What Toklas had inspired in me was a desire to get to know my own country. Eager to find Alice’s America, I hit the road in an attempt to unearth regional fare.  It was the early seventies, and I was tired of being told that the only food worth eating came from somewhere else. Curiously, this woman who had chosen to spend her life in France made me want to know more about American food. My own cookbook became a kind of ode to the America of its time, and I will always be grateful that Toklas sent me on that journey. It turned out that there was, indeed, an American cuisine, and I was eager to discover it before it vanished forever.

Toklas and Stein spent seven months in America, growing so enamored of their native country that Toklas wrote, rather wistfully, that nothing might ever equal this adventure. Thornton Wilder offered to find them a new home in Greenwich Village and they briefly considered staying. I wish they had. For they were not just two aging American women. They were Jewish. They were openly lesbian. It was 1937.  And Hitler was on the rise.

Later, they were urged to leave by their families and local officials. But they stayed on.  In an article in the Atlantic Monthly in 1940, Stein explained why.  “We telephoned to the American consul in Lyon and he said, ‘I’ll fix up your passports. Do not hesitate – leave.’ But the next day… I said to Alice Toklas, ‘Well, I don’t know.  Moving back would be awfully uncomfortable and I am fussy about my food. Let’s not leave.” 

And as Toklas tells it, the occupation wasn’t so bad. They left Paris for the Bugey (near the Swiss border), and life went on.  They gave their meat rations to the dogs and ate crayfish. At birthday parties they indulged in trout, braised pigeons and baron of lamb. They bought food on the black market.  The recipes roll off her pen. It is easy to believe that Stein was telling the truth when she told Eric Severeid the war years were “the happiest years of her life.”  Long afterward Toklas herself said wistfully, “though Hitler and the presence of the occupants was a menacing nightmare, I was happier then than today.”

These are remarkable admissions from two Jews in the time of Hitler. How did they survive? You will look in vain for any clues in this book. Toklas talks of getting food from friends in the resistance and the occasional soldiers – German, Italian – were foisted upon them.  But for the most part, life went on.

How is this possible? The answer isn’t pretty. In 1934 Gertrude Stein suggested that Hitler should be given the Nobel Peace Prize because he was getting rid of Jews and leftist dissidents and making Germany a more peaceful place. Apologists have tried to pass this off as ironic, but there’s no explaining away the work Stein did for the head of the Vichy regime, Marshall Petain.  Stein translated Petain’s speeches into English with the hopes of getting them published (they never were).  She even described herself as a propagandist for Petain and continued to praise him after the war.

Did she do this to save their skins?  We don’t know.  What we do know is that she was protected by Bernard Fay, a close friend and Vichy official who had translated The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas into French. In his own memoir Fay wrote about talking of Stein to Petain. “Before the meeting ended the Marechal dictated a letter to the sous-prefect at Belley entrusting Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas to his care, and directing him to see to it that they had everything needed to keep warm during the winter, as well as ration coupons for meat and butter. I came to Vichy quite regularly and I telephoned the sous-prefect to remind him of his instructions. During this horrible period of occupation, misery and nascent civil war, my two friends lived a peaceful life.”

After the war Fay was sentenced to life in prison for the things he had done during the war.  

You probably wish I hadn’t brought this up.  Frankly, I wish I hadn’t either. 

But the truth is that our views of Gertrude Stein have been altered by our modern understanding of her collaboration with the Vichy regime.  We read her differently than we once did. However none of the vast literature about Stein’s unpleasant politics say anything about Toklas’ complicity. As in so much else, she stays in Stein’s shadow. Alice has been given a pass; after all, she only wrote a cookbook.

But we can’t have it both ways. We can let Alice remain a minor character– the little woman who didn’t think for herself, whose politics don’t matter - and allow her book to remain in the shadows too.  But if we agree that her words matter – that a cookbook has something to do with writing – then we have to take a clear-eyed view of her legacy.

That casts a cloud over this book. My apologies. But history has not been kind to Alice B. Toklas.  She is always the ugly stepsister, the afterthought, the one whose voice was stolen.  The last years of her life were long (she died at the age of 90), and lonely, and she lost almost everything, including the beloved Paris apartment.  But the one thing she would not give up was her guardianship of Stein’s legacy.    

Nobody has done the same for her.  Now, pondering her words, I can’t help wondering if she would prefer to live forever in the shadows, someone dimly seen, who did nothing more than produce a pleasant little cookbook in what Time Magazine dismissed as her “prattle”.  Or would she rather go down in history- in all her fierceness, complexity and complicity - as the woman who changed the way we think of cookbooks?

Alice herself may have answered that question.  In her final book she wrote about the last time she saw Gertrude Stein.  The two are at the hospital. “I sat next to her and she said to me early in the afternoon, What is the answer?  I was silent. In that case, she said, what is the question?”

Since I mention my first cookbook in the article above, I thought I might offer you one of the recipes. They are, unlike the recipes in Alice B’s cookbook, extremely simple. This is one of my favorites.

Aunt Birdie’s Potato Salad
Aunt Birdie was 102 when she died in 1980. But she was still making her famous potato salad, and it was still wonderful. This is a very spare salad - quite unlike the mayonnaise version you may be used to - but it brings out all the sweetness of the potatoes. It gets better as it sits; I like it best on about day 3.

3 pounds small potatoes
1 or 2 small onions
Pepper and salt to taste
1/3 cup neutral oil (I prefer grapeseed)
1/2 cup white vinegar
1 tablespoon sugar

Boil the best little potatoes you can find in their jackets until just al dente, and when cool enough to handle peel and slice into thin rounds.

Cut the onions into slim shards and mix into the potatoes. Layer them into a large bowl, seasoning with salt and pepper as you go. Add the oil and mix.

Dilute vinegar with a little water, stir in the sugar bring to a boil and add this while hot over the potatoes. Mix well.

Chill before serving. Taste again, just before serving, to make sure the seasoning is right.

Much of the Alice B. Toklas cookbook takes place in remote French country towns. In honor of that I offer up this old menu (I think it is from 2014), from the legendary three-Michelin star Maison Bras.

There is no easy way to get there. But, as the French say, the restaurant vaut le voyage.

Kitchen Arts and Letters is one of my favorite stores in the world. It’s a dangerous place, because I always leave with a heap of books I simply had to have. Well, it just got a little more dangerous. They are now selling these fantastic one-of-a-kind Danyaki hand-painted aprons. (For an even larger selection - and really adorable kids’ aprons, go directly to the Danyaki site.)

Surely you know someone who would love one!

Book tour information; Tickets here.