Questions and Answers

The newest edition of THE ALICE B. TOKLAS COOK BOOK (Harper Perennial, 2010) came out yesterday published by the paperback division of its original 1954  publisher then called Harper & Sons. (The title of the book maintains the original spelling of “cookbook” as two words.)  This book is a reprint of the original, but  includes a foreword written by food writer M.F.K. Fisher for the thirtieth anniversary edition.  Fisher regrets that she never met Alice, though she had several chances while living in Paris.

By the end of the first week that this edition was released, it was within the top fifty French cookbooks on amazon.com.  Not bad!

In the fifty six years since it first came out, the cookbook has only been out of print for a very short time and has been widely translated, most recently into Norwegian and became a bestseller in Scandinavia.

The continuing popularity of the cookbook is largely due to the  “Haschish Fudge” recipe, page 259 of the latest edition, which though really more of a spicy, nut candy than a fudge, morphed into  “Alice B. Toklas Brownies” in the 1960s.  (See Ruth Reichl note below.) The cookbook is, however, more than just this notorious recipe, and the story of how it came about and has endured all of these years is in itself blogworthy.

The latest edition with a cover blurb by friend Janet Flanner.

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OK, I celebrated Gertrude’s birthday with a post in February and mine in March with a post, so now here’s to Alice B. Toklas who was born today in 1877!

As she wrote at the beginning of  her memoir WHAT IS REMEMBERED:

“I was born and raised in California, where my maternal grandfather had been a pioneer before the state was admitted to the Union.  He had bought a gold mine and settled in Jackson, Amador County.  A few years later he crossed the Isthmus of Panama again and went to Brooklyn, where he married my grandmother.  There my mother was born.  When she was three years old, they went to Jackson.”

And then there’s Gertrudes’s take on Alice’s beginnings in THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS:

“I was born in San Francisco, California.  I have in consequence always preferred living in a temperate climate but it is difficult, on the continent of Europe or even in America, to find a temperate climate and live in it.  My mother’s father was a pioneer, he came to California in ’49, he married my grandmother who was very fond of music.  She was a pupil of Clara Schumann’s father.  My mother was a quiet charming woman named Emilie.”

Alice B. , circa 1878

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Last summer when I told one of my friends, who is also a big GertrudeandAlice fan, that I was going to write a blog devoted to them, his first response was that he hoped I’d be writing about things that hadn’t been written about and that I wouldn’t write silly things making fun of them.

I did mention the chickens in England  named Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein in an earlier post about items I’d received through my GoogleAlert.  I guess that was silly. Sorry.

But now to some  items about GertrudeandAlice that, though factual, could fall into the “Believe It or Not!” category.  Some are the kind of tidbits that scholars love to unearth or reference to indicate that they are really in the know and that they’ve scoured those boxes in the lower basements of research libraries.  For fans like me, they are like the shiny nuggets among the pebbles in a gold miner’s pan and almost as exciting as finding a previously unseen photograph of GertrudeandAlice tucked away in the pages of a rare book.

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“My Mesdames began preparing for it months in advance. They placed orders for new dresses, gloves and shoes. Nothing was extravagant, but everything was luxurious, waistcoats embroidered with flowers and several kinds of birds, traveling outfits in handsome tweeds with brown velvet trims and buttons, shoes identical except for the heels and the size.”

– THE BOOK OF SALT (2003) by Monique Truong

Seventy-five years ago today, GertrudeandAlice arrived in San Francisco as part of their 1934-35 U.S. lecture tour.  They drove from Los Angeles in a rental car. (Gertrude had been introduced to the concept of car rentals on a Chicago stop and was fascinated by it.)

Gertrude had not been in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than forty years and Alice returned after leaving for Paris in 1907.

For eleven days they were regaled by the City staying at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill and spending the days at luncheons and lectures and visiting some of the places they had known many of which had changed since the 1906 fire and earthquake.

Top of the Mark, San Francisco circa 1930s

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In the lives of famous people anniversaries are easy to find. The only decision is whether you limit them to years ending in 0 or 5 and determining whether any number preceding those is fair game.

In Europe, where anniversaries are a really big deal, numbers have gone into the 1,000’s for city anniversaries and into the 100’s for famous writers, artists, composers and major historic events. As you see below, I’m not limiting myself to the ‘0 or 5’ anniversary formula.

Another anniversary today – it’s forty-three years since the death of Alice B.  Toklas.  Not just Alice Toklas, but Alice B. Toklas!

And that’s the rub, the ‘B.’ (Sounds a bit Steinian, like something from TENDER BUTTONS or LIFTING BELLY.)

Alice B., early 1960s

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Last November I posted a blog about the sudden death of our English Springer Spaniel Ollie and paralleled the importance of him in our lives with the role that dogs played in the lives of GertrudeandAlice.  I ended the piece anticipating a grand-nephew of Ollie’s, a new little dog who would come to know us.

Well, Fritz arrived last week Priority Parcel on American Airlines from Dallas to San Francisco.  This little fellow has already accumulated a lot of miles considering he was born in Ohio!

So here he is:

Fritz on his 3 month birthday today

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On this, Gertrude Stein’s 136th birthday, first the facts:

Born: February 3, 1874

Where: Allegheny, Pennsylvania, now a part of Pittsburgh

Parents: Amelia and Daniel Stein

Siblings: Michael, Bertha, Simon and Leo

Then the cake, not an Alice creation, but one I think she would have made and Gertrude would have eaten it and loved it:

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This past week I was in New York City (with a stopover first in Baltimore to visit Gertrude’s cousin, Julian Stein, Jr. – more on that later) and as usual stayed at the Bryant Park Hotel not far from the Jo Davidson sculpture of Gertrude Stein in Bryant Park.

The sculpture has been in the park since 1992 and was donated by Dr. Maury Leibowitz. This casting is number eight in an edition of ten.  I don’t remember the first time that I saw it and it’s certainly a coincidence that the hotel that I’ve stayed in for years happens to be nearby.  When I’m here, however, I make a point of visiting it.

A picture of the sculpture is deceptive since it looks so much larger in a photo than it really is.  It’s  only a little more than about 2 feet wide and maybe 3 feet high, but is very imposing because of Gertrude’s Buddha-like seated position.

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From the imagined journal of Alice B. Toklas:

“1.January 1910, 27 rue de Fleurus

All the guests have left and Gertrude has retired. What a glorious evening!

And so a new year begins with the most wonderful of news which I will share at the end of today’s entry, saving the best for last.

Paris, 1910

I was asked by Gertrude and Leo to assist in preparing the holiday’s food which I did with pleasure. There are so many recipes that I have collected from my grandmother and mother and many of our cooks that someday I may have to do a cook book.

Assisting with soirées here has become such a pleasurable task as I have become quite familiar with the household as I come daily to transcribe Gertrude’s notebooks on the Smith-Premier typewriter—a marvelous apparatus.

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People often ask me which of Gertrude Stein’s works they should read first.  Sometimes the question comes from someone who knows very little about GertrudeandAlice.  Sometimes it comes from someone who has heard of them and only knows Gertrude through her most famous quotes: “Rose is a…,” or “No there…” and knows Alice because of her cookbook’s most famous recipe the “H–hish Fudge aka ABT Bro-nies.”

Usually I’ve encouraged them to begin with THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS.  The book is very accessible, written in a straight forward narrative style with just enough touches of Gertrude’s stylistic word-play and chronology shuffling to let the reader know that this masterpiece of modernist literature is just that – a masterpiece of modernist literature.

GertrudeandAlice with words (to typeset) in a picture circa 1935

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