Chapter 4
Murder in the Kitchen: The Violence of Cooking
"Cookbooks captivate me as murder mysteries once enthralled Gertrude Stein," Toklas writes in one of her most memorable chapters. Yet cooking involves unavoidable acts of violence-the killing that must precede preparation. It was during wartime rationing that Toklas truly learned to cook seriously, when necessity demanded both skill and efficiency in a restricted market. The scarcity of ingredients during this period forced her to become intimately familiar with every aspect of food preparation, from slaughter to plate.
She recounts her first "victim"-a lively carp, delivered alive in a basket, its scales gleaming and its movements vigorous. With no instruction from the fishmonger on proper dispatch methods, she nervously grasped its jaw through a protective dishcloth and plunged a knife into its vertebral column. The fish's final struggle haunted her. Horror-struck at her deed, she needed two cigarettes before regaining composure to prepare it-stuffed with a mixture of chestnuts, bread soaked in rich red wine, fresh garden herbs and aromatic spices. The resulting dish, she notes with a mixture of pride and remorse, was declared excellent by her dinner guests.
Another memorable culinary murder involved six white pigeons that arrived as a gift with the note that "Alice is clever" and would make something delicious of them. Fortified with strong coffee, she reluctantly pressed on each innocent dove's throat, laying out "the sweet young corpses" before preparing them braised with salt pork and butter. The birds' delicate bodies, still warm from life, required gentle handling. She describes in detail how their breasts were larded with thin strips of fat, their legs tied neatly, and their cavities filled with fresh herbs before being slowly braised to tenderness.
These vivid, almost confessional accounts of animal slaughter reveal Toklas's understanding that good cooking requires confronting mortality. There is something primal in her approach-a recognition that nourishment comes at a cost. Her descriptions oscillate between practical instruction and poetic reflection, acknowledging both the necessity and the gravity of taking life for sustenance. She notes how each act of culinary violence taught her something about both cooking and herself, forcing her to confront the reality that fine dining requires death.
This chapter stands as one of the most honest accounts of cooking's fundamental violence ever written, made all the more powerful by her elegant, almost dainty prose style. The contrast between her refined sensibilities and the brutal nature of food preparation creates a tension that runs throughout the text. Her experiences during wartime, when food was scarce and nothing could be wasted, taught her that true cooking requires not just skill and creativity, but also courage and respect for the ingredients' sacrifice.
Chapter 5
Beautiful Soup: A Culinary Anthropologist
Toklas's determined quest to uncover authentic gazpacho recipes exemplifies her methodical approach as a culinary anthropologist. During her extensive travels through Spain, she encountered distinct regional variations in Malaga, Seville, Cordoba, and Segovia - each city claiming their version as the most authentic. In Malaga, she discovered a version enriched with almonds; in Seville, the soup featured more garlic and olive oil; Cordoba's interpretation included fresh mint; while Segovia's version emphasized raw vegetables. Despite searching numerous bookshops and libraries, she found no written recipes-a dismissive clerk informed her that gazpachos "are only eaten in Spain by peasants and Americans," revealing class attitudes toward traditional dishes.
This persistent investigation led to fascinating cross-cultural connections that spanned continents. A Polish-American composer, dining at her table, noted the soup's similarity to chodnik, a Polish iced soup made with beets and cucumber. A Turkish diplomat insisted it closely resembled cacik, a yogurt-based cold soup, while Greek guests pointed out parallels to tarata, their ancestral cold soup of bread, garlic, and olive oil. These connections illuminated how recipes traverse borders through conquests, trade routes, and occupations across Mediterranean cultures, often transforming while retaining core elements.
Toklas meticulously documents seven Mediterranean cold soup recipes, including four distinct Spanish gazpacho variations - each reflecting regional preferences and available ingredients. She also includes Polish chodnik, Turkish cacik, and Greek tarata, demonstrating the interconnectedness of culinary traditions. A Chilean writer later provided an alternative perspective, describing gazpacho not as a soup but as a muleteer's practical meal - carefully layered tomatoes, cucumbers, and breadcrumbs prepared in an earthenware dish, wrapped in wet cloth, and left to meld in the sun's heat during long journeys.
This anthropological approach defines Toklas's unique contribution to culinary literature. She understood that recipes function as living cultural artifacts, carrying within them stories of conquest, migration patterns, social hierarchies, and economic conditions. Her detailed investigations into dish origins reveal how food transcends geographical borders, adapting to local ingredients and tastes while maintaining essential techniques and cultural significance. Through careful documentation of variations and origins, she transforms her cookbook from a mere collection of instructions into a scholarly work of cultural history, preserving not just recipes but the rich tapestry of human culinary heritage. Her work demonstrates how food serves as a universal language, connecting diverse cultures through shared techniques and flavors.
Chapter 6
Culinary Treasures: A Lifetime of Collection
What is the first food you remember seeing, if not eating? From her early childhood in 1880s San Francisco, Toklas first recalls breakfast foods: cracked wheat with sugar and cream, corn meal with molasses, and farina with honey. But the first dish she clearly remembers seeing was Nora's souffle fritters, not included in a child's diet.
Looking back at these early "treasures," Toklas is surprised how her collection began so long ago, with many no longer qualifying as treasures. One's taste evolves, she notes, and the quantity of rejected recipes for her book is "neither flattering nor encouraging." Her collecting began with sweets-cakes, ices, desserts and candies-evidence of both their date and her youthful preferences.
Among her earliest treasures was Scheherezade's Melon: a whole melon filled with diced fruit, sugar, and a mixture of champagne, Kirsch, Maraschino, Creme de Menthe and Roselio, refrigerated overnight. Another early favorite, known for sixty years as "Alice's Cookies," required delicate handling of butter, egg yolks and sugar, producing fragile, exquisite treats.
Her treasure trove includes elegant dishes like Pink Pompadour Bass (a cold fish covered with pale-green herb mayonnaise and decorated with a potato-beetroot mixture) and Giant Squab in Pyjamas (a young pigeon slow-cooked with pork fat and brandy, covered in port wine aspic). These elaborate preparations reflect the French haute cuisine tradition that Toklas embraced, while maintaining her own distinctive sensibility.
The collection also includes recipes with famous names: Coconut Marmalade from poet Stephane Mallarme, Custard Josephine Baker featuring bananas and kirsch, Rossini's Salad with truffles cooked in champagne, and Alexandre Dumas Junior's Francillon Salad-proving "the master is greater than the follower." These celebrity connections reveal Toklas's place in artistic and literary circles, where food often served as both sustenance and creative inspiration.
Chapter 7
Food in America: A Culinary Travelogue
When Gertrude Stein couldn't decide whether to visit the United States in 1934, one of her concerns was the food. A young Frenchman had recently returned from America reporting that the food was more foreign to him than the people or their homes-strange tinned vegetable cocktails and fruit salads that guests were obliged to eat. Despite these concerns, they undertook the adventure, beginning a twelve-state tour that would provide Toklas with rich culinary observations.
Their culinary adventures varied wildly across America. Before her lectures, Gertrude insisted on dining simply and alone, typically ordering oysters and honey-dew melon. The ubiquitous honey-dew bored Toklas-she preferred Spanish melons to honey-dew and Persian varieties, especially in heated rooms that "don't replace summer sunshine." On non-lecture days, they dined more lavishly with friends in their homes and at restaurants across the country.
At one historic home filled with beautiful antiques, they ate from exquisite eighteenth-century porcelain and silver on precious lace tablecloths yet left quite starved, finding relief fifty miles away at an unpretentious restaurant serving carefully cooked oysters, roast turkey and an unusually good rice pudding. This contrast between pretension and substance in American dining becomes a recurring theme in Toklas's observations.
In Chicago for the performance of Gertrude and Virgil Thomson's opera "Four Saints in Three Acts," Bobsie Goodspeed gave a magnificent supper party. Of the many courses, Toklas remembered only the first and last-a clear turtle soup requiring four days of preparation, and a fantastic piece montee of nougat, roses, cream and colored candles that reminded her of a postcard Virgil once sent describing the Cote d'Azur.
Throughout their journey, Toklas discovered American regional specialties that delighted her, including wild rice in Connecticut (which she later served to delighted French friends as Wild Rice Salad) and mint jelly in St. Paul. She found excellent cooking throughout Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois and St. Louis, with notable exceptions of superlative meals at estates near Minneapolis and in New Orleans, where she first tasted Oysters Rockefeller-a dish that "makes more friends for the United States than anything I know."
When the time came to leave California and return to France, Toklas was distressed. It wasn't until they were aboard the Champlain that she realized the seven months they had spent in the United States had been "an experience and adventure which nothing that might follow would ever equal." Her travelogue reveals America through a sophisticated European palate, appreciating regional distinctions and culinary innovations while maintaining her French-influenced standards.
Chapter 8
Food During Wartime: Creativity Under Constraint
When war began in 1939, Toklas and Stein initially lived well on their reserves in the Bugey region, famous for its food. Though meat was strictly rationed to a quarter pound weekly per person, they had access to fish from the Rhone and Lac-de-Bourget, plus abundant vegetables and fruits from their garden and delicious dry white wine from their cellars. What they lacked were milk, butter and eggs-German requisitioning left nothing for locals, despite these items appearing on their ration cards.
For entertaining guests during food shortages, Toklas prepared Swimming Crawfish using a bouillon of white wine, cognac, vegetables, and spices. Guests brought their own bread or gave her their ration coupons, as theirs went to their pedigreed poodle Basket, who received special rations. When crawfish became monotonous, she prepared variations like Crawfish a la Bordelaise, substituting olive oil for butter.
Despite their beautiful vegetable garden's bounty, true hunger set in, and for six months Toklas dreamed of succulent ham slices before the black market was organized. Friends would visit for real China tea-ten pounds from America lasted until Liberation-and American cigarettes that Gertrude Stein had stockpiled. When the Mother Vigne agreed to sell them one egg daily in exchange for dishwater for her pig, Toklas was elated, but this arrangement ended when they slaughtered the pig for Christmas.
Toklas found solace in reading elaborate recipes from cookbooks Gertrude Stein gave her for Christmas. Even during the Occupation, Montagne's and Salle's 1,479-page "The Great Book of the Kitchen" somehow crossed forbidden lines. She'd pore over impossible dishes like Tournedos Margot-tender beef fillets topped with large mushroom caps filled with truffles in cream sauce-imagination being "as satisfying as it had to be."
After Paris was liberated, local Resistance fighters eliminated 700 Germans from their area. When American soldiers in a jeep arrived, they immediately invited them for dinner. Their cook, despite rationing, prepared a celebratory meal: trout in aspic, chicken with tarragon, salad, chocolate souffle, and wild strawberries. The Liberation Fruit Cake Toklas prepared to send to General Patch of the Seventh Army-a rich concoction requiring citron, cherries, white currants soaked in brandy, and other luxuries-symbolized the end of deprivation and the return of abundance.
Chapter 9
The Vegetable Gardens at Bilignin: A Culinary Paradise
For fourteen years, the gardens at Bilignin were Toklas's consuming passion-working them diligently through the warm months and planning expansions during winter evenings. Located in the foothills of the French Alps, the climate presented unique challenges, with late spring frosts sometimes devastating early plantings and requiring careful timing of sowings. Initially, she dismissed local farmers' traditional wisdom-such as never transplanting parsley, avoiding planting during new or full moons, and following strict lunar calendars-as mere superstition. However, through trial and error, she gradually became "not only weather-wise but a fairly successful gardener," learning to respect and incorporate local agricultural knowledge.
When they became tenants in 1929, the gardens had fallen into severe neglect, requiring an intensive restoration effort of seven men working six full days just to clear the overgrown chaos. After meticulously establishing raised beds, gravel paths, and proper drainage, they began their plantings with cherished seeds brought from their previous home and carefully selected seedlings from the vibrant Saturday market in nearby Belley. The constant battles against persistent weeds and challenging soil erosion were balanced by the property's blessed abundance of natural water sources, though one memorable drought required them to organize a procession of ox carts to bring precious water up from the valley stream.
The first May harvest filled Toklas with an almost transcendent wonder: "There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown." Their culinary approach evolved with the garden's bounty-beginning with simple preparations using just butter or cream to enhance natural flavors, later expanding to complex sauces and combinations as their confidence and harvest grew. Her flourishing garden inspired countless innovative vegetable recipes, from her renowned Green Peas a la Francaise with its perfect balance of herbs to her celebrated Macedoine of Vegetables, which she proudly declared "one of the very best of vegetable dishes," featuring a harmonious mixture of seasonal produce.
Toklas's garden represented far more than mere food production-it became her primary creative outlet, a source of immense pride, and a profound connection to the French countryside and its agricultural traditions. The garden chapters reveal her encyclopedic knowledge of heritage plant varieties, specific growing conditions for each crop, and the intricate seasonal rhythms that fundamentally shape French country cooking. Her vivid descriptions of the garden's abundant harvests reflect a deeply sensual appreciation for fresh produce that transcends simple sustenance, transforming into a celebration of nature's generosity and the profound satisfaction of agricultural self-sufficiency. The gardens at Bilignin became not just a source of ingredients, but a living laboratory where culinary innovation met traditional French farming wisdom.
Chapter 10
A Cookbook That Transcends Its Genre
The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book stands as one of the most unusual and enduring culinary memoirs ever written. What began as a practical solution to financial problems-Toklas was broke after Stein's death and needed to qualify for access to the American commissary's affordable food-became a literary classic that transcends its genre.
Rather than creating a conventional cookbook, Toklas crafted something entirely different, perhaps inspired by how Stein had earlier written The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas to achieve mainstream success. She wrote a cookbook to be read, not merely followed. Her voice is remarkably poetic, her observations keen, and her anecdotes revealing of both her personality and her era.
The book caused a small sensation upon its 1954 publication, partly due to the hashish fudge recipe (contributed by Brion Gysin), but mostly because it was "a unique book by a unique person." During its creation, Toklas tested recipes on the publisher and Thornton Wilder, who politely stood whenever Alice bustled between kitchen and dining room, prompting her exasperated "Thornie, for God's sake, sit down and I'll give you some chicken."
Toklas's cookbook reveals the intimate connection between food and memory. Written during a lengthy illness and in the loneliness after Gertrude's death, it became a way to revisit happier times and reconnect with absent friends. As M.F.K. Fisher notes, it would "feed my soul abundantly" even without other nourishment, making one "smile in the midst of sadness, and feel braver if I risked faltering."
Through recipes and reminiscences, Toklas created not just a cookbook but a portrait of an extraordinary life lived among extraordinary people. From Picasso's bass to Hemingway's encounters, from wartime privations to lavish pre-war entertaining, the book captures a vanished world of artistic ferment, cultural exchange, and culinary exploration. In doing so, it ensures that both Alice B. Toklas and her remarkable circle will continue to nourish readers' imaginations long after the last recipe has been attempted.
