What does Alice B. Toklas have to do with Alice B. Toklas brownies, anyway? –Judy Prisoc, Chicago
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It all started when Alice signed a contract with Harper’s to write a cookbook in 1952. She was a pretty fair cook, but what Harper’s really hoped to get (and what by and large it got) was tales of her life with Gertrude Stein, who’d died in 1946.
Alice, unfamiliar with “canibus” (at least as spelled by Gysin) and lacking the time to test the recipes, stuck her friend’s contribution into her manuscript and sent it off to the publisher. The editors at Harper’s spotted the suspicious ingredient and held the recipe out, but the publisher of the British edition didn’t. The press promptly went nuts. Tittered Time: “The late Poetess Gertrude (Tender Buttons) Stein and her constant companion and 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 (and also possibly a clue to some of Gertrude’s less earthly lines) was her hashish fudge.”
