The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book by Alice B. Toklas

    • Categories: Stews & one-pot meals; Main course; French
    • Ingredients: beef shoulder; lard; salt pork; onions; Burgundy wine; oranges; bay leaves; thyme; nutmeg
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Notes about this book

  • don.moors on January 17, 2022

    The Folio Society [London] published a hard cover edition in 1993.

  • Barb_N on December 26, 2020

    I made the Duck in Port wine but appreciate the book more as a memoir than for its recipes. No, I don’t think I will make the Haschich Fudge (remarkably similar to today’s date energy balls) which contains no cocoa. I enjoyed reading about ABT and Gertrude Stein’s war efforts and her gardening in rural France! I found this much more readable than MFK Fisher, who was a generation later.

  • featherbooks on April 18, 2013

    Notable Recipes: Gazpacho of Malaga, p.335, Gigot de la Clinique, p. 539, Green Peas a la Goodwife, p. 404, Haschich Fudge, p.645, Oeufs Francis Picabia, p.467, Scheherezade's Melon,, p.641.

Notes about Recipes in this book

  • Duck in Port wine

    • Barb_N on December 26, 2020

      I earmarked this recipe for Christmas after reading the book cover to cover one weekend, as much a memoir (hilarious at times) as a cookbook. I did not follow the recipe exactly, opting for a dry rub of thyme, salt, brown sugar, orange zest and 5 spice powder, loosely based on Alexandra Stafford’s duck breast recipe. I did baste repeatedly with port then chicken stock, but roasted it low and slow like the Food52 recipe. I’m pretty sure a 450 degree oven would have incinerated it! I added little onions just before the figs which I only macerated in the port for 24 hours. They really needed thirty six.

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  • Published Jan 01 1954
  • Format Hardcover
  • Page Count 288
  • Language English
  • Edition First British Edition
  • Countries United Kingdom
  • Publisher Michael Joseph

Publishers Text

The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, first published in 1954, is one of the bestselling cookbooks of all time. Alice B. Toklas, writer Gertrude Stein's life partner, wrote the book to make up for her unwillingness at the time to write her memoirs, in deference to Stein's 1933 book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

This work is as much of an autobiography as it is a cookbook, in that it contains as many personal recollections as it does recipes. The most famous culinary experiment is a concoction called "Hashish Fudge". Made from spices, nuts, fruit, and cannabis, Hashish Fudge quickly became a sensation in its own right. In the recipe, Toklas says it is called "the food of paradise" and goes on to suggest places where the cook might find the cannabis. She adds that the fudge can liven up any gathering and is "easy to whip up on a rainy day." She cautions two pieces are quite enough and that one should be prepared for hysterical fits of laughter and wild floods of thoughts on "many simultaneous planes."

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