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

  • Boeuf Bourguignon

    from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook 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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  • ISBN 10 0060913274
  • ISBN 13 9780060913274
  • Published Aug 31 1986
  • Format Paperback
  • Page Count 301
  • Language English
  • Countries United States
  • Publisher HarperCollins Publishers Inc
  • Imprint HarperPerennial

Publishers Text

First published in 1954, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook is one of America's great works of recollection, culinary and otherwise. Toklas lived, cooked, and kept house in Paris and rural France with her companion, Gertrude Stein, from 1908 until Stein's death in 1947. During that time she cooked for and shared food with friends, including Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Thornton Wilder, accumulating recipes for the simple and haute bourgeois dishes compiled in the book. She also saw and remembered all, from life in the high bohemian circle she and Stein occupied; to France during two world wars; to the United States, visited in the '30s; to summers passed in a paradisiacal country retreat at Biligin in France. These and more Toklas depicts vividly and acerbically, all viewed through the prism of food and good eating. Woven within chapters such as "Dishes for Artists," "Food in French Homes," and "The Vegetable Gardens at Biligin," the 300 recipes run the gamut from hors d'oeuvres and salads to breads, entrées, drinks, and sweets. Original (and sometimes whimsical) dishes like Stuffed Artichokes Stravinsky, Gigot de la Clinque, and Bavarian Cream Perfect Love appear among more traditional offerings, such as Boeuf Bourguignon, Chicken à l'Estragon, and Green Peas à la Goodwife. Many of the recipes (which are written in abbreviated-narrative style) will be attempted only by adventurous cooks with time (and, in some cases, money) to spare. The rest of us will enjoy reading the recipes, the droll reminiscences, and the fantasizing about a time when the dishes' creation could be relatively commonplace. The tour of this era and its food, by one of literature's great cook-writers, is obligatory reading.

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