I love you Alice B. Toklas isn’t, in my case, a sentiment aroused by the movie (which I haven’t seen) or the cannabis brownies (which I’ve never tasted), but by a long and intimate relationship with the history of her life. It was a life I first became aware of in respect to her relationship to the modernist writer of impenetrable prose, Gertrude Stein, and the literary fruit of that relationship, the remarkable book “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas“. I think of this now as a book I read somewhere back in the mists of time but in fact I remember quite clearly reading it during my daily bus commute to the city and thinking what a couple of dotty, but fascinating, old birds these two were.

It was some considerable time later when I realised there was more to Alice B. Toklas than Gertrude Stein. Alice was, it turned out, a cook of some renown. Her culinary prowess, it could be said, set the stage for those more celebrated cooks who followed her. Long before Julia Child’s, Elizabeth David’s or Alice Waters’ conversions to the faith, Alice B. had not only become a devotee of la cuisine Française but had mastered the art. 

Evidence of this was obvious in the previously mentioned cookbook. To regard it as the source of the infamous brownie recipe alone, is to gravely underestimate it. A fascinating compilation of recipes collected over the years, it’s vividly enriched by whimsical anecdotes and memories of the Toklas and Stein menage. Alice’s instinctive understanding and appreciation of French food shines through in excerpts such as this:

“To cook as the French do one must respect the quality and flavour of the ingredients. Exaggeration is not admissible. Flavours are not all amalgamative. These qualities are not purchasable but may be cultivated. The haute cuisine has arrived at the enviable state of reacting instinctively to these known principles.” (from Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, 1954).

To further reinforce Alice’s culinary reputation in my eyes, I came across the small book “Murder in the Kitchen“, published as part of the Penguin Great Food Series some years ago. 

This book is based on a chapter in Alice’s cookbook called by the same name, an excerpt of which is characteristic of her idiosyncratic style.

‘The only way to learn to cook is to cook, and for me, as for so many others, it suddenly and unexpectedly became a disagreeable necessity to have to do it when war came and Occupation followed ….. It was at this time too that murder in the kitchen began. … The first victim was a lively carp. … I carefully, deliberately found the base of its vertebral column and plunged the knife in. I let go my grasp and looked to see what had happened. Horror of horrors. The carp was dead, killed, assassinated, murdered in the first, second and third degree. Limp, I fell into a chair, with my hands still unwashed reached for a cigarette, lighted it, and waited for the police to come and take me into custody.”

In another chapter, called “Dishes for Artists” artistically inclined fish lovers will be drawn to her recipe, “Bass for Picasso”.

“One day when Picasso was to lunch with us, I decorated a fish in a way that I thought would amuse him. I chose a fine striped bass and cooked it according to a theory of my grandmother who rarely saw her kitchen but who had endless theories about cooking as well as about many other things…” 

“A short time before serving it, I covered the fish with an ordinary mayonnaise and, using a pastry tube, decorated it with a red mayonnaise, not coloured with catsup – horror of horrors – but with tomato paste. Then I made a design with sieved hard-boiled eggs, the whites and the yolks apart, with truffles and with finely chopped fines herbes. I was proud of my chef d’oeuvre when it was served and Picasso exclaimed at its beauty. But, said he, should it not rather have been made in honour of Matisse than of me.”

This photograph taken by David Douglas Duncan (at another time and place) wouldn’t have done credit in any case to the artistic triumph of Alice’s creation, taken after the fact as it was, but you’ll get the idea.

My appetite for Alice by then was well and truly sparked. Julia Child with all her female impersonator eccentricities pales in comparison (and she didn’t have a moustache). Even the eminent James Beard was sufficiently impressed with her to say “Alice was one of the really great cooks of all time. She went all over Paris to find the right ingredients for her meals. She had endless specialities, but her chicken dishes were especially magnificent. The secret of her talent was great pains and a remarkable talent.” 

It was, I think, this combination of literary legend and culinary luminary that inspired me to attempt a novel, based loosely around Alice Toklas, the fate of which is touched on in a previous post. (Touched, I might say, gingerly, with all the trepidation of feeling for the source of an obstinate persistent ache in the body.) I would like it to go away, but I’m not sure it will. 

Nevertheless, it was an odyssey during which I experienced adventures, not quite as mythic as those of Ulysses, (of Greek not Joycean origin) but close. Along the way (and assisted by the benevolence of Arts SA) I travelled to Paris, New York, New Haven, San Francisco and Monterey, met remarkable people and discovered the extent to which this rather strange- looking, quirky little woman, consistently overshadowed as she was by the mountain range of Stein, left her own huge mark on the world.

You may wonder what the point of this nostalgic ramble among the Alice B. Toklas memorabilia is, especially if you neither know of, nor care about either Alice B. or Gertrude S. (At the very least, if this is the case, the Woody Allen movie “Midnight in Paris” is essential viewing for you, not least because of the starburst performance of Kathy Bates as Gertrude).

But back to the nebulous point. In the course of my Alice B. adventure, I discovered there were many other people in the world who had similarly found her a character of such fascination they devoted books, years of study, comprehensive documentaries, websites, collections, archives, both academic and otherwise, to keeping her identity alive.

Of those, one was the unforgettable late Janet Malcolm, (mentioned before in a book review). Another was Hans Gallas, the author of the whimsical and delightful book “Gertrude and Alice and Fritz and Tom: an Artful Adventure with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas”.  

Illustrated by Tom Hachtman, the book is described by the Marginalian as “an adventure in Paris with Pussy and Lovey” (Pussy and Lovey being the nicknames Alice and Gertrude gave each other). 

Here we have the fortuitous coming together of the vast knowledge of one of the world’s experts on Alice B. and Gertrude S. and the creative wizardry of a brilliant caricaturist to produce a book Alice would have loved (and Gertrude too perhaps, on a good day).

(Illustrations by Tom Hachtman from “Gertrude and Alice and Fritz and Tom”.)

Hans not only provided a research resource unsurpassed by even the Beinecke Library but generously guided me through the ups and downs (literally) of San Francisco when I was there.

All this, in a roundabout way, goes to show how story comes about when a character grows in someone’s imagination and assumes a three-dimensional aspect, deepening, lengthening and beginning to cast an enticing shadow, taking on not so much a life of their own but a life of the writer’s conjuring. For me to say “I love you Alice B. Toklas” needs no apology, but perhaps an explanation, and this is it.