Alice B. Toklas and Her Queer Cook Book
From Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women's Food Writing
Since its publication in 1954, the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book has enjoyed a cult readership among American food lovers, many of whom have prepared its recipes, which span from the sensible “Restricted Veal Loaf” to the extravagant “Young Turkey with Truffles” to the controversial “Haschich Fudge.”[i] As much as the recipes themselves, the reminiscences into which they are embedded have long drawn readers eager to learn more about Toklas’ adventures with her partner Gertrude Stein. Only recently, however, has the Cook Book begun to garner serious attention from literary scholars, who had previously gleaned it for information about Stein and her relationship with Toklas before setting it aside.
One notable and eloquent exception dates back to Paul Schmidt’s “As If a Cookbook Had Anything To Do With Writing,” published in 1974. Schmidt examines four of the most preeminent American food writers, Julia Child, Adelle Davis, M.F.K. Fisher, and Toklas, to argue that the latter pair belong to a tradition of food writing that can be traced back to Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and are, “like him, amateurs of the table,” who rely on an intermingling of anecdote, memory, and flavor (180-81). [ii] After Schmidt’s article, over a quarter century would pass before critics would begin to address the genre-blurring nature of Toklas’ Cook Book. One of the first to do so, Traci Marie Kelly happened upon it quite by “accident” while researching Gertrude Stein. Kelly went on to analyze the Cook Book in an essay, published in 2001, that defines three major categories of culinary autobiographies: the culinary memoir, the autoethnographic cookbook, and the autobiographical cookbook. This latter category, to which Kelly assigns The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, is “a complex intermingling of both autobiographical and cookery traditions.… such texts do not necessarily favor one element or the other; rather, the authors try to balance and illuminate the inter-elemental nature of how the recipe reveals the life story” (257).
Even more recently, Anna Linzie not only locates the Cook Book “at the borders of several genres or categories: cookbook, autobiography, and literary experiment,” but also draws attention to its gender-blending content (140). She observes:
In the Cook Book as a whole, the unconventional use of the quintessentially (male) modernist ‘war story’ genre not only alongside but thoroughly mixed up with the description of trivial, domestic aspects of life such as cooking and recipes works to collapse, or at least undermine the strongly hierarchical distinction between the martial and the domestic arts. ….[t]he boundaries between public and domestic concerns have been unsettled or partly erased (160).
Noting that the Cook Book has been dismissed by scholars because “it has typically been read and categorized, if at all, simply as a trivial cookbook,” Linzie examines it as a genre-bending and gender-blending text through the lens of autobiographical theory to “conceptualize the Cook Book as a renegade autobiography,” which challenges “an autobiographical tradition that presupposes heterosexuality” (148, 139, 51). As such, she reads the cookbook as a “queer” text, a term used by scholars and activists to designate that which challenges, questions, and disrupts heteronormativity. In turn, “to queer” as a scholarly pursuit means to delineate how texts and contexts destabilize “normative” notions of gender and sexuality as fixed or essential, to underscore their fluidity.[iii] I would like to extend Linzie’s analysis of the Cook Book as a text that destabilizes the heteronormative ideology of autobiographical writing by shifting the focus from autobiography onto food writing. Taking up where Schmidt left off in his discussion of Toklas’ debt to Brillat-Savarin, I argue that Toklas incorporates key tenets of gastronomic literature into her cookbook, a gesture that disrupts the heteronormative domestic food writing tradition by ideologically queering its conventionally gendered bounds. By simultaneously addressing Toklas’ Cook Book as a queer text and situating it within a highly gendered food writing tradition, this study works to interweave and extend the disparate strands of Toklas scholarship in order to illuminate the power of genre-bending food writing to transgress and reconfigure conventional gender ideologies.
Published a decade after The Gastronomical Me, M. F. K. Fisher’s pioneering celebration of female appetite, The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book blurred the boundaries that separated gastronomic literature from the domestic cookbook by merging these genres into one book. Like Fisher before her, Toklas adopted the French appreciation of cooking and dining as artforms. She also revered and nurtured the aesthetic pleasures that lead to gastronomic knowledge and articulated such pleasures in writing. But unlike The Gastronomical Me, which is comprised entirely of gastronomic memories, or memoir, Toklas’ Cook Book revolves mnemonically and organizationally around recipes, which are addressed to the American and English home cook. By encasing her recipes within a travelogue that charts her undomesticated adventures dining throughout the United States and France, Toklas inserts herself and her pleasure into an other-oriented, self-denying genre. In doing so, she flouts the heteronormative ideology that discouraged women’s self-expression and pleasure in eating.
Blending the sensuality and self-indulgence of gastronomic literature with the attention to domestic detail of the American cookbook, Toklas positions herself as both a gourmand and an exceptionally skilled and aesthetically attuned home cook. In other words, Toklas figures herself as a queer modern epicure—equally at ease in the home kitchen as in the most elite restaurants. Her self-presentation calls into question and reconfigures the ideologies that defined gastronomy and gastronomic tourism as male pursuits and domestic cookery as a feminine endeavor.
The Masculine Palate: Male-authored Domestic Cookbooks and Gastronomic Tour Guides
The seeming effortlessness with which Toklas bridges the gendered divide between men’s and women’s food writing stands out in sharp contrast to the tension that surfaces in the domestic cookbooks that American men began to author in the late 1930s. Whereas Toklas discoursed with ease on the traditionally masculine pursuit of gastronomy, American men often displayed a defensive masculinity upon entering the feminized realm of the home kitchen. Such defensiveness attests to their discomfort, which, at times, became so pronounced that it led to what Barbara Haber describes as “ludicrous posturing” (213).[iv]
Unlike their British counterparts who had been writing books on household management for centuries and felt comfortable advising the housewife on cookery instruction, American men had rarely written for the female home cook. Rather, they penned professional cookbooks, gastronomic literature, or disquisitions on the scientific and moral principles of healthy eating—genres traditionally gendered male. Unlike the realm of gastronomy and professional cookery, the home kitchen and home cookery were gendered female domains. As a result, the American man who wrote domestic cookbooks was inherently conscious of his potential feminization. In her study of cookbooks and gender in the twentieth-century United States, Jessamyn Neuhaus examines a range of domestic cookbooks written by men to find that “authors and editors took pains to depict men as essentially different kinds of culinary creatures than women in order to safeguard the masculinity of the male hobby cook” (76). Some authors differentiated themselves from the female home cook by declaring themselves innate gourmands who, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, wanted to help their readers hone an aesthetically nuanced palate. Others simply denigrated women’s cookery skills, often resorting to disparaging rhetoric.[v] As Neuhaus documents, for example George Frederick’s Cooking as Men Like It (1930) attributes the relative decline in marriage to woman’s “incompetent cookery,” noting that “few things move man to manslaughter more than does poor cookery” (82). Robert Loeb dedicates his popular and playful Wolf In Chef’s Clothing (1950) “To my father, and my father’s father, and my father’s father’s father, right back to Adam, all of whom spent their lives as the passive victims of feminine culinary caprice— from the first apple to the apfelstrudel” (7).
Gentler authors sought to depict men as artists in the kitchen, who enjoyed an innate creativity not shared by women. For example, in the preface to his The Best Men are Cooks (1941), Frank Shay notes that “[m]en should be good cooks, for they have a greater feeling for food than women have; … they are adventurous and are willing to take chances…. Women have reduced cooking to a science while men cooks are working to restore it to its former high estate as one of the finer arts” (vii).[vi] Like Shay, male authors frequently depicted men as more adventurous and imaginative in the kitchen than women. They also took pains to define themselves and their palates as more aesthetically refined and attuned to pleasure than the female home cook with her uninspired taste.
Many male authors differentiated themselves by using the words “gourmet,” “king,” or “chef” in their titles and by firmly aligning themselves with the nineteenth-century gourmand, presenting their cookbooks as gustatory criticism and themselves as arbiters of good taste. For example, in Gourmet Dinners (1941), G. Selmer Fougner blends gastronomic essay, domestic cookbook, and professional cookbook in one work. A wine writer for the New York Sun, Fougner clearly defines himself as a gourmand in the elite sense of the term—well-traveled, well-heeled, well-connected, a well-respected dining critic, and in much demand as a dining companion. In the forward to Gourmet Dinners, he states outright that
his function in the field of gastronomy, as he sees it, is limited to the role of the widely traveled gourmet who describes the culinary marvels he has found in his search after epicurean adventure throughout the world. And with the description, he passes along to his readers the recipes for the fine dishes which have been set before him in the various epicurean groups… of which he has been, in a manner of speaking, the moving spirit.
The author, then is not a cook. But greatly mistaken indeed is he who believes that to criticize a dinner it is necessary to be an expert chef (vii).
On one level, Fougner’s assertion that he “is not a cook” enables him to avoid association with the home kitchen and its accompanying feminization. On another level, Fougner’s claim that he “is not a cook” echoes that made by many nineteenth-century gourmands who defined themselves as consumers, rather than producers, of the culinary arts.
As self-defined critics of the culinary arts, the nineteenth-century gourmand “represented the public pursuit of sensory pleasure not the private satisfaction of physiological needs” (Ferguson 93). Drawing on this tradition, Fougner dissociates himself from the practice of domestic cookery, claiming an authority as a gourmand, or dining critic, with a discriminating palate. Like the nineteenth-century gourmand, or man of good taste, Fougner likewise writes “to interest those who like to read about good food” (xiii). In other words, his book fits into what Stephen Mennell describes as the “ill-defined margin at which the gastronomic essay gradually shades into the cookery book.” Such works “seem intended to be read as literature” as much as for practical instruction (271). Fougner states outright that “[s]ome of the recipes are intended purely for experts,” thereby excluding them from the practical domain of the home cook, who, he implies, will read them as a form of vicarious gourmandism (xiii).
William Rhode takes a similar tack in Of Cabbages and Kings (1938), for which he gathered recipes from European royal kitchens run by chefs who “reduced their work to the simplest, most subtle practices—just as great painters … achieve their finest effects in simplicity.” He did so in order to offer the modern housewife “the experience of the great, simple artist who really knew food and cooking,” encouraging his readers to “[l]ook into [such] experience and get the ‘hang’ of what makes fine food—not the women’s magazine ‘pap’ of today” (8). Like Fougner, Rhode firmly differentiates his “domestic cookbook” from the women’s tradition of home cooking by aligning himself with artists, chefs, and kings.
Appearing a year after Rhode’s gastronomic cookbook, Merle Armitage’s Fit for a King (1939) combines gastronomic essays with recipes to nourish the “cultivated palate” of his readers. In his introductory chapter, Armitage differentiates male gourmands from female home cooks, noting that
Man has proven that even in an over-refined civilization he can retain an enthusiasm, amounting to gusto, for food and eating. Probably because he can enjoy food without inhibitions he best can prepare dishes for the epicure. Far too many women find cookery a drudgery, an inescapable, dull routine. It cannot be from lack of practice then that women, by and large, have not made good as cooks. …. Cooking is a thing women have to do. Remove the daily necessity, and you would, undoubtedly, remove most of the indifference, making room thereby, for lively interest (12).
Unlike many of his male counterparts, who declare that men enjoy an innate gusto absent in women, Armitage provides a cultural explanation for this claim. He excuses women’s lack of gourmandize by acknowledging that placing three meals a day on the family table leads to “drudgery, an inescapable, dull routine.” By presenting cookery and gourmandize as pursuits “Fit for a King,” Armitage encourages more men to enter the home kitchen. With this gesture he suggests a future in which men might enjoy preparing the occasional meal themselves, thereby relieving the housewife of a portion of her weekly cooking duties. Although he does not disparage women outright, however, Armitage still takes their inferiority in the kitchen for a given.
The puffery of 1930s men who authored domestic cookbooks clearly attests to their discomfort at entering a culturally feminized realm. Men, however, weren’t the only ones struck by anxiety when they entered the domestic realm of cookery. Women found the potential emasculation of men who entered the home kitchen worrisome as well. In The Mystery Chefs Own Cook Book (1934), John McPherson states outright that he adopted the pseudonym to protect his mother who “was horrified when she first heard that I had taken to cooking as a hobby” (viii). Not surprisingly, McPherson makes a concerted effort to justify home cooking as a respectable occupation for men:
To me it is not strange that I should find pleasure in cooking. What does seem strange to me is that so few people do find pleasure in it or know that many of the world’s greatest men have found pleasure and relaxation in the art of excellent cooking. They are surprised to hear that Alexandre Dumas was a wonderful cook, and that the last book he wrote was a cook book…. I have in my possession the favorite recipes of over two hundred of the world’s greatest men. Among those who have made cooking their hobby are… Whistler, Clemenceau, King Edward VII, the Right Honourable Arthur J. Balfour, former Prime Minister of Great Britain…. I could almost fill this book with their names—kings, prime ministers, princes, presidents, cardinals, great generals, admirals, scientists, great painters, authors, musicians, sculptors (vi).
As such examples attest, bridging the rigidly gendered spheres of domestic food writing was no easy task for American men. One notable standout who felt no need to disparage women or to justify his passion for cookery proved to be none other than James Beard, whose first book Hors d’Oeuvre and Canapés (1940) provided rules of etiquette and recipes for hosting the ideal cocktail party, which Beard viewed “as the twentieth-century salon” (2). Wanting to encourage more men to take up domestic cookery, Beard chose manly topics for his next two cookbooks, Cook it Outdoors (1941) and Fowl and Game Cookery (1944). Although these books were geared more toward the male as opposed to the female home cook, Beard does not devalue women or women’s cooking in order to justify men’s entry into the home kitchen. By 1949, Beard hit his stride as the “Dean of American cookery” in The Fireside Cookbook, addressed equally to men and women.
By the time Toklas wrote her cookbook, another genre of food writing had taken root in the United States—the gastronomic tour guide. Whereas England saw the publication of Lieutenant-Colonel Newnham-Davis’ Dinners and Diners: Where and How to Dine in London in 1899 and France began using its first Michelin guide in 1900, the United States would not witness the publication of its own gastronomic guide book until the 1920s, when the first city restaurant guides, such as George Chappell’s Restaurants of New York (1925), came into being (Smith 352). The first national guide, Duncan Hines’ Adventures in Good Eating, appeared in 1936. Providing an annotated list of restaurants throughout the United States for fellow travelers and updating it annually, Hines became a national celebrity. International guides began to appear at the end of World War II, when record numbers of Americans began traveling to France. The more well-heeled were guided by Samuel Chamberlain’s “An Epicurean Tour of the French Provinces,” first published serially in Gourmet Magazine from 1949 to 1952. Chamberlain first encountered France when he served in the military during World War I and again as a civilian in the 1920s. Before his return to the United States in 1934, he befriended a number of American expatriates, including Toklas and Stein.
In 1952, Chamberlain’s series for Gourmet Magazine appeared in book form as Bouquet de France, preceding Toklas’ groundbreaking cookbook by two years. Unlike Hines’ guidebook, which provides brief, informative reviews of America’s restaurants, Bouquet de France offers an historical overview of French provincial cooking, a guide to regional inns and restaurants, as well as recipes gathered “from the best provincial and Parisian chefs in France” (viii). Chamberlain undoubtedly drew inspiration from two of the founding fathers of French gastronomic tourism—Curnonsky (pseudonym of Maurice Edmond Sailland) and Marcel Rouff.[vii] Beginning in 1921, Curnonsky and Rouff began publishing France Gastronomique, a twenty-seven volume series on French provincial cooking, which recommended inns and restaurants to discerning French travelers.In doing so, they created a series that “merges travel in France with the cooking found in her provinces” (Curnonsky 13).
Like Curnonsky and Rouff before him, Chamberlain pays tribute to Brillat-Savarin, his home province of Bugey, and his hometown of Belley, even including a fondue recipe concocted by the gastronome’s biographer and great-nephew Lucien Tendret. Tendret, a gourmand in his own right, wrote La Table au Pays de Brillat-Savarin. Tendret’s grandson gave Toklas and Stein a copy of the book, which the couple so well adored that they discussed translating it into English. Like Chamberlain, Toklas derived much inspiration from Brillat-Savarin, Lucien Tendret, and gastronomic guidebooks such as Curnonsky and Marcel Rouff’s twenty-seven volume France Gastronomique.
The Making of a Lesbian Gastronome and Her Cookbook
Toklas herself grew up in San Francisco to inherit the domestic responsibilities expected of a married woman at the age of twenty; when her mother died in 1897, she was bequeathed the domestic management of a home filled with men, including her grandfather, father, uncle, and younger brother. As one family friend remarked, “Alice was looked upon ‘only as a housekeeper, provider of food and of general comfort’” (29). Another friend recalled eating at Alice’s family home: “‘Alice and I sat meekly swallowing our food, never attempting to venture an opinion, nor were we encouraged to do so; quickly we fled at the first opportunity to Alice’s room to reestablish our lost identities’” (21). When Alice did offer an opinion, as biographer Linda Simon notes, her “ideas were ignored or dismissed with a laugh.”
During the ten years spent caring for her family, Toklas struggled to cope with her lesbianism within a fin de siécle culture that experienced a fundamental shift in its attitude toward women’s intimate relations. On one hand, the tail end of the nineteenth century brought a select group of women access to higher education and to pioneering career opportunities; Toklas herself attended the University of Washington, where she earned the equivalent of an associate degree in Music, a decidedly more conventional route than Stein’s decision to study psychology by attending Johns Hopkins’ Medical School for five years. Having achieved intellectual independence, such women were often loath to marry men who “expected them to become dutiful wives, attending the home.”[viii] For many of these women, “the choice to continue or pursue relationships with other women was a natural one…. [T]hese partnerships, which were sometimes labeled ‘Boston marriages,’ were visible to the outside world, and accepted by society” (D’Emilio 192). Simultaneously such “overly educated” women were beginning to feature in medical literature. In particular, renowned doctors such as S. Weir Mitchell, Edward Clarke, and John Harvey Kellogg argued that women who pursued intellectual endeavors risked the ruin of their mental and physical health. Male practitioners commonly believed that women were especially at risk from puberty through eighteen years of age, the period during which their ovaries were developing; doctors believed that mental exertion would inhibit ovarian growth, resulting in sterility.[ix]
In addition to its growing concern with women’s higher education, the medical community was also beginning to examine same-sex relationships and to define them as indicative of mental and physical degeneration. Some suffrage opponents went so far as to yoke a woman’s drive for the vote with sexual frustration and homosexual desire. In the words of one doctor, “the driving force in many agitators and militant women who are always after their rights, is often an unsatisfied sex impulse, with a homosexual aim. Married women with a completely satisfied libido rarely take an active interest in militant movements” (Simmons 57). [x] According to this logic, the best way to silence an activist would be to marry her off to a sexually attentive man. As such thinking attests, the unmarried woman underwent intense scrutiny by the medical community, which was not only beginning to define same-sex relationships as homosexual but also to construct “images of lesbians…. around notions of illness, perversion, inversion, and paranoia” (Benstock 11).
Such hostility toward women achieving higher education and toward same-sex desire spoke loudly to the fragility of middle-class heteronormative conventions at the turn into the twentieth century. In the words of one scholar: “In constructing viable lives without motherhood, female couples offered an implicit challenge to the delicate structure of middle-class civilized morality” (D’Emilio 201). Thus Toklas grew up during a time when public response toward women’s same-sex relationships was undergoing a revolutionary shift from one of acceptance to one of disgust and hostility. Simon summarizes Toklas’ plight as a lesbian living in the early twentieth-century United States: “Unable to fulfill the expectations of marriage and children, limited to those very few friends who understood her, Alice looked forward to a lonely future” (34). Her only hope lay in an escape from her familial duties. So she began planning an extended trip to Europe. Tellingly, once she set sail in 1907, she never again set eyes on her father. Within forty-eight hours of her arrival in Paris, she had met Gertrude Stein, with whom she built a life grounded in sensual pleasures, pleasures denied the proper middle and upper class American woman.[xi]
Stein herself documents the marked improvement in the quality of Toklas’ life initiated by travel abroad and completed by the couple’s union in “Ada,” a word portrait that Stein crafted about Toklas who features as the title character. In it, Stein recounts Toklas’ unhappiness taking care of family in San Francisco:
Her mother died…. The daughter then kept house for her father and took care of her brother. There were many relations who lived with them. The daughter did not like them to live with them and she did not like them to die with them….She told her father…that she did not like it at all being one being living then. He never said anything. She was afraid then…. (15).
The brief sketch ends with a playful, erotic tribute to the physical and emotional intimacy the couple enjoyed together in France: “Trembling was all living, living was all loving some one was then the other one. Certainly this one was loving this Ada then. And certainly Ada all her living then was happier in living than any one else who ever could, who was, who is, who ever will be living” (16). These latter lines of the “Ada” manuscript appear in Toklas’ handwriting while the previous ones were clearly written by Stein, a fact that has led one biographer to conclude that they were crafted by Toklas herself (Souhami 96).[xii] Regardless of whether or not Toklas authored part of Ada, the sketch undoubtedly articulates Toklas’ feelings about her family and for Stein. Thus, in their symbiotic and highly idiosyncratic fashion, the couple document that Toklas’ decision to escape the patriarchal confines of home enabled her to build a lesbian identity grounded in sensual pleasures, pleasures denied by the domestic ideology to which she was heir.
The couple lived together on the Left Bank of Paris from 1910 until Stein’s death in 1946; for most of these years, they summered in Brillat-Savarin’s home province of Bugey. For Americans living abroad during this time, France allowed, even enabled, a freedom of expression in the literary, visual, and culinary arts. For Toklas, in particular, cookery became a means of constructing her identity as the partner of Gertrude Stein, as an American expatriate living in Paris, and as a regular hostess to the likes of Pablo Picasso and F. Scott Fitzgerald. By creating an expatriate household in which her “husband” was another woman, Toklas queered American domestic ideology, which defined woman’s role as nurturing man and, literally as well as metaphorically, reproducing the American nation.
Given Toklas’ unconventional life and the radical nature of Stein’s own writing, it is hardly surprising that the Cook Book blurs the gendered distinctions between men’s and women’s food writing. It draws as much inspiration from the free form and aesthetic sensibility of gastronomic literature as from the domestic cookbook. Toklas’ emphasis on the presentation of self as well as on cooking and on dining as artforms were likewise key concerns of Brillat-Savarin, as they were for other authors of gastronomic literature.
According to Denise Gigante, gastronomic literature traces its roots back to the “eighteenth-century discourse on taste” and identifies “three separate categories of appetite: a basic hunger for food, a desire aroused by the presentation of an appetizing dish, and an appetite stimulated by all the arts of cookery when our hunger has already been satisfied” (Gusto xvii). If, as Gigante argues, gastronomers were primarily “concerned with the third, artificial or cultivated type of appetite, at the furthest remove from need,” domestic cookbooks might be understood to focus most intently on the first two of these appetites—basic hunger and the presentation of an appetizing dish (xx).Unlike gastronomic literature, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century domestic cookbooks display an ambivalent relationship with the aesthetics of dining, in large part, because American and British Victorian culture worked so hard to elide female sensuality from the dining table in order to repress the erotic component of eating. Toklas’ Cook Book shows no such indecision. Instead, it focuses on each of the appetites outlined by Gigante, concerning itself equally with the need to put food on the table, particularly during wartime, and with the aesthetics of appetite entirely removed from physical need.
In addition to its emphasis on the aesthetics of appetite, The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book also shares with gastronomic literature an attention to the aesthetic quality of its own style. As Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson notes about Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste, the most revered and emulated work of the genre, “the anecdotal mode, the witty tone and the language play…give this work an almost palpable literary aura” (96). Such notable anecdote, wit, and language play likewise saturate the The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. The Cook Book also displays an intellectual engagement with the senses and a freedom to travel beyond the home kitchen that moves nimbly beyond the domesticated realm within which most women’s cookbooks were contained. In its articulation of such freedom, Toklas’ Cook Book employs at least six of the key characteristics of the male-authored tradition: 1) an unconventional form that incorporates and crisscrosses between several genres of writing 2) a stress on gastronomic tourism as well as a transnational frame of reference 3) an aesthetic appreciation of the pleasures of the table and of cookery as an artform 4) a reverence for hospitality and the mutual accord and well being that it nourishes 5) a keen sense of humor and a playful attitude toward the deadliness of man’s hunger for fish, flesh, and fowl. By incorporating such key tenets of gastronomic literature into a book written for the home cook, Toklas transgresses the private boundaries of domestic food writing in order to articulate an aesthetics of eating pleasure and to establish her credentials as a well-traveled gastronome, conventionally male undertakings.
As much a travelogue as a domestic cookbook, Toklas’ memoiris filled with movement, dislocation, relocation, and transgression. This movement works to dissolve the binaries and hierarchies typical of American women’s food writing, such as male versus female; native versus foreigner; American versus French; public versus private, and mobility vs. stasis.[xiii] In particular, The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book shows the couple wandering the countryside, often during wartime. They refuse to leave France during the Second World War despite repeated warnings from doctors, friends and lawyers about the danger of being highly visible Jewish lesbians living in German-occupied territory. Many of Toklas’ recipes are literally encased within stories that describe her and Stein’s wartime work with the Red Cross, evacuating wounded soldiers, moving supplies, setting up make-shift hospitals, serving as liaison for incoming American troops during the first World War, and twice, housing German soldiers under their roof during the Second World War.
In the chapter “Little-known French Dishes suitable for American and British Kitchens,” Toklas reflects that the recipes she includes “are no longer novelties” in France, but rather “a slow evolution in a new direction, which is the way great art is created—that is, everything about is ready for it, and one person having the vision does it, discarding what he finds unnecessary in the past. Even a way of cooking an egg can be arrived at in this way” (139). This “slow evolution in a new direction” with “one person having the vision” to “discard what he finds unnecessary in the past” likewise articulates Toklas’ culinary philosophy and aptly describes her own project, which dissolves and reconfigures the rigid format of the cookbook to include the looser structure of gastronomic literature; like the Physiology of Taste, which includes personal narrative; a list of aphorisms; reflections on digestion and diet; theories of frying; and gastronomical meditations, Toklas’ Cook Book comprises a pastiche of style and form, including a collection of dishes for artists; a gastronomic travelogue of her and Stein’s journeys throughout France, Spain, and the United States; a tribute to her vegetable gardens; reflections on war and conquest; and a collection of recipes from French chefs.
Alice B. Toklas as a Gastronomic Tour Guide
The Alice B. ToklasCook Book fashions a new genre of food writing—an idiosyncratic blend of American domestic cookbook, nineteenth-century French gastronomic literature, twentieth-century gastronomic tour guide, war story, and memoir. The genre that Toklas creates owes as much to the aesthetic form pioneered by Brillat-Savarin in the nineteenth-century as to its twentieth-century extension—the gastronomic tour guide.In 1923, Toklas and Stein first explored Brillat-Savarin’s home province of Bugey with France Gastronomique, the twenty-seven volume series on French provincial cooking, as their guide. Toklas writes of the series: “As each one appeared I would read it with curiosity. The author [Curnonsky] was paradoxically a professional gourmet. Of the places we knew I was not always in agreement with his judgment” (90). Yet at Curnonsky’s recommendation, the couple traveled to Bourg-en-Bresse, where the “menu at the hotel for dinner was carefully chosen and delicately cooked. We were delighted and toasted the guide book which had led us there and decided to stay for a couple of days” (91). After Bourg-en-Bresse, Curnonsky led the couple to Brillat-Savarin’s hometown of Belley.
The mobility that characterizes Toklas’ cookbook arises not only from her gastronomic tourism and wartime escapades, but also from her emphasis on the permeability of national boundaries as well as the culinary exchanges wrought by wars and conquests. Such permeability is no more apparent than in the chapter “Beautiful Soup.” Here Toklas attempts to trace the origins of the “ineffable” Spanish gazpacho only to find structural similarities branching geographically outward into countries such as Greece, Turkey, Poland, and even Chile. In the end, Toklas presents seven Mediterranean soups, which she loosely conjectures share a similar origin. She directly attributes such geographic dispersion to war, reflecting that “every nation…has its idiosyncrasies in food and drink conditioned by climate, soil, and temperament.… Wars and conquests [and their]… invading or occupying troops carry their habits with them and so in time […] modify the national kitchen or table” (xvi). Rather than condemning such martial exchanges, Toklas embraces the flavors wrought by transnational culinary contact, refusing to hierarchize French cuisine over that of the French colonies or French cookery over that of the United States.
Although Toklas enjoys what she calls the less “emasculated” home cookery of the French, she refuses the rigid adherence to culinary tradition and, by extension, to national boundaries, which she found typical of the French table. As she explains, “We foreigners living in France respect and appreciate [French technique] but deplore their too strict observance of a tradition which will not admit the slightest deviation in seasoning or the suppression of a single ingredient” (3). Such strict observance excludes the “imaginative” and “exotic” from French cuisine, an exclusion Toklas remedied by incorporating ingredients and cooking techniques imported from colonized lands as well as from the United States into her recipe collection. In fact, she began to seriously learn about the cooking of her home country while preparing meals for Gertrude Stein in France. As her acumen developed, Toklas felt herself growing “experimental and adventurous” (29). With an appreciation for transnational culinary exchanges as well as a penchant for experimentation, she found what she considered the best foreign cooking in France in the homes of those who had lived “in the colonies” and returned home “not only with the respect of the local cooking [of Indo-China or Africa] but with the materials unobtainable in France and a knowledge of how to prepare them” (21). Not surprisingly, Toklas reflects that three of the finest cooks in her employ came from Indochina and Martinique.
In addition to her culinary adventures in France, Toklas recounts her and Stein’s seven-month gastronomic journey to the United States, which took them to the myriad cities and towns where Stein spoke on an extended lecture circuit. In the chapter “Food in the United States,” Toklas charts her and Stein’s itinerary through the regional foods they encountered, providing recipes for such American icons as wild rice salad, gooseberry jelly, turtle soup, and oysters Rockefeller. Having returned to the United States for the first time in twenty-seven years, Toklas finds herself smitten with the flavors of her home country. Stopping in San Francisco, Toklas and Stein “indulged in gastronomic orgies—sand dabs meunière, rainbow trout in aspic, grilled soft-shell crabs, paupiettes of roast fillets of pork, eggs Rossini, and tarte Chambord” (134). In New Orleans, Toklas recalls, “I walked down to the market every morning realizing that I would have to live in the dream of it for the rest of my life” (131). With such recollections, Toklas simultaneously captures the regional bounty and the international flair of American cookery.
Throughout the chapter, Toklas links her final impression of a city with the groups and individuals who hosted the couple, drawing a taut connection between the pleasure of a meal and the social skill of its host. She writes:
When we were at St. Paul to our surprise and delight there was a telephone message from Sherwood Anderson. He had heard we were in the neighbourhood [sic]. He proposed calling for us and driving us down to meet his wife…which he did, through miles of ice and snow-drifts, to sweet people and a festival dinner. It was the happiest of meetings (128).
Such memories not only link a city with the quality of its hosts but also introduce the private realm into a chapter that charts the couple’s publicly-oriented, or professional, adventures.
Not surprisingly, Toklas’ gastronomic reflections also include commentary on American restaurants. She recalls that
[i]n Columbus, Ohio, there was a small restaurant that served meals that would have been my pride if they had come to our table from our kitchen. The cooks were women and the owner was a woman and it was managed by women. The cooking was beyond compare, neither fluffy nor emasculated, as women’s cooking can be, but succulent and savoury (128-29).
Like the female restaurant cooks, who skillfully avoid the fluffy and the emasculated in favor of the succulent and savory, Toklas illustrates a remarkable agility in moving between the private and public, the culturally coded feminine and masculine realms, all the while displaying a keen wit and refusing the slightest taint of nostalgia.
Crisscrossing the Gendered Divide of Food Writing
Voyaging well beyond the domestic realm not only enabled Toklas to gain a freedom of movement and breadth of perspective that accrues through travel, but it likewise enabled her to contextualize cooking and gastronomy in relation to the other arts. Like nineteenth and early twentieth-century gastronomes, she draws heavily on comparisons to the visual arts, a reliance aided by her intimate knowledge of such painters as Picasso and Matisse; she and Stein not only owned many of their artworks but also hosted the artists regularly. Driven to impart an artistic dimension to her cookbook, Toklas jettisoned the distrust of sensual pleasure that haunted much American home cooking, practicing in its stead an aesthetic approach toward eating and a reverence for the pleasures of good food and wine. She adopted this reverent attitude from the French, who, as she explains, “bring to their consideration of the table the same appreciation, respect, intelligence and lively interest that they have for the other arts, for painting, for literature, and for theatre” (3). Such comparisons of cookery with art are a hallmark of Toklas’ cookbook. For example, after encountering a series of “ineffable” gazpachos on a tour through Spain, Toklas finds that “the recipes for them had unquestionably become of greater importance than Grecos and Zurbarans, than cathedrals and museums” (49).
Toklas, like authors of gastronomic literature before her, focused on “[e]levating gourmandism to the status of the fine arts and establishing its legitimate link to aesthetic taste” (Gigante, Taste 166). Toward this end, she articulates the intellectual and emotional rewards of gastronomy, reflecting that:
When treasures are recipes they are less clearly, less distinctly remembered than when they are tangible objects. They evoke however quite as vivid a feeling—that is, to some of us who, considering cooking an art, feel that a way of cooking can produce something that approaches an aesthetic emotion (100).
Here Toklas raises cookery to the level of the less ephemeral arts to argue that an exquisitely wrought dish can affect the diner as profoundly as can a painting by El Greco or, for that matter, one by Matisse or Picasso.
Throughout the cookbook, Toklas documents her many encounters with dishes that produced in her an “aesthetic emotion,” elegantly demonstrating a fundamental goal of gastronomy: to nourish aesthetic pleasure so that it may add nuance, depth, and richness to the very way we perceive and interact with the surrounding world. In so doing, she echoes two previous authors of gastronomic literature—Theodore Child and Elizabeth Robins Pennell, each of whom aligned aesthetic emotion with one of the three agents, or artists, involved in the practice of gastronomy—the gourmand, the cook, and the host. Whereas Toklas found that the aesthetic emotion of eating arises from the gourmand’s appreciation of the dish itself, Child attributed it to the cook who, as an artist, should approach his work with “a sense of dignity and self respect and a certain emotion” (3); Pennell attributed aesthetic pleasure to the act of hosting “the perfect meal” during which “mind and body alike are satisfied” (12).
In his definition of the French word Hôte, André Simon explores why gastronomy relies as heavily on the art of hospitality as it does the art of cookery, explaining that the term
is used for both host and guest, and it is as it should be, since there is no differentiation between host and guest, wherever there is true hospitality…. L’Hôte, the name indicates perfect equality and understanding between two persons entertaining each other…. In hospitality as in love, there should be no bargaining: each giveth the best that he hath to give, without any sense of either inferiority or superiority (29).
Toklas emphasizes just such an undifferentiated rapport between host and guest. As she explains, the most memorable meals to which she has been invited as a guest inevitably “achieve a harmony” and balance (25).
Tellingly, the three recipes included in her chapter “Dishes for Artists” include one Toklas created in Picasso’s honor, a second given to her by the painter Francis Picabia, and a third from Baronne Pierlot, “an exquisite hostess.” Toklas lauds Pierlot as an artist “not only for her wit and charm [and] for her impeccable taste in choosing her guests and her menus, but also for the care with which her old cook, Perrine, prepared the menus” (32). Toklas commends Pierlot as an original and enchanting hostess, including her recipe for “Gigot de la Clinique,” or Hospital Leg of Mutton. This latter dish famously requires that the mutton be injected daily with a syringe filled with ½ cup Cognac and ½ cup orange juice and bathed for eight days in a highly spiced and herbed marinade so that it will be “transfused into a strange and exquisite venison” to which “no leg of venison can compare” (33). Toklas closes her commentary on Pierlot’s artistry by noting that her recipe for Gigot a la Clinique becomes so renowned that some years later it appears in a cookbook:
Everyone thought that the syringe was a whimsy, that Madame Pierlot was making mock of them. Not at all. Years later I found it in that great collection of recipes, Bertrand Geugan’s Le Grand Cuisinier Français. The Barrone Pierlot’s recipe is classified, it has entered into the Grande Cuisine Française.
Here Toklas draws attention to one of the primary functions of gastronomic as well as culinary literature—the codification of an aesthetics of taste.
Like Fisher and the founding fathers of gastronomic literature before her, Toklas memorializes those moments of gastronomic harmony and balance—to capture and convey the essence of hospitality. Toklas’ cookbook focuses in particular on those harmonious moments struck amid the brutal horrors of everyday existence lived during two World Wars. Being able to host the unexpected guest, the usual circle of friends, and any stranger who extended her and Stein hospitality became especially important during wartime, as it provided a means of maintaining dignity. Thus when looking out her window while dressing one morning in 1940 and seeing “German planes firing on French planes, not more than two miles away,” Toklas determined to exist and be hospitable for as long as possible. Toward that end, she and Stein drove into town to procure
two hams and hundreds of cigarettes and some groceries—the garden…would provide fruit and vegetables. The main road was filled with refugees, just as it had been in 1914 and in 1917. Everything that was happening had already been experienced, like a half-awakened from nightmare…. [W]e lived on those two hams during the long lean winter that followed and well into the following spring (31).
When the Germans forbade fishing, Toklas found a sympathetic butcher to bring her sacks of crawfish so that she could “give lunch parties.” In return, she recalls, “[o]ur guests brought their own bread or gave me their coupons” (204).
At another point, while driving around the countryside, Toklas asked a “military car filled with officers” where to find a bite to eat.
They said if we followed them we could find something to eat…. They stopped at a corrugated iron hut and sure enough the man who presumably lived there made us an omelette with fried potatoes and a cup of real coffee, so rare in those days that at once we realized that the officers must have brought their own provisions with them and that we were sharing them. And then I remembered the two boxes of cakes the abbé’s mother had sent to us the day before. So we got them out of [the car]. The little Alsatian cakes were of her own baking and delicious. We took a few of each kind and gave the rest to the officers whose unwitting guests we had been (70).
Toklas then describes how to make the cakes she gave to the officers, in effect, providing her readers with a way to materialize the gift she shared with her hosts. As with each of the recipes Toklas provides, the cakes, if prepared and eaten, can convey the gustatory pleasures around which Toklas’ memories cohere. Repeatedly within Toklas’ wartime stories, the line between host and guest becomes blurred. By merging the roles of host and guest, Toklas’ stories emphasize hospitality as a mode of exchange in which, as Andre Simon defines it, each nourishes the other in such a way that “there is no differentiation between host and guest.”
The Aesthetic Pleasures of Domesticity
Like Fisher before her, Toklas pushes beyond the more innovative American women food writers by inserting her appetites, her tastes, and her life story into the narrative flow. Both Fisher and Toklas craft gastronomic travelogues of their time in France in which they articulate the importance of nourishing the self with hospitality and grace during wartime. Both women likewise cultivate a wry sense of humor. Toklas differs notably from Fisher, however, in her philosophical and practical engagement with the culinary arts. Fisher explains that in her own work recipes appear “like birds in a tree—if there is a comfortable branch” (Serve It Forth 5).[xiv] Recipes serve a far more foundational role within Toklas’ work. In particular, they anchor her memories and offer a way for readers to taste, literally or metaphorically, the gustatory pleasures that enriched her life with Stein. Prepared and eaten, they also enable the reader to literally ingest Toklas’ culinary aesthetic.
Toklas’ emphasis on domestic ritual and household management clearly participates in the women’s food writing tradition. It does so in such a fashion, however, that it not only queers the boundaries between the private and public realms, but also those traditionally erected between household manager and servant. Nineteenth-century cookbooks often included tips on how to manage domestic workers and notably stereotyped entire nations in so doing. Authors lumped servants into a subclass of immigrants prone to laziness and insolence. Domestic scientists, in particular, felt it their duty to reform such traits into diligence and alacrity. For example, in a chapter devoted to servants in her Practical Housekeeper (1857), Elizabeth Fries Ellet bemoans that fact that
[h]ousekeepers are mainly dependent on the Irish and German emigrants, who as a rule are utterly ignorant of household service, and have to be taught everything; often receiving wages for months before they begin to make themselves useful. By the time they can be trusted to do the work, they are corrupted by intercourse with other servants, or persons who prompt them to make exaction on your time for visiting their numerous relatives from the old country, as well as to fill your kitchen with strangers, till the annoyance becomes intolerable. A complaint on this front from the employers is followed by an outbreak of insolence…. (26-27).
Servants were frequently compared to children, whose willful behavior and ignorance needed a housewife’s firm guidance. In The American Woman’s Home, Catherine Beecher relates the tale of a housekeeper who “succeeded in procuring a raw Irish maid-of-all-work, a creature of immense bone and muscle, but of heavy, unawakened brain. In one fortnight she established such a reign of Chaos and old Night in the kitchen and through the house that her mistress… dismissed her” (311). In a declaration that epitomizes the foundational ideology of nineteenth-century domesticity, Beecher reflects on the relationship between housewife and servant:
It has been shown that the great end for which Jesus Christ came, and for which he instituted the family state, is the training of our whole race to virtue and happiness…. In this mission, of which woman is chief minister…the distinctive feature is self-sacrifice of the wiser and stronger members to save and to elevate the weaker ones. The children and the servants are these weaker members, who by ignorance and want of habits of self-control are in most danger (143).
Although Beecher articulates this message within an etiquette book rather than a cookbook proper, such notions of self-sacrifice and moral duty characterized nineteenth-century women’s food writing, which conflated the family’s physical nourishment with its moral and spiritual health. A woman who failed to properly feed her family not only risked their physical well-being, but also jeopardized the spiritual well-being of the family. Certainly, not all domestic cookbook authors adopted such a moralistic tone as Beecher or rigorously espoused Christian values. However, the principles of self-sacrifice and moral responsibility would continue to preoccupy much of women’s food writing well into the twentieth-century.
A comparison of this American domestic ideology with Toklas’ discussion of her own household in France illuminates a radical shift in perspective. Tellingly, Toklas does not provide intimate portraits of her dinner guests or even of Stein, who features most commonly as part of the “we” with which Toklas narrates much of her memoir. Rather, she paints intimate portraits that record the idiosyncratic lives and recipes of her “Servants in France.” Without a doubt, Toklas writes about these individuals from a position of cultural privilege, which leads her, on occasion, to stereotype her employees according to their nationality. Nonetheless, the fact that she folds their stories into her life writing marks her culinary memoir as a distinctly modern, or modernist, text. Within the chapter, Toklas not only recalls the weaknesses and strengths of her employees, but also relates those instances when servants quit their position, in effect firing Toklas and Stein on moral grounds. One cook quit the couple after seeing their art collection, having been “frightened” by its disturbing content. Another lasted three days before, as Toklas narrates “she looked at me severely and said that we ‘lived French,’ and that that was not what she had been led to suspect and she was leaving, which she did” (180). Toklas and Stein were not alone in the difficulty they encountered keeping servants. The dawn of the twentieth-century brought with it a permanent decline in the number of domestic workers per household, resulting in an increasing shortage of available workers for hire.[xv] As a result, cookbooks from the 1920s and 1930s illustrate “an increasing emphasis on the problem of getting servants and on their general inadequacies… and anecdotes are told about their willful stupidity in the face of the exotic [such as] mistaking caviare for engine grease” (Humble 51).[xvi] Like Toklas’ cookbook, they also show “the balance of power having shifted to the servants” (Humble 51).
The fact that Toklas and Stein lived together as a lesbian couple, however, meant that they were at a particular disadvantage. As a result, those servants who stayed, as Toklas explains “had their weaknesses…. Gertrude Stein liked to remind me that if they did not have their faults, they would not be working for us” (173). In this chapter, Toklas comes closest to addressing the downside of living as a lesbian, even in a city such as Paris that nurtured the Bohemian lifestyle practiced by her and Stein. She does so in a humorous fashion, however, that inverts the patronizing tone that cookbook authors typically expressed toward domestic workers and destabilizes the hierarchy of master over servant. As Anna Linzie explains:
Stein’s and Tokas’s unconventionality, in both sexual and cultural preferences, obviously make them less than ideal employers. The way in which the Cook Book openly reveals this to be the case introduces an element of ambiguity in the roles of master and servant as superior and inferior, as dominant and subordinate (178).
This destabilization extends to Toklas’ appreciation of the finest cooks that worked for her and Stein, three of whom tellingly hail from Martinique and Vietnam. Hélène was “an invariably perfect cook,” (171) Jeanne’s “sauces had unknown, delicate and still exotic flavours,” (174) Trac’s cooking “was delicate, varied and nourishing,” (186) Nguyen was “inventive, deft, a wizard” (189). On one level, the fact that three of Toklas’ favorite cooks hail from colonized territories speaks to what one critic terms a “colonial inflection” that appears now and again in Toklas’s Cook Book, one that surfaces in her desire for “exotic” flavors, recipes, and, in this instance, cooks (Garland 46). At the same time, however, in lauding the idiosyncratic skills of such “exotic” cooks and including recipes that showcase their culinary artistry, Toklas pays tribute to their influence on her own culinary aesthetic, which is nourished by domestic workers and professional chefs alike.
The fluid boundaries that characterize Toklas’ cookbook extend to the recipes themselves, which eschew the traditional American recipe format. Although Toklas’ recipes are visually separated from the narrative as they are in most cookbooks, the beginning and end of the recipes often flow into and out of the “memoir” encasing it. As Traci Marie Kelly notes, “Such interplay makes perfect sense to the reader who understands that Toklas wanted to write a cookbook to be read for enjoyment; she wanted to write the memoirs of her years with Stein; and that those two elements (the cookery instructions and the memories) could not be separated” (258). In some cases, such textual flow from recipe into memoir and vice versa so successfully fuses the recipe with the memory of the dish it describes that the two become one. A striking example of this integration appears in the chapter “Food to Which Aunt Pauline and Lady Godiva Led Us,” which recounts the couple’s adventures roaming the French countryside in search of exquisitely prepared meals. Aunt Pauline, a Model T Ford, took them to a restaurant in Lyon where the owner and chef, Mère Fillioux, awed them with both her cooking and her carving skills, showcased most memorably in the flavor and presentation of her “Steamed Chicken,” for which Toklas provides the following recipe:
The very best quality of chicken was used for steaming, as we use the best steel for gadgets, which is a very smart thing to do. The chicken has very thin slices of truffles slipped with a sharp knife between the skin and the flesh, and before trussing it the cavity is filled with truffles. Place the bird in the steamer over half white wine and half veal broth with salt and pepper and the juice of a lemon. The latter will give a flavour, but above all will keep the chicken white. The chicken was gigantic but so young that less than an hour had sufficed to cook it. This she told me when she came to carve it. She looked at it critically, then proudly. She was an artist (59).
In this recipe, Toklas interweaves her memory of the dish at the restaurant, directions on how her readers might prepare it, rationale for why only the best ingredients will do, and commentary on the originating chef herself, successfully embedding the recipe within a description of the very one her and Stein ate at the restaurant.
In “Food to Which Aunt Pauline and Lady Godiva Led Us,” Toklas abandons the home kitchen altogether to dine at some of the nation’s finest restaurants, ones which often came highly recommended by the Guide Gastronomique. At the Hotel de la Côte d’Or the couple dine on a meal created by “one of the great French chefs” from whom Toklas remarks that she “learned a great deal.” Toklas learned not only by eating the dishes prepared by French chefs, but also by watching them at work in the restaurant kitchen (78). In turn, Toklas includes many of the recipes gathered during the course of such adventures, thereby injecting the professional into the domestic cookbook. She explains how in Chablis, she had the pleasure of watching “Monsieur Bergeran [who] was an intelligent and gifted chef. His menus were a history of the French kitchen and he was its encyclopaedia” (90). After Bergeran shows Toklas how to prepare Chicken Sauté Aux Ducs De Bourgogne, a recipe for which punctuates the narrative, the couple drive to Dijon, where they dine at the Three Pheasants. Fittingly, Toklas ends this chapter with a tribute to the “perfect cook” Madame Bourgeois, from whom Toklas “learned much of what great French cooking was and had been” (93). That Toklas awards her highest accolades to a female chef is well in keeping with the gender-bending nature of the Cook Book.
Although many female cookbook authors had included recipes from professional chefs by the time Toklas began writing, she stands alone, far surpassing even M. F. K. Fisher, in her macabre sense of humor. Such black humor marks yet one more way that Toklas deviates from the women’s tradition whose rare streaks of humor revolve around decidedly more domesticated play, epitomized by the jocular asides that pepper Irma Rombaeur’s Joy of Cooking (1931). Rather than constructing humorous anecdotes about such somber topics as “Murder in the Kitchen,” as does Toklas, Rombauer jokes about family crests and apple pies. For example, she puns: “A friend of mine is so fond of Apple Pie that he says his coat of arms bears an apple pie rampant. Every attempt has been made to make this one couchant” (211-12). As Susan Leonardi has astutely details in her essay “Recipes for Reading,” Rombaeur’s humor helps create a friendly rapport with the reader. It would take another thirty years before Americans were eager to imbibe Peg Bracken’s quips about the drudgery of domestic work in The I Hate to Cook Book (1960), written for “those of us who want to fold our big dishwater hands around a dry Martini instead of a wet flounder come the end of a long day” (ix).
Unlike Bracken’s book, which appealed to the weary housewife with such cookery instruction as “let it cook for five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink,” Toklas’ humor derives from her reluctant sadism driven by an unapologetic hunger for gustatory pleasures. Such humor enables her to lighten heavy subject matter and address the murder of fish, flesh, and fowl required to nourish gourmandize. In one passage in particular, she skillfully treats domestic labor with a dark sense of humor reminiscent of Grimod de la Reynière. The chapter “Murder in the Kitchen” finds Toklas confronted with dispatching the very fish and fowl that she eats, a necessity brought on by war. She reflects on the situation:
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, then, that murder in the kitchen began. The first victim was a lively carp…. A heavy sharp knife came to my mind as the classic, the perfect choice [of weapon]…. [so] 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 (28).
Here Toklas comments ironically on the fact that the mass slaughter of war brought on her own “horror of horrors”—the necessity of killing her dinner.
The next murder she commits in the kitchen takes place after a crate of doves arrives, sent by a friend. Toklas recalls the accompanying note ending with the comment that “as Alice is clever she will make something delicious from them” and reflects:
It is certainly a mistake to allow a reputation for cleverness to be born and spread by loving friends. …. I carefully found the spot on poor innocent Dove’s throat where I was to press and pressed. The realization had never come to me before that one saw with one’s fingertips as well as with one’s eyes. It was a most unpleasant experience, though as I laid out one by one the sweet young corpses there was no denying one could become accustomed to murdering. So I plucked the pigeons, emptied them and was ready to cook “Braised Pigeons en Croûtons” (40).
Unlike Rombaeur, Toklas adopts a wry, macabre sense of humor that juxtaposes death with pleasure. Such a tack allows Toklas to illuminate the underside of life, enabling her to safely reveal what would otherwise remain unspeakable within the confines of a cookbook. “Murder in the Kitchen,” for example, links the murderous nature of war with the murderous nature of cookery and gastronomy—both are predicated on the expendability of life. Packaging such gruesome reflection within a humorous anecdote softens its message into a more palatable form. Such deflective and revealing humor likewise runs throughout the Physiology of Taste, which, like Toklas’ cookbook, documents a life heavily impacted by war. As Paul Schmidt explains, Brillat-Savarin and Toklas concerned themselves with “the notion…that life goes on all around the dining table, and death and destruction are there, waiting, without” (193).[xvii]
In addition to humor, Toklas relied on food writing itself to help distract from the violent nature of war as well as from the psychological and physical hungers that it unleashed. In the following passage Toklas describes how she coped with rationing at the tail end of the Second World War:
I betook myself to the passionate reading of elaborate recipes in very large cook-books. Through the long winter evenings close to the inadequate fire the recipes for food that there was no possibility of realising held me fascinated—forgetful of restrictions, even occasionally of the Occupation, of the black cloud over and about one, of a possible danger one refused to face. The great French chefs and their creations were very real (214).
Because culinary and gastronomic literature, in the words of Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, “transforms the material into the intellectual, the imaginative, the symbolic, and the aesthetic,” it provides Toklas with a means of transcending the brutal reality of war (105). In turn, as a representation of the material food, culinary literature can evoke taste memory, an evocation powerful enough to provide temporary relief from hunger and fear.
Just as reading about food can provide nourishment, so too can the act of writing about it, a point Toklas underscores in the introduction to her cookbook. Noting that she penned much of the cookbook while suffering from “an attack of pernicious jaundice,” she recalls how “remembered health and enjoyment lent special lustre to dishes and menus barred from an invalid table, but hovering dream-like in invalid memory” (xvi). That the act of remembering and recording such dishes provided “an escape from the narrow diet and monotony of illness” attests to the power of gastronomy; a dish, like a painting, can stir an “aesthetic emotion” in the diner that, in turn, leaves an existential trace, or taste memory. Recipe writing itself enables Toklas to record dishes that stirred in her an aesthetic emotion, thereby evoking the taste memories they left behind.
Toklas’ recipe collection conveys her particular aesthetic as well as her approach toward life. As Elspeth Probyn explains, “her recipes are suggestive of a certain conduct; we glimpse through them the intermingling of bodies, nations, memories, war, and love” (75). Toklas’ recipe for fondue exemplifies such intermingling. She introduces the recipe by contextualizing how it came into her life, describing the time “two officers and thirty soldiers of the Italian army were billeted upon” her and Stein (217). The officers thanked the couple by giving them three pounds of parmesan cheese. In reciprocal thanks, Toklas threw a party, inviting the Italians to share the fondue she prepared with their gift. Toklas provides the recipe before dropping the fact that “The Italians stayed until their country accepted the Armistice…. There were about six hundred Italian soldiers in the neighborhood and the frontier was only 125 kilometers away. We hoped they would cross it safely. Later we heard that they had all been killed by the Germans” (218). Rather than lingering on the mass slaughter, Toklas includes a recipe for the fondue she made and ate with the Italians. She prefers to memorialize the fondue in a recipe that can, in turn, be transformed into an aesthetic object, a living tribute to the Italians with whom she shared it. In this way, she illustrates that the act of cooking is an attempt “to circumvent decay and death, in the quiet knowledge that the task is impossible” (Schmidt 203). Shortly after the mass slaughter of the Italians, the destructive violence of war savages the civilized tone of Toklas’ memoir, creating the most disturbing moment of the book. Toklas recalls:
The end was near. So the boys of the Résistance came down quietly from their mountain top one morning, drove the seven hundred Germans from Culoz and the neighborhood into the marshes, surrounded them and wiped them out. It was glorious, classical, almost Biblical. We celebrated by taking one of the liberated taxis to Belley (218-19).
An undomesticated attitude, indeed.
Because of her determination to grasp pleasure amid the horrors of war, Toklas shows little remorse about partaking fully in the black market. On one birthday that fell during Occupation, Toklas shared a meal with Stein and a dozen of their friends, dining on: “Aspic de foie gras; Truites en chemise; Braised pigeons—shoestring potatoes; Baron of spring lamb—jardiniere of spring carrots—onions, asparagus tips—string beans en barquette; Truffle Salad; Wild-strawberry tart” (208). Hardly a modest, self-denying meal. Toklas herself addresses its extravagance when she writes:
One remembered the packages of food one was sending to war and political prisoners and felt conscience-stricken at the overabundance of our feast. We did nevertheless recover our high spirits….That lunch was the beginning of the excitement and gratification that came to us gradually from provisions secured on the black market (209).
With such an unapologetic apology, Toklas underscores her refusal to sacrifice herself or her pleasure even during the worst of times. Although Toklas provided generously for French and American soldiers, she had no qualms about putting her own stomach first.
In conclusion: Toklas may have cooked regularly for Gertrude Stein and taken on other traditional “wifely” duties, but she nevertheless enjoyed a life far outside the bounds of conventional domesticity. For Toklas, as for M.F.K. Fisher before her, leaving the States and setting up home in France enabled her to cohere a set of daily practices that cultivated aesthetic pleasure, to approach cooking and eating as artforms. In turn, Toklas’ full-fledged participation in the culinary and gastronomic arts nourished an appetite that reconfigured the bounds of American women’s food writing. This appetite gave rise to a text that refuses to be neatly contained within men’s or women’s food writing traditions; the cookbook effectively blends the personal anecdote, wit, aesthetic reflection, and attention to public taste of gastronomic literature with the recipes and attention to domestic ritual of a traditional cookbook.
Like the founding fathers of gastronomic literature and gastronomic tour guides, Toklas charts unexplored territory to create a new genre of food writing. Part domestic cookbook, part gastronomic travelogue, part modernist war story, The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book articulates an appetite that queers the heteronormative food writing tradition, one that refuses to be bound by convention. By crisscrossing the gendered divide of men’s and women’s food writing, The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book stands out as one of our nation’s most innovative contributions to culinary literature. Indeed, hers was a queer appetite, which coalesced in a written form to which many late twentieth- and twenty-first-century food writers have much to be grateful.
Notes
[i] For a first-hand account of cooking from Toklas’ cookbook when it was first published, before the advent of Julia Child, see Janet Malcolm, “As the French Do.”
[ii] More particularly, Schmidt examines Toklas, Fisher, Julia Child, and Adele Davis to argue that these women “belong to two traditions of writing about food that we can trace to two great monuments of France: La Physiologie du Gout by Brillat-Savarin, and Le Guide Culinaire by Escoffier. In this heritage, Alice B. Toklas and M.F.K. Fisher are Savarinists, and like him, amateurs of the table; Julia Child and Adelle Davis are Escoffians, and, like Escoffier, both are professional cooks.” Schmidt states that, like Brillat-Savarin, the Savarinist relies on “anecdote stimulated by food, the memory of taste awakened by anecdote” (180-181). In “’Consider the Menu Carefully’: The Dining Room Tales of Alice B. Toklas,” Salvatore Marano likewise links The Cook Book with The Physiology of Taste. His brief comparison finds the two texts share an “anecdotally digressive manner” and a mastery of “the three stages of the cultural process of production, preparation and consuming of food” (176).
[iii] In the words of queer activist, writer, and scholar Thomas Glave, the term ‘queer” has “been used much in recent years as both verb and adjective by many…scholars.... With such linguistic and intellectual fluidity and expansiveness, almost anything can be ‘queer’-ed or ‘queery’-ed: text…, public and private spaces, ideological, cultural, historical, and national narratives…, metaphors, allegories, and so on” (246).
[iv] In From Hardtack to Home Fries, Barbara Haber examines the posturing of male cookbook authors from the 1930 to the 1960s. She also traces this posturing back to women cookbook authors of the nineteenth-century, who often worked to “hide the fact that they may have been more interested in politics and social justice” than in domestic management (213).
[v] Neuhaus points out that with the onset of World War II and the rise in patriotic propaganda that linked the nation’s well-being to mom’s home cooking, “fewer authors felt inclined to attack women’s fundamental lack of cookery ability” (153).
[vi] Shay did not maintain such a gentle tone toward women throughout, however. As Barbara Haber points out, “He snidely refers to the British Mrs. Beeton, the most famous woman cookbook author of her day, as ‘the nineteenth-century lady who put the blight on English cuisine’” (212).
[vii] In All Manners of Food, Stephen Mennell explains that Curnonsky and Rouff “seized the opportunity of linking gastronomy and tourism, and thus initiated a great interest in a vogue for French regional cookery…. The alliance of tourism and gastronomy was particularly to the advantage of tyre companies like Michelin and Kléber-Colombes, who began to publish their celebrated guides to the restaurants and hotels of France. Curnonsky and his friends [Rouff, Louis Forest, Austin de Croze, Maurice des Ombiaux] had links to them, but also wrote their own guides” (276).
[viii] As John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman state in their book Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America “[o]f women educated at Bryn Mawr between 1889 and 1908, for instance, fifty-three percent remained unwed. For Wellesley and the University of Michigan, the figures were forty-three and forty-seven percent. The proportion among those who went on for advanced degrees was even more lopsided: three-quarter of the women who received Ph.D.’s between 1877 and 1924 remained single” (190).
[ix] Not surprisingly women educators made strong counterarguments as did Mary Putnam Jacobi, one of the nation’s most influential and respected of women doctors. The belief that woman’s higher education could lead to her mental and physical degeneration, however, continued to prevail within the medical community until well into the twentieth-century. See Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “The Body in the Library.”
[x] Dr. John Meaghers quoted in Christina Simmons, “Companionate Marriage and the Lesbian Threat.”
[xi] Although numerous second wave feminist critics describe Toklas and Stein’s homosexual relationship as modeled on heteronormativity, with Toklas playing wife and Stein husband, contemporary gender studies scholars have reinterpreted such couplings to draw attention to their gender disruption. In particular, they take into account the playful, subversive, performative nature of such lesbian dynamics to argue that such couples effectively queer (challenge, destabilize, provide a new perspective on) the very dynamic they appear to reproduce.
[xii] Scholars have long debated Toklas’ influence on Stein’s oeuvre, with some scholars positing that Toklas herself might have written The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein’s most accessible and popular book. In “A Recipe for Modernism and the Somatic Intellect in the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book and Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons,” Belinda Bruner names Richard Bridgmen, George Wickes, and Holly Laird as three scholars who argue that Toklas may have authored the Autobiography.
[xiii] As noted in the introduction, the CookBook’s dissolution of boundaries and hierarchies is a common theme in Toklas criticism.
[xiv]How to Cook a Wolf is the closest Fisher comes to authoring a cookbook. Even here, though, the recipes ornament, or illustrate, the gastronomic philosophy of the book. Toklas’ recipes embody her culinary aesthetic.
[xv] Just as in the United States and England, the disappearance of domestic workers in France was expedited by two World Wars.
[xvi] Although Humble makes this commentary about British cookbooks in particular, it also holds true for American cookbooks.
[xvii] Schmidt continues the thought: “We are so taken by the charm of Alice B. Toklas’ memories and menus that we forget that the major narrative concerns the way two ladies survived the two greatest wars of history in a foreign country. The context, after all, is clear: For much of the time span of the book people are being starved, tortured, imprisoned, and killed just off its pages—and once or twice right on them. Yet the two imperturbable Americans go on gardening, hoarding, and scrounging rationed foods for what we cannot assume were other than delightful meals. It isn’t easy to decide whether to be appalled at such callousness or to admire such sublime detachment. I incline to the latter—it isn’t fiction, after all” (193-94).