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\u201cFrom the little old lady who gave you hashish fudge\u201d read the headline in the February 1974 issue of Vogue. The profile of the late Alice B. Toklas turned out to be more tease than delivery, since none of the recipes attached to the article actually contained weed. Still, Toklas \u2014 who\u2019d passed away seven years earlier, at age 89 \u2014 was, as the writer described her, \u201ca counter-culture byword.\u201d<\/p>\n
Miss Toklas, in her prim clothing and stern expression in black-and-white photographs, seems an unlikely advocate for getting high. But, thanks to a recipe for\u00a0hashish fudge<\/a>, published in 1954 in the British version of \u201cThe Alice B. Toklas Cook Book,\u201d Toklas\u2019s intelligent, brittle-looking and mustached face became an icon of the pot brownie, America\u2019s first-gen edibles.<\/p>\n Perhaps the pinnacle of her cannabis notoriety came with the 1968 Hollywood rom-com \u201cI Love You, Alice B. Toklas!\u201d in which Peter Sellers plays an uptight attorney who unwittingly gorges on brownies laced with weed (shaken like dried oregano into a bowl of batter whipped up from a Pillsbury boxed mix), thereby precipitating a rethink of his life\u2019s priorities.<\/p>\n Toklas\u2019s journey to cannabis fame started in 1952, at a time when Toklas was desperate. Gertrude Stein, her de facto wife (the women had declared themselves married in 1910, though France, where they lived, did not legalize same-sex marriage until 2013), was dead. Although Stein was arguably the most famous American writer of her generation, and stacks of paintings by the likes of Picasso and Matisse filled their Paris apartment, Toklas needed money. Now, as a 73-year-old widow\u00ad surrounded by a great art collection she refused to dismantle out of love for Stein\u2019s memory, her situation had become dire. But Toklas had another collection she hoped would prove almost as valuable as the Picassos: her recipes.<\/p>\n Food was one of Stein\u2019s great passions, and Toklas took delight in cooking for her. Duck in Port wine, braised chicken stuffed with noodles, nougat ice cream, raspberry flummery: she would collect the recipes for these dishes all into a book. Through letters, a friend in New York introduced her to an agent. The publishing house Harper and Brothers agreed to buy her proposal for \u201cThe Alice B. Toklas Cook Book,\u201d and promised to send her a contract and an advance in return for a partial manuscript. The money, Toklas realized with a sense of relief, would keep the wolves from circling.<\/p>\n But by March of 1953, she was straining to make her deadline. A 30,000-word chunk of the manuscript was due in April, with another 40,000 to be delivered in May. Toklas had never written a book before. She was finding it to be a slog. \u201cYou\u2026 see the grind this is,\u201d Toklas wrote to a friend.<\/p>\n Toklas feared she might not have enough recipes to make her word count. For help, she wrote to the large and diverse circle of friends and acquaintances she and Stein had made in the expat bohemian underground: actors, composers, painters and models. She asked everyone \u2014 Picasso\u2019s former mistress Dora Maar, the Turkish painter Nejad Devrim, the actress Fania Marinoff \u2014 to contribute a recipe or two.<\/p>\n \u201cOne chapter (how pretentious for me to write that)\u201d she told a correspondent, with Toklas\u2019s typical self-effacement, \u201cwill be devoted to recipes of friends \u2014 undoubtedly the only thing of merit in the deadly dull offering.\u201d<\/p>\n One such friend was the 37-year-old English painter and writer\u00a0Brion Gysin<\/a>. He\u2019d met Stein and Toklas in the 1930s, but hadn\u2019t kept in touch. In 1950, stalled in his art, unable to find a publisher and depressed with caf\u00e9 life in Paris, Gysin had reached out to the widowed Toklas, who gave him grandmotherly encouragement to persevere. And when the expat American composer and author Paul Bowles met Gysin in Paris, and invited him to come stay at his home in the northern Moroccan port city of Tangier, Toklas urged Gysin to go. He intended to visit\u00a0Morocco<\/a>\u00a0for a summer; he stayed for 23 years.<\/p>\n Tangier had all the vestiges of a colonial city (Morocco was still a French protectorate), seething with American and European artists, ex-pats and rich tourists. Gysin, who was gay, took up with an aspiring young painter, Mohamed Hamri. The match proved fateful, as it was Hamri who showed Gysin local customs and culture, including how to pack a pipe with the cannabis-tobacco mix known as kif. Gysin wrote a long, ecstatic manuscript on the subject. It was the same enthusiastic tone that Gysin used to describe the recipe for hashish fudge (spelled \u201chaschich\u201d) that he sent Toklas for her book.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the food of Paradise \u2014 of Baudelaire\u2019s Artificial Paradises,\u201d Gysin wrote. \u201cIt might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies\u2019 Bridge Club or chapter meeting of the DAR. In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of hot mint tea. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one\u2019s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be completely expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by \u2018un \u00e9vanouissement reveill\u00e9<\/em>\u00a0[a state of fainting while fully awake].\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cArtificial Paradises\u201d is a reference to French poet Charles Baudelaire\u2019s 1860 book of essays about being high on opium and hashish: \u201cLes Paradis Artificiels.\u201d Gysin notes that, for anyone outside of Morocco, obtaining hash might be slightly tricky, although \u201cthe variety known as canibus [sic] sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognized.\u201d In America, he states, its cousin \u201ccanibus [sic] indica, has been observed even in city window boxes.\u201d Gysin, obviously, was having a lark.<\/p>\n Of course, his confection isn\u2019t really fudge (which, typically, contains milk or cream and implies a smooth texture) and it doesn\u2019t even call for hashish. In fact, it\u2019s a variation on the traditional Moroccan aromatic kif candy known as\u00a0majoun<\/a>: smen (a kind of salty ghee) simmered with cannabis, strained, cooled and cooked again with spices, dates, honey, nuts and orange flower water.<\/p>\n Toklas was unaware that Gysin\u2019s recipe yielded psychoactive results \u2014\u00a0 and even forgot the recipe was in her book. In October 1954, weeks before \u201cThe Alice B. Toklas Cook Book\u201d was to be released, Time Magazine caught a whiff, in galley form, of scandal.<\/p>\n \u201cThe late poetess Gertrude Stein\u2026 and her constant companion\u2026 Alice B. Toklas used to have gay old times together in the kitchen,\u201d Time\u2019s gossipy item read. \u201cPerhaps Alice\u2019s most gone concoction (and also a possible clue to some of Gertrude\u2019s less earthy lines) was her hashish fudge.\u201d<\/p>\n Toklas did not take Time\u2019s drug-shaming well. \u201cI was\u2026 furious,\u201d she wrote a friend, \u201cuntil I discovered it was really in the cook book!\u201d She went on to write, \u201cIt is my ignorance not to have suspected what the few leaves were \u2014 of course I didn\u2019t know their Latin name.\u201d The laugh, she said, was on her.<\/p>\n Her publisher wasn\u2019t nearly so amused. In 1951, the U.S. Congress passed the\u00a0Boggs Act<\/a>. It set mandatory sentences for drug convictions \u2014 a first offender convicted of cannabis possession faced a minimum sentence of two to ten years and a ruinous fine as high as $20,000. Harper and Brothers sent a telegram to the U.S. Attorney General, asking: Would it be a crime to publish a recipe that praised cannabis and sent the curious out to score some? In fact, it wasn\u2019t illegal to merely publish such a recipe. Still, Harper was skittish, and deleted Gysin\u2019s recipe from the American edition (though it appeared in the U.K. version).<\/p>\n Even suppressed, \u201cHaschich Fudge\u201d sealed Toklas\u2019s reputation. The haze of notoriety around \u201cThe Alice B. Toklas Cook Book\u201d made Americans curious. \u201cIt sold seven thousand copies in its first month in the United States,\u201d Justin Spring writes in \u201cThe Gourmands\u2019 Way,\u201d \u201cand within three weeks of its publication, it had gone into its fourth printing.\u201d<\/p>\n Toklas got her royalties, and the impish-looking, 77-year-old bohemian widow of the famous Gertrude Stein took on the status of an underground hero. Toklas didn\u2019t mind. The writer Thornton Wilder thought the whole business made his old friend look like a sly genius.<\/p>\n \u201cThornton said that no one would believe in my innocence,\u201d she wrote to a friend after \u201cThe Alice B. Toklas Cook Book\u201d had become an instant classic, \u201cas I had pulled the best publicity stunt of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong>\u00a0have you ever cooked with cannabis?<\/p>\n Originally published in Issue 39 of Cannabis Now.\u00a0LEARN MORE<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n The post Bohemian Rhapsody<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom the little old lady who gave you hashish fudge\u201d read the headline in the February 1974 issue of Vogue. The profile of the late Alice B. Toklas turned out to be more tease than delivery, since none of the recipes attached to the article actually contained weed. Still, ToklasContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":378,"featured_media":39989,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12936,1492,50,111,12937,1831,85,12901,3549],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39988"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/378"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39988"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39990,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39988\/revisions\/39990"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/Bettmann.jpg\")
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nThe Recipe for Hashish Fudge<\/h4>\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nProhibition Begets Publicity<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Bohemian Rhapsody<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"