Born On This Day- April 30th... Alice B. Toklas

The famous pair with Toklas on the right.

Alice Babette Toklas left Seattle for Paris when she was 30 years old. In Paris she met Gertrude Stein. The 2 women were a couple for the next 39 years, living through WW1 & WW2, the apex of The Lost Generation, & a collection of very famous friends. They were positively partners. Toklas was Stein’s secretary, editor, critic... & muse.

Their books' titles were quite deceptive; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written Stein & had next to nothing to do with Toklas & The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, although it contains recipes, was more a memoir of a life friends like Janet Flanner, Picasso, Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, & Virgil Thomson, along a collection of over 300 recipes.

Toklas lived another 20 years after Stein’s death. At the end of her life she was broke. The family of Stein claimed the famous paintings & royalties. In those final years Toklas was plagued with financial difficulties. She had no choice after Stein’s heirs took all the famous paintings left to her, except to write a memoir.

The much renowned recipe for marijuana brownies started when Toklas signed a contract with Harper's to write a cookbook in 1952. She was a known as a very goodcook, but what Harper’s wanted was not so much recipes but tales of her life with Gertrude Stein.

Toklas, then in her mid-70s, didn’t have enough pages to call her tome a book. She added several recipes, including them that would become renowned: “This is the food of Paradise. It might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies' Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR, with euphoria & brilliant storms of laughter, ecstatic reveries & extensions of one's personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better."

The editors at Harper's spotted the suspicious special ingredient- canabis ingredients & cut the recipe out, but the publisher of the British edition didn't. The press promptly went nuts. The London Times: "The late Poetess Gertrude Stein & her constant companion 7 autobiographee, Alice B. Toklas, used to have gay old times together in the kitchen. Some of the unique delicacies that were whipped up will soon be cataloged, in a wildly epicurean tome which is already causing excited talk on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps the most gone concoction was her hashish fudge." The book would go on to be the best seller for either of the lesbian pair.

Here is the recipe: "Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of stone dates, dried figs, shelled almonds & peanuts: chop these & mix them together. A bunch of Canibus Sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit & nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake & cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. 2 pieces are quite sufficient. Obtaining the canibus may present certain difficulties. It should be picked & dried as soon as it has gone to seed & while the plant is still green."

Just a few years ago, I had an acquaintance (now living in San Francisco with a rich boyfriend) that made a variation of this recipe. With only one half of a serving, I was unable to raise my head off the pillow. His advice: “Don’t sit down. After you eat one you need to go hiking or dancing. Keep moving.”  I was left giggling, horny & hungry & unable to move.

Although Toklas converted to Catholicism late in life, the pair of Jewish lesbians are buried next to each other in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. 

The Toklas name would become a part of the vernacular of the pot smoking world.

Born On This Day- February 3rd... Gertrude Stein

It seems disingenuous to label a work of art charming, but Midnight in Paris has so much charm, so many deft moments, that I felt of being taken to someplace magical. The film is populated with small turns of great actors playing ex-pats & assorted artists, writers & personalities of 1920s Paris.

This film is an enchanted comedy set in Paris about a family that goes there because of business, & a pair of young people who are engaged to be married have experiences there that change their lives. It's about a young writer's love of Paris, & the illusion people have that a life different from theirs would be much better.

The cameos include a perfectly cast Adrien Brody as Salvedor Dalí. emphasizing the accent each time he says his name, Corey Stoll as a sexy, young Hemingway & Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein. She plays Stein as an Earth-Mother, a no-nonsense, incredibly pragmatic center of artistic activity. her moments in Midnight in Paris are superb. The entire enterprise is as effervescent as champagne. As a fan of Woody Allen's films (especially the films he does not appear in), it is nice to know his work can still intoxicate.

Stein is the sort of author you want people to see you reading when you are in college, or that is how I played it. Stein was a wealthy American art collector & writer who dominated the Paris avant garde in the days of Picasso. She was one of Picasso's boldest collectors, his only real female friend, & the object of one of his most revolutionary paintings. Picasso's Portrait of Gertrude Stein, which hangs in her apartment in the film. She played herself in her literary classic memoir- The Autobiography Of Alice B Toklas that portrays Stein through the eyes of her lover Alice B Toklas.

I noticed one of my kids at work reading Stein for about a week. I couldn’t stand it & at one point asked: “Really? This how you want to spend your 10 minute break, reading Gertrude Stein? Shouldn't you be reading a Twighlight Saga? Well, at least it will make you feel that your break is a half an hour.”

Stein’s work can be exasperating & exhilarating. Her novels, plays, operas, valentines, poems, autobiography, lectures are challenging for me. Often the entrance is not apparent; there is no door. Here is an example, from the poem- If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso:

Shutters shut & open so do queens. Shutters shut & shutters & so shutters shut & shutters & so & so shutters & so shutters shut & so shutters shut & shutters and so. & so shutters shut & so & also. & also &

 so &

 so & also.

Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly a resemblance,

 exactly & resemblance.

 For this is so.

 Because.

Stein was born in the USA 138 years ago on this day-February 3rd. Stein died at the age of 72 in Neuilly-sur-Seine & is buried in Paris in the Père Lachaise cemetery. When Stein was being wheeled into the operating room for surgery on her stomach, she asked Toklas: "What is the answer?" Toklas did not reply, Stein: "In that case, what is the question?" There is a monument to Stein on the Upper Terrace of Bryant Park, NYC.

Together, Stein & Toklas hosted a salon in Paris that attracted expatriate American writers: Ernest Hemingway, Paul Bowles, Thornton Wilder & Sherwood Anderson, & painters: Picasso, Matisse, & Braque. Stein & Toklas were a couple for 40 years, until Stein’s death in 1946.

Born On This Day- February 3rd... Gertrude Stein

"I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich."

I have read & enjoyed the very famous & well read The Biography Of Alice B. Toklas, but I have never been able to make heads nor tails of any of her other work. But still, Gertude Stein & Alice B. Toklas were the most famous lesbian couple ever…. until Ellen & Portia, & I do love lesbians, especially in pairs.



Gerttrude Stein was born in 1987 grew up in Oakland, CA. She studied psychology at Radcliffe & medicine at Johns Hopkins, but in 1903 she moved to Paris to be a writer. In 1907, she met a lady from San Francisco, Alice B. Toklas, & 5 years later, they moved in together. They stayed together for over 30 years until Gertrude's death in 1946.


Gertrude & Alice lived together in France for most of their adult lives. During WW1, they drove an ambulance. During World War II they had to flee to the countryside when the Germans occupied Paris. They lived in a small town & kept a low profile, protected by their French neighbors.


The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas which Stein published in 1933,  & made her famous. The book is not a Toklas biography at all, but Stein's which she wrote using the voice of Alice B Toklas. as the narrator. The book was wildly popular in America, & Gertrude and Alice embarked on a triumphant lecture tour of the U.S., where she was, according to biographer John Malcolm Brinnin: " a celebrity of such proportions that her eminence on the American scene was for a time shared only by gangsters, baseball players & movie stars".


The apartment of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas was the most famous artistic & literary salon in Europe. Gertrude Stein was the arbiter of artistic taste in the artistic circles. Her offhand remark could make or break an artist's reputation. Geniuses like Pablo Picasso & Ernest Hemmingway would come to spend time Gertrude Stein, while their wives sat with Alice B. Toklas.

When France was liberated, Gertrude became the surrogate mother for the American GIs. Shortly after the war, she was diagnosed with stomach cancer & died in surgery. Her beloved Alice B. Toklas outlived her by 21 years.

Words To Live By

"Let me listen to me & not to them."
Gertrude Stein