Resident experts: Rebecca Wadlinger and Greg Koehler, on an anthropological literary romp through the Harry Ransom Center collection at the University of Texas.
Many of the amateur bakers who enjoy lacing a batch of brownies with cannabis in leaf or seed form would happily tell you that the originator of the recipe was Alice B. Toklas, long-time companion of Gertrude Stein. Few, it would seem, could tell you anything else about Ms. Stein’s companion or other details of the recipe’s history. Those details have been largely lost or overlooked in the annals of marijuana-culinary lore as they’ve passed from frat-house to co-op and back.
A recent exploratory trip to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin [a spectacular archive of rare books, photographs, and personal archives of literary figures from Alfred Knopf to Anne Sexton] unearthed a variety of direct and tangential information about Stein, Toklas, and the cookbook project that is the source of the speculation that the infamous brownie recipe came from her card-box.
Hoping to publish lively tidbits about Stein’s life, her publishers offered Toklas a lucrative deal for a cookbook. Stein and Toklas were well known as hostesses, and Toklas’s own recipes were meant to comprise the bulk of the recipes in the collection in addition to personal recollections of her life with Stein. As the deadline loomed, however, she realized she only had about half of the recipes she needed. So, never lacking creative friends, she solicited their large cadre of artists and writers to send her their favorites.
The infamous brownie recipe, which appeared under the title “Haschich Fudge,” did, in fact, appear in the UK edition of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, but Toklas did not invent the recipe herself. Toklas’s friend Brion Gysin, an English painter living in Paris, submitted it for the project. When the text reached Random House, the fudge recipe raised suspicion amongst the editors and was excised for the American edition. The book went on to become one of the best-selling cookbooks of all time.
Amongst the materials in the Stein archive at the Ransom Center are several items of interest, including Stein’s recipe for “Orange Cake” written in Toklas’s hand (a recipe which did not make it into the cookbook), a notebook of French phrases, transcripts from Toklas’s “Homage to Gertrude Stein” in 1965, bank papers, and Toklas’s address book. Also included is an orange 3×5 card with the following note typed erratically across it: “I think you will enjoy this book, especially the opening chapter on cooking utensils which has never appearee [sic] in an American cookbook before. I certainly never knew before that Maurois had a son.”
Here is the Orange Cake recipe, which was baked and eaten as part of the Gertrude Stein dinner featured in J.W. Donaldson’s companion entry:
Orange Cake
? cup butter
1 cup sugar
4 eggs
? cup milk
1 ? cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
Bake in loaf, when finished squeeze the juice of four oranges over it and frost.
Happy baking…
Greg Koehler lives in Austin, where he studied law at the University of Texas School of Law and was a Michener Fellow in Poetry at the James A. Michener Center for Writers. He is an editor for Richmond-based magazine Makeout Creek, and his poetry, fiction, and occasional writing have appeared in Ninth Letter, the tiny, Handsome, Pebble Lake Review, The Austin Chronicle, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among other publications.
Rebecca Wadlinger lives in Austin, Texas. She’s twee as all get out and owns 9 pairs of glasses.