'Australian gustatory memories' in Focus

The 'Alimentary' column in Focus began with contributions from Oscar Mendelsohn's circle of friends which tended to limit its scope. Mendelsohn hoped that his journal would 'help raise eating in Australia to its rightful place as a fine art', his contention being that satisfying the senses of taste and smell was as important as satisfying those of sight and hearing. To that end he encouraged submissions from readers on eating facilities in all and any Australian cities and 'notes on food and beverages generally', assuring would-be contributors that 'we are willing to print reviews on new lines of foods and drinks as cheerfully as those of plays and books'. (Focus August 1946)

Not all his readers were as enthusiastic about the notion of raising eating to a fine art. In September 1947 Mendelsohn published a letter from 'B.C' of Milson's Point, Sydney under the heading of 'Alimentary Fan Mail',

Alimentation - phooey! I belong to the C.B.C. (Corned Beef and Carrots) cult. (Can you beat the dish, mother's masterpiece on washing day?) Candidly, Focus is generating a tribe of food fanatics. There is a nitwit element in mankind which refuses to learn the rudiments of alimentation, and flits from dish to dish in the hope of finding an elixir.

What poor old B.C. would make of our current fascination with food we can only try to imagine. However, he needn't have been too concerned that things would change in Australia any time soon.

For the September 1946 edition 'Pot' contributed another piece for the 'Alimentary' column entitled 'Australian Gustatory Memories'. Here he lamented that, although the Italian and Chinese restaurants were all 'reliable and artistic', they actually meant little in the grand scheme of things.

They have catered only to a small stratum of the community - mainly the artists and other intellectuals who have sensibly elected to carry their good living to the stomach as well as the mind - together with a still smaller section of the arty, to whom such places are mildly interesting; also, they have retained all their native character and are in no sense Australian.

According to 'Pot' breakfast was the best meal to be had in Australia, even allowing for 'the dreadful and atrociously expensive manufactured and depreciated cereals' copied from the US, the grey coffee and the 'leathery' fried eggs. He extolled 'the simple combination of a grilled steak with an egg coyly perched on it' as 'one of the few Australian culinary inventions'.

When the steak is  really grilled and not deep-fried and the egg is poached or lightly fried on both sides, and if there are some piping hot, crisp chipped potatoes on the plate, a good start of the day is assured.

He also suggested that a really good breakfast would include a selection of properly chilled fruit juices.

For lunch, 'Pot' praised the culinary inventiveness of the 'double-cut roll' which he attributed to Adelaide. This was a variant on the American triple decker sandwich, but in Adelaide, where he believed Australia's best bakeries were to be found, the fillings were of better quality and more varied than elsewhere. Most sandwiches, he implies, made use of some variation on 'flabby Kraft cheese' and 'dry, dark-hued corned beef'.

Alas steak, eggs and chips and well prepared sandwiches do not make an Australian cuisine.

Aside from one or two memorable meals, all of them pre-war, Pot had little to say in praise of Australian cooking. In general there seemed to be a lack of respect for freshness and precious little inventiveness. When it came to crayfish for example the Americans grilled them, and produced chowders or fried them in butter but the best Australia could do was a curried version which he described as 'dreadful'. Similarly in most places in Australia roast beef was 'respectable enough' but 'rather dull' when all it needed was 'the intelligent use of herbs' to make it into something much more interesting. And this from a man whose favourite breakfast was a well prepared steak, a non-leathery egg and crisp chips!

 Two things should be noted about Pot's remarks. Firstly, he was talking about food served outside the home, so we shouldn't assume that 'B.C' and other members of the Corned Beef and Carrots cult were necessarily averse to, or unfamiliar with, the use of chives and lemon thyme and rosemary as Pot suggests. And the meals he praises are all remembered from a time before there were any war time restrictions , when oatmeal porridge could be eaten with unlimited amounts of thick cream.

None the less, these themes - lack of any cuisine that could really be called Australian; lack of respect for freshness despite a preponderance of good ingredients;  simple, unadorned food that could best be described as 'dull';  a readiness to adopt manufactured and 'depreciated' products; and a general disinterestedness in the notion of eating as a 'fine art' - all raise their heads again the best part of forty years later in Michael Symons' One Continuous Picnic. But it's hard not to have a bit of sympathy for B.C and his CBC brigade. There really isn't anything wrong with a good piece of corned beef, carrots, peas, mashed potato, some white sauce, or maybe even some cauliflower cheese. Today we would call this 'comfort food', to turn to when we are tired of flirting from one new dish to the next. The secret of these 'dull' meals is all in the quality of the ingredients and, most importantly, the care of the cook. Perhaps we should consider that B.C's mother really did have the skill to produce a masterpiece on washing day.

Keeping it cool

The Ice Cutters by Natalia Goutchanov 

http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/natalia-goncharova/the-ice-cutters

The painting above is the illustration on the cover of my copy of Elizabeth David's Harvest of the Cold Months. The social history of ice and ices (1994), her last work, published after her death. With not a recipe in sight this book is more a series of thoroughly researched essays rather than a comprehensive history of ice and refrigeration but it is wonderful to dip into. She covers an amazing range of sources and there's something fascinating in every chapter (and not always concerned solely with ice).
My purpose for returning to Harvest of the Cold Months was to read up about Italian ice cream but in truth I learnt most of what I wanted to know from Mary Taylor Simeti's Sicilian Food.

The Sicilians and and the Neapolitans were mad for ice using it to cool wine, chill fruit or to make sorbetto  or granita. Taylor Simeti quotes from A Tour through Sicily and Malta written by Patrick Brydone in 1773

The bishop's revenues [the Bishop of Catania] are considerable, and arise principally from the sale of snow and ice not only to the whole island of Sicily, but likewise to Malta, and a great part of Italy, and make a very considerable branch of commerce; for even the peasants in these hot countries regale themselves with ices during the summer heats, and there is no entertainment given by the nobility of which these do not always make a principal part: a famine of snow, they themselves say, would be more grievous than a famine of corn or wine.

Visitors to Sicily in the eighteenth century were very taken by the amount of sugar consumed both in confectionery and ices and as Brydone says ices and ice cream were popular across all levels of society. Apparently most of the ice was collected in March on the slopes of Mount Etna. The snow on the mountain sides was beaten into hard ice with sticks and then rolled down to be stored in caves. The peasantry were the traditional suppliers of ice, the blocks being brought down each day by donkey, wrapped in straw and salt to minimise wastage.
The snow from Mount Etna was plentiful and low in price so that ices could be consumed even by the peasantry and trade in ice was lucrative. According to Elizabeth David  'in the eighteenth century the Bishop of Catania's income had been largely dependent on the £1,000 a year derived from the small patch of mountain reserved for snow for the Knights of Malta'. There was sufficient snow available for four or five hundred tons to be shipped to Malta each fortnight on board the ship maintained by the Knights for just that purpose. I also read somewhere that in 1717 the export of snow provided a twentieth of the municipal income of Palermo. Trade in and enthusiasm for ice was encouraged in the eighteenth century by physicians recommending ice and ice-water for the treatment of fevers.
Palermo's supply of ice usually came from mountains close to home and when the snows failed the matter was taken most seriously. In 1774 a government official was sent off to Mount Etna with an armed guard to bring back snow to relieve the 'universal suffering'.

Sicily of course wasn't the only place which traded in ice and snow, indeed anywhere where ice could be harvested it was made use of in one way or another, and, because of the demand, a considerable amount of time and energy was expended not just on harvesting but on ways of transporting and storing ice and snow. If you ever wondered exactly how ice was harvested Nicola at Edible Geography recently posted a terrific piece about just that. The subsequent story of the commercialisation of ice production and the globalisation of the trade in ice makes for interesting reading. Wikipedia has a good article on the frozen water trade and how it developed in the nineteenth century.

 Before ice was produced commercially in Sydney  it was imported  from Boston which you can read about in the Dictionary of Sydney. [nla.news-article12944577] (Sydney Morning Herald 22 March 1853, p.3)

It isn't hard to imagine how popular ice must have been in the days before home refrigeration and there are certainly many who can still remember the ice man and the domestic  ice chest which preceded the electric refrigerator. There is a photograph of ice being delivered, from the collection at the State Library of New South Wales here [a422009 / ON 225, 22] (Mitchell Library)

The ice chest in the holiday cottage we stayed in when I was a child looked almost exactly like this one which dates from the 1940s here.

The making of sophisticated ices for consumption involved both experimentation with the right balance of solids, sugar and fat, in the mixture to be frozen and with methods for stirring the mixture as it froze to break up the ice crystals and ensure a smooth texture. David mentions milk based sorbetti recipes from the late seventeenth century and milk and custard based sorbetti, involving cream, butter and/or eggs,were certainly  being made in the eighteenth century. Despite all my reading I'm still a bit confused about the difference between sorbetto  and gelato or rather confused about whether there was any historical difference. According to the Oxford Companion to Italian Food

The terminology of the past can be confusing; gelare can mean to set rather than to freeze, and a sorbetto could be a cool drink that was sipped rather than the almost solid mush we know today.

So a sorbetto  might also have meant something which was more like what we would call a granita, courser in texture and slushy, which evolved into today's sorbet, a water ice with a smooth texture while gelato  is a milk or custard base ice. In the end I suppose it doesn't really matter whether all gelati are sorbetti but not all sorbetti are gelati or vice versa. 
Given my previous defense of blancmange I was very chuffed to find this - of Sicilian gelato Taylor Simeti says

Sicilian gelato is not made with cream at all, but with crema rinforzata, which is nothing other than the omnipresent biancomangiare  in a particularly liquid form.

Hurray for biancomangiare.

Alice (and Gertrude) Again

The trouble with research is that you never know when you are finished. People, places and things that you are interested in keep coming back to haunt you.
This photograph of the Gertrude Stein statue  in Bryant Park, New York was taken on 7 February. Either someone knows how much she liked her little cakes or they are a gift to celebrate her birthday (on 3 February).
For more information about the statue see the Bryant Park Blog here. Bryant Park itself has an interesting history which you can read about here. I came across Gertrude (well to be truthful I was looking for her) en route to the New York City Library to see the Lunch Hour NYC exhibition (which I have mentioned before and you can read about here) but not before I also encountered Carl Van Vechten's name carved into the sandstone in the library foyer.
So can Alice be far behind? Well since I last wrote about her cookbook I have encountered more information about her too. Deanna Sidney at Lost Past Remembered here introduced me to  Naomi Barry's essay in Remembrance of Things Paris: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet. Then reading Laura Shapiro's Something from the Oven. Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America I discovered a whole chapter on Poppy Cannon who collaborated with Alice on Aromas and Flavours of Past and Present. (which I wrote about here). Poppy herself was a wonderful character and I thoroughly recommend Shapiro's thoughtful account of her life and her legacy.
Another recent read was John Thorne's Simple Cooking which includes his review of The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book written on the occasion of the publishing of a new edition by Harper & Row in 1984. In his usual thoughtful way he begins with the problem of the aura which seems to surround everything to do with Stein and Toklas and the warning that unless you approach The A.B.T.C.B. with more than 'a few scattered impressions' about Gertrude and Alice 'you may well begin reading with puzzlement and soon sink into total disgruntlement. Because, while it would be wrong to say that this is a terribly overrated cookbook, it is very much a wrongly reviewed one.' Of the recipes he says  'they do not contrary to the reviews, make you want to rush into the kitchen and try them out' because although a cook book  the pleasure  lies elsewhere,

' to enjoy this book you must find your pleasure in the company of Alice B. Toklas - in a woman who knew exactly who she was. It is this that gives the book its measure of wild charm and also draws its limits, for she was a person of intense domesticity who, having established her realm, felt totally independent within it.

While the gaze she directs at the famous people who grace their table is alert, curious, even sensitive, it is also finally enigmatic, for they have no real impact on her perfect sense of self.'

 

 

And of Alice's relationship with Gertrude he says

'There is never one false note in the impeccable ordinariness with which she surrounds that liaison to ever suggest she was ever surprised, frightened, or intoxicated by what happened to her, by the sui generis nature of her life.'

 

 

John Thorne, Simple Cooking, Viking, New York, 1986.

 

Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven. Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, Penguin Books, New York, 2004.

 

ed. Ruth Reichl, Remembrance of Things Paris: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet, Random House, 2004

 



Christmas Wish List

Some things are always on the wish list. For example a housekeeper. That is someone who will do all the cleaning but will achieve this magically so that I will wake up in the morning and it will all be done.  This genie would also be able to do all the shopping leaving me free to browse the markets without having to make any serious decisions. He or she would prepare all our meals with the proviso that they would cook just the way I  do  - so I could enjoy my own cooking without having to do it myself. Given such a gift is unlikely I wouldn't mind someone giving me a Thermomix and/or a Kitchen Aid mixer, or something similar, and/or an ice cream maker. I don't need any of these gadgets but I would love to have one or other of them to play with, and especially without the guilt of having spent a small fortune on something I know I can live without. Should anyone seriously contemplate any of these gifts they should also consider donating an extra room to the house so that there would be somewhere to put the thing.

There are however one or two more realistic suggestions on my Christmas list.
Yottam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi have written another book, Jerusalem: A Cookbook which I have salivated over (although that does sound slightly revolting doesn't it) in the book shop. As usual it is full of strong flavours and interesting combinations. There has been no shortage of publicity for Jerusalem. There is an article with recipes in the latest edition (December 2012/January 2013) of Delicious magazine and a long and very interesting article about the whole Ottolenghi phenomenon in the December 3 issue of The New Yorker magazine if you can lay your hands on a copy.There is another interview with the authors here at Serious Eats and you can whet your appetite with recipes from the book for roasted butternut squash with tahini and za'atar here, Na'ama's fattoush here, mejadra (which is delicious) here, stuffed eggplant with lamb and pine nuts here and hummus kawarma here. When I first made the mejadra (which has all sorts of other spellings - mujaddara for instance) I used this version of the recipe which skips the step of mixing the onions with flour. I found the flour only made things gluggy and messy and the onions tended to clump together - so this step seemed quite unnecessary. However you make it mejadra is terrific with yoghurt, with feta cheese or with a fried egg on top (or indeed with all three together).

On the non-fiction book list is Consider the Fork: A history of how we cook and eat by Bee Wilson (which you can read about here). There are so many everyday objects that we take for granted, many of which have a fascinating story to tell. This book sounds like a good companion to Margaret Visser's The Rituals of Dinner: The origins, evolution, eccentricities and meaning of table manners. Another food book which caught my attention at The New Yorker is Jon Kramper's Creamy and Crunchy  which is a history of peanut butter, reviewed here. Having worked at a plant which made peanut butter I am very familiar with the benefits of hydrogenation but can only tolerate  peanut butter in small doses.

Another book which isn't actually on the wish list but one which I think I should get around to reading sometime is You Aren't What You Eat. Fed up With Gastroculture by Stephen Poole. Depending on where you sit on the foodie spectrum you might see  Mr. Poole's effort as 'a bloody brutal and necessary sacred cow hunt' (as here) or you may find that you 'strenuously disagreed with every single conclusion' (as here). Perhaps you could give copies to everyone to read before Christmas to ensure lively discussion during lunch on the 25th.

There is also a new Mark Kurlansky book which was published this year Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man (reviewed here) which would appear to throw a whole new light on frozen peas.

And there is one last book on the list. I recently heard Lawrence Norfolk interviewed about his latest book John Saturnall's Feast (reviewed here, the download for the interview is here) which sounds like a good yarn and historically interesting as well. A book about medieval feasting should make perfect reading for the beach this summer.

Month in Review - March 2012

According to Gretchen A. Hirschauer and Catherine A. Metzger in Louis Meléndez, Master of the Spanish Still Life  (Yale University Press, 2009) this painting combines several of Meléndez favourite props. The wine cooler appears in at least ten other compositions, the large spoon, the basket, the kitchen cloth and the ceramic bowl with the iron lid all appear elsewhere.  Apparently only the group of three spoons in the plate on the left is unique. Even the melon turns up again in Still Life with Melon, Jug, and Bread. But what a magnificent melon!
The inclusion of this painting here is for no other reason than I thought some sort of illustration was long over due.

This month there is no particular theme, just a collection of interesting bits and pieces.
In February the Australian Government published Foodmap:An analysis of the Australian food supply chain. The aim of this study is 'to identify the scope for improved performance of the food industry in the face of changes in consumer preferences, pressures from the global food market and the strategic responses of major food sector participants'. The report, full of graphs and tables, makes for interesting if not inspirational reading. It will perhaps come as no surprise to learn that supermarkets account for 63% of household food expenditure of which 80% is controlled by Coles and Woolworths. Nor is it any surprise that the private label brands share of grocery categories has increased dramatically since 2002 and most of the brands we buy in the supermarket are foreign owned. Pasta and margarine are the only two categories where the brands are more than 70% Australian owned, and you can add to them bread, rice and smallgoods for those categories more than 50% Australian owned. Biscuits, canned fruit, cheese, canned fish, fresh dairy, frozen vegetables, milk and sugar are all less than 10% Australian owned.
The good news is that the report concludes that Australia has relatively high food security. That is  food security,as defined by the FAO - 'a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to significant, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life'. 
So the devil is in the detail somewhere - but perhaps not in this report.

Because I like my food with a bit of history here are two links to the past - How tea was picked in the late nineteenth century here and Salvador Dali and friends dining at a 'Night in a Surrealist Forest' here.

There is also another new journal, the 'International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science', the first issue of which includes an article by our very own Neil Perry on dry aging beef. This isn't exactly light, bedtime reading but might be worth keeping an eye on in future. And another new and rather more scientific journal is 'Flavour' which you can look at here.

On the subject of reading, Claudia Roden has a new book out on the food of Spain - see here. You can read a recent interview  here and a much longer and very interesting piece by Jane Kramer for The New Yorker here.

Finally, some links on my special topic, eating out -
on taking photographs in restaurants here
on eating in the restaurant where you work here
on Mietta O'Donnell here
and finally this on what might be the newest trend in fast food.

And before I forget, the 19th Symposium of Australian Gastronomy will be held in Sydney over Easter 2013 (29th March to 1st April) and the theme will be 'The Welcoming Table'.

Mobile Food

My last post elicited a number of anonymous impassioned comments taking me to task on my review of Alain Ducasse's Nature. I have chosen not to publish those comments here because I think they would be best read in the context of the complete review. So for a different take on M. Ducasse's book please have a look at what Nikki has to say here where you can also scroll up and read my thoughts.
And while you are over at The Gastronomer's Bookshelf have a look at my latest offering, a review of Anissa Helou's Mediterranean Street Food (here). I've mentioned her blog before where she often discusses something unusual, like a recent post on Middle Eastern sheep and their fat tails (here). One of the things I like about Mediterranean Street Food is the way it celebrates the exuberance of street life and those cultures where the preparation of food, and the sight and smell of food are a not just part of the everyday but very much part of the public domain.

Ready to go in Jame' el Fna, Marrakesh

 Snack time near the spice market in old Delhi.

For the outsider though street food carries with it that hint of danger and the prospect of holiday disaster. I have to admit that we weren't game enough to actually eat any of the food in either of the situations photographed above although we came under a lot of pressure to do so. And I am sure this is not the sort of thing that  is intended when the food trucks finally roll out on the streets of Sydney.

The concept of mobile food is not new although the food truck idea might be the latest trend. Horse-drawn tamale carts worked the streets of Los Angeles more than a century ago. New York City has long had its share of mobile food -for ice cream and hot dog carts see Edible Geography here  and for the results of last year's annual awards for street food see here.

 India is perhaps one of the most exciting places for food let alone street food. For some fabulous photos of  'bicycle based commerce' in Mumbai here and for the top ten places to eat on the street, also in Mumbai see here.

Even Paris has caught the food truck bug with the delightfully named 'Le camion qui fume' which you can read about in French here or in English, albeit with an American slant, here.

Last time I mentioned the French post office style bread box which seems like a very good idea. The cupcake ATM however (which you can read about here) does not have the same appeal.

Month in Review - February 2012 .

There has been a bit of a French theme this month - by coincidence rather than by design.
First up there was my encounter with Alain Ducasse, well with his book  Nature. Simple, healthy and good which I reviewed for The Gastronomer's Bookshelf (here). I didn't know much about M. Ducasse but there was something about this book that made me think he was trying, perhaps a bit too hard, to be sort of modern and with it, to be more one of us rather than a super chef. It's all a bit cutesy and clever and somehow doesn't manage to get away from being, well for want of a better description, very French. For one thing I suspect he has shares in a company producing Piment d'Espelette (his seasoning du jour). Can you imagine going to your local green grocer and having a choice of different varieties of turnip? Still not to bother because I won't be cooking up 'Poached foie gras with turnips' any time soon. And I am forever going to wonder whether a pumpkin gratin tastes better made with a Queensland Blue or a Muscade de Provence or a Courge Longue de Nice  or even a humble potimarron.
M. Ducasse deserved a better editor and/or a more thorough translation to make this book both more appealing and more user friendly but what struck me more than anything was the implication that there was something new or revolutionary about his approach to food

Plenty of fruit and vegetables, raw and cooked, cereals, preferably wholegrain, a little meat or fish, and all cooked in olive oil. That's the basis of my cuisine and of the recipes in this book

Is it just that M. Ducasse isn't normally associated with the sort of food you and I might cook at home or is this enthusiasm for simple, healthy food meant to come as a surprise to the French? I'm still not really sure of the answer to that question but it did send me off on a quest for more information.

Which meant that I finally got around to reading Michael Steinberger's Au Revoir to All That. The Rise and Fall of French Cuisine. According to the blurb Marco Pierre White considers this 'one of the greatest books I've read' which perhaps says something about the amount of time Mr. White spends reading. This is not a great book - no book which includes a sentence which begins 'One hundred years later, it was déjà vu all over again,' could ever be called great - but it is a jaunty journey through French culinary history and the political, economic and social issues which have contributed/are contributing to the current malaise in France in general and French cuisine in particular, and he devotes a whole chapter to Alain Ducasse. Hot on the heels of Skye Gyngell's decision to throw in the towel at Petersham Nursery now that she has earned a Michelin star Steinberger's stories about the scandalous influence of the Michelin Guide made for very interesting reading.
If nothing else Au Revoir to All That gave me a clearer appreciation of the influence of the French and the changes in the restaurant business over the last twenty years or so and I would recommend it as an easy and sobering read especially for those of us far enough away to be pretty well insulated from the nuances of European life.
Depressed by the news that la malbouffe has been not so much warmly welcomed as enthusiastically embraced by the French (France is McDonald's second most profitable market and their latest promotion sees hamburgers served on a baguette and topped with POD (that is Protected Designation of Origin) cheeses such as Cantal) it was another cruel blow to read about the French bread crisis! But all is not entirely lost. This little piece (here) about an entrepreneurial French baker bringing fresh bread back to the village suggests that there is some hope for  the future.

I also have to thank Mr Steinberger for introducing me to a new word - zaftig. This looks for all the world like one of those desperate combinations you come up with in Scrabble and then reject because it seems so unlikely, but  no, it is in fact an adjective which describes women who have a full figure -and as such should be used with some care.

Month in Review - December 2011

First up this month a Christmas Quiz (in time for next year perhaps) from the Guardian here and the answers here.

In the latest issue of Gastronomica (Volume 11, number 4) there is an article about Dione Lucas by Jean Schinto ('Remembering Dione Lucas', pp. 34-45). Dione Lucas may be a forgotten name these days but in the 1950's she was appearing on American television - well before the likes of Julia Child. She had trained under Henri-Paul Pellaprat at the Cordon Bleu Cookery School in Paris and she set up the Ecole du Petit Cordon Bleu school and restaurant in London with Rosemary Hume in the early 1930s. In 1940 she sailed to America and from then on made her career there. She opened her own Cordon Bleu Restaurant and Cooking School in New York in 1942 and first appeared on television in 1947, demonstrating French cuisine to American audiences when Julia Child was still learning to chop onions (Schinto, p. 34). By all accounts a complicated and rather difficult personalty Mrs Lucas regarded cooking as a serious business and as Schinto puts it 'her personality was at odds with the whole idea of mass appeal'.
What Schinto doesn't mention in her article is that Mrs Lucas made at least three trips to Australia, in 1956, 1958 and 1960 which included demonstrations in department stores and television appearances. The tours were sponsored by the Australian Women's Weekly  and promoted through the publication of special supplements of her recipes. In addition the magazine ran a series of her recipes in 1957 and again in 1966.
In her photograph on the cover of Book for Cooks, the recipe supplement which complemented her visit in 1956, Dione Lucas appears stern and competent, with her apron tied firmly around her waist in her 1950's kitchen with peg board behind the stove on which to hang the copper saucepans. She is referred to as 'America's blue-ribbon chef' (Australians were not yet ready for cordon bleu?) who has come to 'demonstrate to women how to make artistic creations from ordinary kitchen ingredients'.

When Dione Lucas tells her Australian audience how to cook she will be doing what she does five days a week in front of the TV cameras for her audiences in America. There she creates in half an hour complicated, mouth-watering delicacies that would take an ordinary cook at least twice as long to prepare.

Mrs Lucas's philosophy makes for interesting reading. Although a capable and independent woman herself (she was a divorced mother of two boys) she was no feminist but as her son says of her 'an artist in cookery' (Schinto, p.39)

I believe housewives these days spend far too little time in the kitchen planning and preparing meals. They depend too much on quickly prepared meals, so losing two of cookery's most worthwhile ingredients - glamor and artistry in food. 

Cooking, to my mind, is as much art as painting, dancing, or composing poetry, and cooking a masterpiece for the table can be a creative outlet for the modern housewife. (Book for Cooks)

She saw no need to 'spend vast sums of money to produce the most artistic and tasty meals', advocating the use of the cheapest cuts of meat along with heart, brains, liver, kidneys and 'the most maligned of all meats' tripe. For Mrs Lucas economy was achieved 'by substituting skill and careful preparation for expensive ingredients'. She emphasised planning so that meals could be 'integrated', simple menus ('concentrate on making masterpieces of each of a few dishes'), doing your own shopping 'rather than ordering by telephone' and using 'spices, herbs, butter and wine' to bring out the best in your ingredients.
Most importantly she believed 'there are no short cuts to real cookery success.

As with every other art, it takes time and practice to acquire and learn the many techniques needed by a creative cook.
I have three rules for mastering the art of cooking. First, learn to cook by making mistakes; second, learn to save the food you spoil; and third, remember not to repeat your mistakes. (Book for Cooks)

On her 1956 tour she demonstrated numerous different menus which included exotica like Coronets de Jambon Lucullus. This recipe required the hapless housewife to prepare a foie gras mousse which she then piped into ham cornucopias (made by lining cream horn tins with slices of ham). Each cornucopia was topped with a thin slice of truffle and sealed with aspic jelly (which said housewife had prepared earlier) and served on a bed of rice salad. She also demonstrated delicacies such as cabbage strudel (including making the strudel pastry), Vacherin aux Peches, piroshkis, Mousse de Saumon Judic (salmon mousse made with tinned salmon and served with sauce Bercy and braised lettuce), Lobster Thermidor, Charlotte Malakoff, Beef Tenderloin en chemise Strasbourgeoise and prunes stuffed with sauteed chicken liver and wrapped in bacon which were baked in the oven until the bacon was crisp then speared with a toothpick and attractively presented atop a head of cabbage. All rather a far cry from making the best of inexpensive ingredients.
But then as now there was more to cooking than just technique and practice. According to the recipe supplement to emulate Dione Lucas the modern cook also needed a Sunbeam frypan and mixmaster,  a Kelvinator refrigerator, a Metters oven and a Namco pressure cooker as well as Nestle milk products, Champion's malt vinegar, Mayfair ham, Aunt Mary's baking powder, Davis gelatine, Meadow- Lea table margarine and Wade's cornflour.

One of the blogs I enjoy reading is by Anissa Helou (you can read about her background here). She has written a number of books including Lebanese Food and The Fifth Quarter (about offal, which I think has recently been re-published) and my current favourite Mediterranean Street Food. Two of her recent posts about yufka pastry (here and here) were particularly interesting. All her work is well researched and she takes great photographs.

Two other books this month. First  Giorgio Locatelli's  Made in Sicily (my review is at The Gastronomer's Bookshelf  here.) I had thought that Mary Taylor Simeti had the last word on Sicilian food but I enjoyed Locatelli's book where the recipes are a bit more accessible for those who want to avoid some of the historical background.
The other read (which I haven't started on yet) is by Richard Wilk, Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, entitled Home Cooking in the Global Village. Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists. Despite a cover which doesn't seem to do the content justice - a pirate with an eye-patch and a parrot on his shoulder holding a platter of food from 'Blackbeard's Burgers' - this is a book about globalization. More specifically it is about Belize and how globalization has been influencing patterns of food consumption there for over three hundred years. None other than Sidney Mintz (he of Sweetness and Power) says

'Wilk's narrative food history of  a timberland backwater reborn as a tourist mecca redefines the term 'colonial'. It makes a solid theoretical contribution to clarifying the real meanings of terms like 'fusion' and 'blending', when applied to food in the modern world. A thoughtful and stimulating essay on the present, pitched entertainingly against a tatterdemalion and ragged colonial past.'

Sounds irresistible doesn't it? I am pleased to say Wilk himself doesn't go in for words of any more than about four syllables.

And another historical/anthropological read which might be of interest - Rachel Lauden on servants and how the survival of 'traditional' laborious cuisines depends on having someone prepared to do the work - here - with  links to some other interesting articles.

A final word on Eliza Acton

Fact is stranger than fiction. A good biography beats a good story any day, but to write a good biography an author needs not only an interesting subject and a degree of empathy but also a good supply of both primary and secondary sources to draw from. In The Real Mrs Beeton, The Story of Eliza Acton Sheila Hardy has made a brave attempt to breath life into the woman credited with being the best cookery writer in the English language but sadly the real Ms Acton eludes her. To be fair this is not entirely Sheila Hardy's fault. Eliza Acton left no diaries or letters, not even a will, to posterity, no written record of her life at all other than the poems she published and her books Modern Cookery and The English Bread Book. Of her family and friends no one has left more than a fleeting glimpse of their association with her.


A sympathetic reader of Modern Cookery would picture Eliza as thorough and precise; an intelligent, well educated and well read woman of her time, not lacking in a sense of humour, with a lively interest in the world around her and a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. Self evidently she was also interested in food and eating and the principles of household economy. Unfortunately, despite a valiant, but not altogether satisfactory, effort to place Eliza in context and to put flesh on the bones of her family and friends (running to more than 200 pages!), Sheila Hardy can add little to that picture. There just isn't enough hard evidence to do more than hedge around what little information is verifiable with 'perhaps' this, 'it is likely' that or 'one could assume'/'we can imagine' the other.

This is a shame because Eliza did mix with some interesting people, just how, why, when and where remains a mystery. Who was the love of her life (an unknown Frenchman?), why did she go to France (for the sake of her health?), did she have an illegitimate daughter (probably not - well not one that survived) will have to remain questions open to speculation.

For me the biggest puzzle is why Eliza thought to write a recipe book in the first place. What motivated her to devote ten years of her life to a cookery book? What experience did she have of the kitchen? Hardy suggests that the recipes were most likely tested by her servant Ann Kirby but Eliza must at least have spent many hours observing and taking notes and the details in some cases are so exact that surely Eliza had hands-on experience of her own. Was it her publisher who suggested the idea of a cookery book and if so why did he think Eliza was the person to write it? Sheila Hardy asks this question herself but fails to provide a satisfactory answer. Perhaps Eliza was urged by her friends to make a record of her recipes. Hardy presents some evidence that Acton openly solicited her friends for recipes to include but it seems to me unlikely that she only started to collect them once she had made up her mind to write a cookery book.

In the end I suppose the whys and wherefores don't really matter, we should just be thankful that Eliza staked her future on recipes and not rhymes.
 
Sheila Hardy, The Real Mrs Beeton. The Story of Eliza Acton, The History Press, Stroud, 2011.

Alice B. Toklas and her cook book - Part Two

Alice at rue de Fleurus with some of the 'sparkling' silver.
Man Ray, 1922.

After I read The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book I went looking for as much as I could find about Alice and Gertrude and food (without having to resort to reading any of Gertrude's works which I think might be a bit beyond me). I wanted to fill in some of the gaps in Alice's story and try to understand more about the role food and cooking played in her life and in her relationship with Gertrude. I don't know that I am necessarily any the wiser but herewith, in no apparent order, are some of the bits and pieces which I found interesting.

Before Alice came to Paris she had led what Gertrude called in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (hereafter AABT) 'the gently bred existence of [her]class and kind'. She had grown up in a household where there were cooks and nurses. With her mother's death she had taken on the management of that household – such as the menu planning and budgeting – rather than the labour of actually preparing meals. In the The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (hereafter ABTC) she tells us that before she came to Paris she 'was interested in food but not in doing any cooking', she read cook books, she collected recipes, but most importantly she enjoyed eating. In the preface to Aromas and Flavours she talks of the 'rapture and surprise' she experienced on her first tasting 'a steak smothered in garlic' although her adventurous palate was not considered entirely appropriate, 'garlic was not admitted in my mother's kitchen, nor did she consider my enjoyment of the strong flavour of salmon, sweetbreads, brussels sprouts, all cheese, caviare, the onion family including garlic, and wine, natural or commendable in her young daughter'.

Alice and Gertrude at 27 rue de Fleurus, Man Ray, 1922.

When she first moved to 27 rue de Fleurus to live with Gertrude Stein the cook was Hélène, an 'invariably perfect cook' who 'knew all the niceties of making menus' (ABTC p. 171). Alice claims that she learned nothing about cooking from Hélène because Hélène did not think it appropriate for a lady to cook. Both Alice and Gertrude tell stories about Hélène and her understanding of the role food played in the social niceties. As Gertrude tells it

Hélène had her opinions, she did not for instance like Matisse. She said a frenchman should not stay unexpectedly to a meal particularly if he asked the servant beforehand what there was for dinner. She said foreigners had a perfect right to do these things but not a frenchman and Matisse had once done it. So when Miss Stein said to her, Monsieur Matisse is staying for dinner this evening, she would say, in that case I will not make an omelette but fry the eggs. It takes the same number of eggs and the same amount of butter but it shows less respect, and he will understand. (AABT, p.16)

But in Alice's version the lesson she learnt from Hélène was more complicated and subtle

If you wished to honour a guest you offered him an omelette soufllé with an elaborate sauce, if you were indifferent to this an omelette with mushrooms or fines herbes, but if you wished to be insulting you made fried eggs. With the meat course, a fillet of beef with Madeira sauce came first, then a leg or saddle of mutton, and last a chicken. (ABTC p. 171).

I think that if she did not already know, Alice would have quickly appreciated that food could play a significant part in her relationship with Gertrude, not just providing sustenance and a sign of affection but also as an important contribution to the gatherings of Gertrude's salon. The guests, the artists and writers, who came to rue de Fleurus in the 1920s and 30s came to see Gertrude but it was Alice who opened the door to them. The conversation may have belonged to Gertrude but the food belonged to Alice. Alice choreographed the proceedings and regulated the atmosphere of those gatherings, at least in part through what she served and how she served it. Even if their guests did not appreciate it, Alice would know that what they were eating reflected how much they were valued.

Hemingway describes Alice working on her needlepoint while he talked to Gertrude and Alice talked to his wife. Alice saw to the food and drink and at the same time 'she made one conversation and listened to two and often interrupted the one she was not making' (A Moveable Feast).  Bravig Imbs, who first met Gertrude in 1926, 'realised instinctively that Alice was important and required attention',

Gertrude received so many people that she could not be bothered worrying whether they would get on together, but let all classes and kinds mix pell-mell and the devil take the hindmost. All she cared about was to shake loose the people who bored or annoyed her and though she was too kindly to drop them in the middle of a sentence, she always managed to introduce them to Alice before the sentence was ended. Alice acted as both sieve and buckler; she defended Gertrude from the bores and most of the new people were strained through her before Gertrude had any prolonged contact with them. That was why after the preliminary handshaking, I found myself taking very delicious tea and munching heavenly cakes with the gypsy-like person ...She talked a blue streak.

What a shame he doesn't tell us what she talked about. Sir Francis Rose, who was first introduced to the pair in the summer of 1937, describes Alice sitting behind a tray 'sparkling' with silver urns and teapots, surrounded by small tables 'covered with beautiful china, heaped with all kinds of home-made cakes, marrons glaces, crystallized cherries and violets'. Most commentators accept that Alice's role was to entertain the women guests, the wives, while Gertrude talked with the men, and to serve the tea and cookies. Rose observes that she was 'always watching the guests like a cat to see that everything was going well and that good manners, according to the Victorian standards of the house, were being observed'.

Whilst some visitors appreciated Alice's attentions others found her intimidating and difficult. Françoise Gilot describes being taken by Picasso to meet Alice and Gertrude, a scene which would be funny except for Gilot's obvious discomfort and for the fact that it paints both Alice and Gertrude as rather ungenerous to their young guest. She was ushered into the salon and 'Alice Toklas sat down on the divan beside me but as far away as possible. In the centre of our little circle were several low tables covered with plates of petits fours, cakes, cookies, and all kinds of luxuries one didn't see at that period, right after the war.' Whilst Gertrude was cross-examining Gilot

Alice Toklas was not sitting down, but bobbing up and down, moving back and forth, going out into the dining room to get more cakes, bringing them in, and passing them around ….when ever I said anything displeasing to Alice Toklas, she would dart another plate of cakes at me and I would be forced to take one and bite into it. They were all very rich and gooey and with nothing to drink, talking was not easy. I suppose I should have said something about her cooking, but I just ate her cakes and went back to talking with Gertrude Stein, so I guess I made an enemy of Alice Toklas that day.

Did Alice and Gertrude disapprove of Gilot or were they trying to give Picasso some sort of message? In the end Gilot promised herself that she would never visit the apartment again and concluded that it was easier to do without Gertrude altogether 'than to take her in tandem with Alice B. Toklas'.


Cakes and sweet things seem to have played a large part in their lives. Apart from what was served to visitors, according to Natalie Clifford Barney, another expatriate American who had a salon in Paris, Gertrude and Alice were always on the look out for new cakes. She rather neatly concludes that Gertrude 'must be sustained on sweetmeats and timely success, this being the surest way of taking the cake and of eating it and having it too.' Alice would have learnt early on that Gertrude had a sweet tooth, and, according to Harold Acton, 'cosseted' her with creamy cakes. Alice may not have known too much about cake making when she first came to Paris, ordering them instead from the baker since Hélène's talents didn't stretch to fancy pastries either, but eventually she earned a reputation for them. Writing to Annette Rosenshine in 1951 she says

When I used to bake a cake for Gertrude I never asked is it good I always said does it look like one that came from the bakers ... well it was often that Gertrude thought that it did.(Burns ed, p. 237)

Natalie Barney recalled a summer afternoon at Bilignin when Alice served a 'fluffy confection of hers, probably a coconut layer cake which only Americans know how to make – and eat' which came with white icing edged with pink. Clare More de Morinni, chairman of the American Women's Club in Paris, was delighted to be invited to 'sample one of Miss Toklas's wonderful cakes'. But for all that they may have been important cakes are not disproportionally represented in The Cook Book and you will search in vain to find Gertrude's favourite or the recipe for coconut layer cake. Many of the recipes are not what Alice herself cooked, they are recipes she collected, recipes for dishes she enjoyed, so whilst she doesn't necessarily tell us what she liked to prepare we do know what she liked to eat.

Alice and Gertrude at 5 rue Christine, 1938
Cecil Beaton

Alice did pretty much everything for the two of them while Gertrude sat around being a genius. Gertrude has Alice say 'I am a pretty good housekeeper, and a pretty good gardener and a pretty good needlewoman and a pretty good secretary and a pretty good editor and a pretty good vet for dogs and I have to do them all at once '(AABT p. 256). What she doesn't say is that Alice was a good cook.
She first cooks for Gertrude only on Sunday evenings, when Hélène was at home with her husband, which was when 'Gertrude Stein liked from time to time to have me make american dishes' (AABT p. 122). For all that they spent most of their lives in France, returning to America only once, and both women came from families imbued with European sensibilities and culture, they both seem to have always remained Americans abroad and proud of it. So Alice prepared Gertrude 'the simple dishes I had eaten in the homes of the San Joaquin Valley in California' (ABTC p. 37) and presumably coconut layer cake, and W. G. Rogers sent them seeds of American corn each year for the Bilignin garden. In 1949, writing to Annette Rosenshine Alice comments that a Chinese restaurant she has been to in Paris was 'nice but not like in S.F. oh dear no' and in 1951 she writes to Claude Fredericks of 'a California recipe for pecan pie with rum and the pecans glazed on top that I've read for years that we might enjoy' (Burns, ed. pp. 157 and 231). Both were enormously proud of the American forces and their role in the liberation of France. Harold Acton commented, on meeting Gertrude and Alice just after their return to Paris at the end of the war, that 'Gertrude had become more aggressively American in idiom and the use of slang'. In Paris their friends were in the main expatriates of one sort or another and the common language of their conversation over Alice's cakes must have been English. It seems to me that living in Paris allowed them a freedom to be themselves which they could not have enjoyed in America, living apart from the French society which surrounded them in a way that they could not have achieved had they been merely trying to separate themselves from their social milieu. According to Gillian Tindall there were probably as many as forty thousand Americans living temporarily in Paris during the 1920s. She goes on

It is from this era that one can date the curious phenomenon, still observable on the Left Bank today, of an almost hermetically sealed anglophone world with its own cultural preoccupations, its own bookshop (Shakespeare & Co.), its own parties and dramas. It also has its own folk memory of former figures, from Gertrude Stein and Hemingway, to the more recent Allen Ginsberg and William Styron, which hardly interacts with the French inhabitants' perceptions of the Left Bank in anything but the most superficial way. The Paris 'to which all good Americans go when they die' has always been ...a different place from the one the local inhabitants know.

Is it too much of an exaggeration to suggest that, at least until they were exiled to Bilignin during the Second World War, Gertrude and Alice interacted with French culture largely through their liking for and indulgence in French cuisine?

Rue de Fleurus, 1922, Man Ray.
This photograph shows Alice entering the studio adjacent to their apartment, where Gertrude wrote, .

If the idea of living the bohemian life in Paris appears romantic and exotic the reality was anything but luxurious, although Alice and Gertrude no doubt lived a more comfortable existence than many of their working class French neighbours. Until 1938 they lived at 27 rue de Fleurus, a stone building dating from the 1890s. Their two storey apartment was off a paved courtyard with a small hallway separating the kitchen from the dining room, and two bedrooms and the bathroom upstairs. Gertrude wrote in a separate studio adjacent to the apartment. In 1914 with Alice permanently established there and Gertrude's brother, Leo, gone they had a covered hallway built between the studio and the living area, they had the studio painted and the house papered and finally had the gas lamps removed and electricity installed. Electric heating wasn't introduced until 1929. There is no mention of the cooking facilities but it seems likely that Alice first cooked for Gertrude on a fuel stove. Their move to 5 rue Christine was a wrench but made easier to bear because of the inadequate conditions at rue de Fleurus, the apartment was dark and airless and 'no servant would stand the kitchen' which suggests that the kitchen facilities were primitive and antiquated. The move also resulted in the acquisition of a refrigerator and gifts of an egg whisk, a garlic crusher,a meat thermometer and a lid opener from friends (Souhami, p. 226). When Alice and Gertrude first started spending at least six months in the summer at Bilignin, where Alice cultivated her much loved vegetable garden, they had no inside plumbing. It wasn't until The Autobiography was published and successful (1933) that they could afford to have a bathroom and lavatory installed, which presumably meant that the kitchen now had a water supply, and to replace the coal fired stove with an electric cooker (Souhami p. 195).

In The Autobiography Gertrude claims on Alice's behalf that 'I like cooking, I am an extremely good five-minute cook'(p. 122) but Alice tells us that 'cooking is not an entirely agreeable pastime' because 'there is too much that must happen in advance of the actual cooking'. She goes on

In the earlier days...if indulgent friends on this or that Sunday evening or party occasion said that the cooking I produced wasn't bad, it neither beguiled nor flattered me into liking or wanting to do it. (ABTC p. 37)

She then says that she did not begin to cook seriously until 'it suddenly and unexpectedly became a disagreeable necessity' while they were in exile in Bilignin during the war and their life with servants had at least temporarily come to an end. (A chapter in The Cook Book deals with some of the cooks Alice employed who worked for them in Paris and travelled with them to Bilignin for the summer.)

What should we make of this? It seems clear that Alice could cook when she wanted to or needed to but she preferred not to or at least preferred to make quick and easy five minute dishes. She came from a home in San Francisco which had boasted an "automatic" freezer for ice cream (ABTC p. 97) so she would have found the conditions in the kitchens in Paris and Bilignin very primitive and cooking would have been hard work. Alice's passion was food, she loved eating, she loved growing her own ingredients ('there is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfying or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown' ABTC p. 266) but cooking was just a practical necessity which took her away from the 'many more important and more amusing things' that she enjoyed (ABTC p. 37).

This and the following two photographs were taken by Carl Mydans for Life Magazine. They show Gertrude and Alice and their dog Basket 'on the doorstep of their home during the US 7th Army's liberation of southern France'. These are my favourites of Alice because they show her in a less severe and mannered pose and because she and Gertrude are shown as equals, rather than Alice being relegated to the background.

When Alice says that many first-rate women cooks have 'tired eyes and a wan smile' (ABTC p. 82) I wonder if she had herself in mind.

Alice was extremely resourceful and capable – she could knit, she produced needlepoint based on designs drawn by Picasso, she spent her summers digging and planting a glorious vegetable garden aside from all her duties as hostess, housekeeper and secretary – and she loved luxury and extravagance. We know from The Cook Book that the food she enjoyed most involved cream and eggs, cognac and champagne,  foie gras and truffles, served with lashings of crystal and silver and lace. Not that she was incapable of appreciating simplicity, she just loved a bit of indulgence. When she was driving around France in 1917 she armed herself with the newly published 'booklets on the gastronomic points of interest' (ABTC p. 102) and it was the Guide des Gourmets which led them to Bilignin (AABT p. 228). Even in old age, alone and destitute she craved the finer things. Doda Conrad writes that it was difficult to satisfy her 'I remember tricking her by having fruit brought to her in used bags from Fauchon or Hédiard. This gave her the illusion of eating the best food Paris had to offer' (Malcolm p. 218).

For all that we know about Alice and Gertrude, from what they wrote about themselves and from what others wrote about them, Alice in particular remains elusive. As Janet Malcolm puts it 'biography and autobiography are the aggregate of what, in the former, the author happens to learn, and, in the latter, he chooses to tell'. In this case The Autobiography tells us as much about Gertrude Stein as it does about Alice. Whilst The Cook Book is Alice's memoir it is somehow oddly impersonal. She tells us only just as much as she wants us to know about the personal details of her life with Gertrude and reveals almost nothing of her own thoughts or feelings. Her other memoir What is Remembered adds little or nothing to the two earlier works. Trying to find the Alice who existed before the publication of The Autobiography is almost impossible. Sadly all her early letters to her father (written regularly from 1907 to 1922), those she wrote to childhood friend Clare Moore de Gruchy, all her early letters to Annette Rosenshine and most of her pre-1946 letters to Louise Taylor have either never been found, were wilfully destroyed or simply lost.

What she looked like is easy enough to gauge from the photographs. Obviously no conventional beauty at best she is described by those kindly disposed to her as 'slim,dark and whimsical' (Sylvia Beach), 'enigmatic and dark' (Clare More de Morinni) and 'tiny and hunched .. with her hooked nose and light moustache' (Harold Acton) and at the other end of the spectrum as 'incredibly ugly, uglier than almost anyone I had ever met' (Otto Friedrich in Simon p. 211). Those who did not warm to Alice saw her as 'hideous...she looked like a witch' (Joan Chapman in Malcolm p. 188) 'with large, heavy-lidded eyes, a long hooked nose, and a dark, furry moustache' (Françoise Gilot).
Hemingway thought she had 'a very pleasant voice', but found her 'frightening'. In A Moveable Feast he can't bring himself to use her name, referring to her only as Miss Stein's friend or companion. Many people who met her found her intimidating, several were a little scared of her. Mabel Dodge thought she was insidious and 'somehow dishonest' (Simon, p.81). Some responded to Alice's wit and vitality (W. G. Rogers), found her dignified, appreciated her shrewdness 'the cultivated and slightly grainy quality of her voice' and her warm, malicious laughter (Otto Friedrich) and took the time to discover her 'intelligence and culture' (Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler). Whilst there seems to be little doubt that she was jealous of her role in Gertrude's life and that she could be wilful and manipulative she still had life long friends like Annette Rosenshine who had been a neighbour in San Francisco and Louise Taylor who had been a friend since they studied music together and the letters written later in her life radiate graciousness,  from them 'she emerges ...as a great lady, witty, self-deprecating, attentive, cultivated' (Malcolm, p. 210).
 
I still can't help but think that it's too bad neither Gertrude nor Alice nor any of the people they entertained bothered to leave us a description of Alice cooking in the kitchen at rue de Fleurus.

 
 
References
All quotations are from Linda Simon, Gertrude Stein Remembered (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1995) unless otherwise acknowledged.

Burns, Edward (ed.). Staying on Alone. Letters of Alice B. Toklas, Liveright, New York, 1973.
Malcolm, Janet. Two Lives. Gertrude and Alice, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007.
Souhami, Diana. Gertrude and Alice, Phoenix Press, London, 2000.
Simon, Linda. The Biography of Alice B. Toklas. Doubleday, New York, 1977.
Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Zephyr Books, Stockholm, 1947.
Tindall, Gillian. Footprints in Paris, Pimlico, London, 2009.
Toklas, Alice. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, Harper Perennial, New York, 2010 (1984 edition).
                     What is Remembered, Michael Joseph, London, 1963.
                     Aromas and Flavours of Past and Present, Michael Joseph, London, 1959.