Back in print!

Wow. It's turning out to be a good season for vintage cookbooks. This one showed up on a cart today, packaged in a beautiful new cover.

Alice B. Toklas was Gertrude Stein's longtime companion. Her cookbook is famous both because it's good reading and because it contains a recipe for marijuana brownies, which must have been pretty shocking in 1954; I've heard of youngsters seeking out old library copies of the book, which is sometimes kept in the "adults only" section and watched over by stern librarians, in order to unlock the secrets of making mind-altering treats. In reality, the recipe is called "Haschich Fudge (which anyone could whip up on a rainy day)," and its combination of pulverized spices, nuts, dried fruits and sugar sounds like a recipe for stale fruitcake. Still, it does contain a good deal of cannabis, and Alice promises, "Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one's personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected." You can find the recipe here if you'd like to give it a try yourself.