Alice B. Toklas

Née aux États-Unis en 1877 et décédée à Paris en 1967, Alice B. Toklas était écrivaine. Elle a été la conjointe de Gertrude Stein¹, une écrivaine et poétesse d’origine américaine installée à Paris. Ensemble elles ont fréquenté de grands artistes et certainement quelques soirées folles.

Dans son ouvrage de 1954, Alice publie la recette d’un ami qui donnera lieu à toutes ces histoires de brownies au pot.

La voici:

Recipes from Friends
BRYON GYSEN²
HASCHICH FUDGE
(which anyone could whip up on a rainy day)

This is the food of Paradise of Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises: it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR. In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter 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’s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by «un évanouissement réveillé».

• Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns
• 1 whole nutmeg
• 4 average sticks of cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon coriander

These should all be pulverised in a mortar.

About a handful each of stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of canibus sativa can be pulverised. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care.

Two pieces are quite sufficient.

Obtaining the canibus may present certain difficulties, but the variety known as canibus sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognised, everywhere in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa; besides being cultivated as a crop for the manufacture of rope. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called canibus indica, has been observed even in city window boxes. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green.

Vidéo-biographie³

Domaine public

L’œuvre d’Alice B. Toklas entre dans le domaine public canadien le 1er janvier 2018⁴.

• The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, 1954
• Aromas and Flavors of Past and Present, 1958
• What Is Remembered, 1963
• Staying on alone: letters, 1973

Références

• Alice B. Toklas (Wikipédia, page consultée le 30 décembre 2017)

1. Par sa collection personnelle et par ses livres, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) contribua à la diffusion du cubisme et plus particulièrement de l’œuvre de Picasso, de Matisse et de Cézanne (Wikipedia).
2. Bryon Gysen est la déformation volontaire du nom de Brion Gysin, artiste et écrivain britano-canadien et inventeur de la fameuse Dreamachine (voir à ce sujet le documentaire de Nic Seehan).
3. Allusion au titre du livre de Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (voir Wikipedia EN).
4. Pour le cannabis, il faudra attendre le 1er juillet 2018 (voir Radio-Canada).

Illustration