Goodness Gracious Living
Aromas and Flavours. By Alice B. Toklas. (Michael Joseph, 21s.) NONE of the pleasures, none of the mere mitiga- tions, of civilised life is quite the same once the snob-sisters of the glossies have got at it. I am sure I am not the only writer about wine who has contemplated taking to a sound Coca-Cola of a good year, in retreat from those tipple-tattlers who know more about labels than about bottles, more about vintage-charts than about vintages. There is even more gush about guzzle than there is about tipple, from the gracious-living- lovers. Look what has befallen the hapless Miss Alice B. Toklas, who once wrote a charmingly rococo book of what she called 'recipe and remi- niscence,' with the down-to-earth. American title of The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. Idiosyncratic, yet firmly based on the French tradition, for all its absurdities it was amus- ing, informative and highly usable. But by the time it was published, alas, Miss Toklas had become a 'celebrity,' in the sense that the shinier American magazines had heard that she had been a friend of Gertrude Stein's, and had also got around to hearing of Gertrude Stein. The editor of House Beautiful summoned the near-octogenarian Miss Toklas from Paris to Venice to hear what she, the editor, had to say about gastronomy, and to meet Miss Poppy Cannon, the author of its column on okay eating. It is Miss Cannon who introduces Miss Toklas's new book, beginning by quoting what is no doubt the only phrase of Gertrude Stein's she has ever heard of, and leans over each of Miss Toklas's recipes (few of which will be unfamiliar to serious students of French cooking) with arch and exclamation-marked interruptions, explaining that where the author asks for the breasts of raw pigeons, as in her clas- sic recipe for artichauts Catherine de Medici, the quick-frozen breasts of cooked chickens will do, and (on onion soup) that 'you can use Miss Toklas's ideas even though you resort to tinned or packaged dehydrated onion soup.' No doubt; but that isn't what books of recipe and reminiscence by a friend of Gertrude Stein's are meant to be about, and even Miss Toklas herself has been cor- rupted since her first success by the kind attentions of her codologist friends. She used to know, and earnestly to expound, the important difference between stirring and beating, but now she has an electric blender, as though quenelles had been im- possible before electricity came to the kitchen. American columnists have cozened her with cake- mixes, and although I am sure that she is still one of the great amateur cooks, and a most articulate epicure, she is none the better for hav- ing been introduced to Poppy Cannon's 'popover mix to which I am passionately devoted.'
CYRIL RAY
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