Hors d'oeuvre The Recipe as Escape

The shared lives of Alice Babette Toklas and Gertrude Stein were suffused with food. It was a concern of such priority that in 1934 they considered reneging on a plan to spend time in the USA due to Stein's apprehensions regarding the cuisine in the country of her birth: 'tinned vegetable cocktails and tinned fruit salads, for example. Surely, said I, you weren't required to eat them,' Toklas recalled. In 1910, when she went to live with Stein at 27 Rue de Fleurus, Paris, Toklas embraced new culinary complexities, preparing dinners à deux and frequently playing the good wife and hostess at parties. In turn, Stein nourished her imagination and encouraged her gastronomical experimentation. 'Cookbooks have always intrigued and seduced me,' Toklas once wrote. 'When I was still a dilettante in the kitchen they held my attention, even the dull ones, from cover to cover, the way crime and murder stories did Gertrude Stein.' And perhaps while Stein was concocting 'Salad Dressing and an Artichoke', Toklas was busy rustling up a couple of Hearts of Artichokes à la Isman Bavaldy, a recipe from her own cookbook.

SALAD DRESSING AND AN ARTICHOKE.

Please pale hot, please cover rose, please acre in the red stranger, please butter all the beef-steak with regular feel faces.

SALAD DRESSING AND AN ARTICHOKE.

It was please it was please carriage cup in an ice-cream, in an icecream it was too bended bended with scissors and all this time. A whole is inside a part, part does go away, a hole is red leaf. No choice was where there was and a second and a second.

Stein's language gambols and gyres in loops and repeats, rejecting all traditions and expectations of linear narrative. It is gnomic and difficult, seeming to require specialist knowledge to unlock its secrets. Its experiment fits the modern model of exclusivity and 'high' art, and whether intentionally or not, it repelled many and alienated most; so to suggest comparison with something as banal as a recipe might seem hard to stomach. In fact, Stein's vocabulary is always ordinary and unemotional, and it is through context, attention and repetition that she renders it strange.

Both Stein and Toklas deal with the objects and words that construct our daily lives. Tender Buttons, from which the lines above are excerpted, is divided into three sections — Objects, Food, Rooms — each addressing the same domestic, everyday ingredients as Toklas's cookbook, and in the hands of both they are made extraordinary. Stein's work is full of humour and play, and her use of the present progressive tense gives a sense of being in the moment. This narrated action differs from the imperative voice of a recipe or Toklas's reminiscences that often surround the instructions, but it holds the same sense of presence and activity. Just as 'Hearts of Artichokes à la Isman Bavaldy' invites action, so 'Salad Dressing And An Artichoke' begs the active engagement of its reader.

This is the menu at a lunch party to which we were invited at a house whose mistress was a well-known French hostess and whose food was famous.

Aspic de Foie Gras
Salmon Sauce Hollandaise
Hare à la Royale
Hearts of Artichokes à la Isman Bavaldy
Pheasants Roasted with Truffles
Lobster à la Française
Singapore Ice Cream
Cheese
Berries and Fruit

This copious lunch was accompanied by appropriate and rare wines. There were at the table ten guests and six of the family. The fine linen and beautiful crystal, porcelains and silver were of the same quality as the menu.

Hearts of Artichokes à la Isman Bavaldy

Prepare 12 artichokes by cutting the leaves to within 2 inches of the heart. As each one is cut, put it into a recipient of cold water to which the juice of 1 lemon has been added. When all the artichokes are ready, shake them well to clean them in a quantity of running water. Put them at once in a large saucepan of furiously boiling water to which 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon cardamom seeds and the juice of 2 lemons have been added, and cover. There should be enough water to float the artichokes until they are tender, about 25 minutes according to size. As soon as a leaf can be removed easily, remove from flame, drain at once, and put into recipient of cold water and under running water. When water is tepid remove artichokes, drain, gently remove all leaves and the chokes. Trim around the hearts if necessary. The leaves can be scraped with a silver spoon and mixed with a little cream to be used in an omelette or under mirrored eggs. Boil 3 lbs. of small green asparagus tied in bundles in a covered saucepan of salted water. Cover and boil for about 15 minutes or until tender, but be careful not to overcook.

After soaking a sweetbread weighing about 1 lb. in cold water for 1 hour, boil in water to which 1/2 teaspoon salt, 2 shallots and 6 coriander seeds have been added. Boil covered for 20 minutes. Plunge into cold water and when cool enough, remove tubes and skin. Strain with potato masher through strainer. Put 2 tablespoons butter in frying pan, when the butter begins to bubble reduce flame. Put the sweetbreads in frying pan. Stir constantly until they are well mixed with butter. Sprinkle on them 2 tablespoons flour. Mix thoroughly. Then slowly add 2 cups dry champagne. Cook gently until this sauce becomes stiff.

Cut the asparagus within 2 inches of the tip. With the left hand hold an asparagus upright in the heart of an artichoke while a wall of the sauce is built around it with the right hand. The tips of the asparagus should show about 1/2 inch above the sauce. Cover the sauce with a thick coat of browned breadcrumbs. Pour 1 tablespoon butter over each asparagus tip and the breadcrumbs. Place the artichokes in a well-buttered fireproof dish and brown in preheated 425° oven for 1/4 hour.

It does not take as long as it sounds to prepare this dish. The lemon, champagne and coriander seeds give an ineffable flavour.

Though Alice B Toklas had always wanted to write a cookbook, it wasn't complete until 1954, almost ten years after the Second World War had ended, and eight years after the death of Gertrude Stein. It was the cookbook of their life together. In the introduction, Toklas wrote: 'As cook to cook I must confide that this book with its mingling of recipe and reminiscence was put together during the first three months of an attack of pernicious jaundice. Partly, I suppose, it was written as an escape from the narrow diet and monotony of illness, and I daresay nostalgia for old days and old ways.'

Toklas relished cookbooks not simply for their helpful instructions, but for the narratives in which recipes are often embedded, as her own certainly were, and for a kind of novelistic escapism. Just as 'hors d'oeuvre' translates literally as 'outside the...