Olivia: Most people think the most scandalous recipe ever published is for pot brownies. But the truth is, the book they came from is far more shocking for its stories of murder, wartime survival, and a secret autobiography disguised as a cookbook. Jackson: Hold on, murder? In a cookbook? That sounds less like Julia Child and more like Agatha Christie. I’m picturing a detective story where the weapon is a poisoned soufflé. What book are we even talking about? Olivia: Exactly. We're talking about The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, written by the lifelong partner of the famous writer Gertrude Stein. Jackson: Alice B. Toklas... I know the name, but mostly from Stein's own book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which, confusingly, Stein wrote herself. Olivia: Right, and that's the key. Toklas felt Stein had already 'done' her autobiography, and done it definitively. So when a publisher asked for her memoirs, she refused. Instead, she poured her life, her wit, and all her memories into this cookbook, which became a surprise bestseller and a cultural touchstone long before food blogs were a thing. Jackson: So it’s a culinary Trojan horse. You think you're getting a recipe for Boeuf Bourguignon, but you're actually getting a front-row seat to one of the most fascinating lives of the 20th century. Olivia: Precisely. And it all started not with a flash of artistic inspiration, but with a moment of pure, cold desperation.

Jackson: Desperation? I always pictured Toklas and Stein living this glamorous, art-filled life in Paris, hosting salons with Picasso and Hemingway. What could possibly have been so desperate? Olivia: That’s the life they had. But this book was written in 1954, eight years after Stein’s death. Alice was 75 years old, living alone in their Paris apartment, surrounded by a priceless art collection that she was legally forbidden to sell. Post-war rationing was still a reality, prices were high, and she was, to put it bluntly, broke and shivering. Jackson: Wow. So she’s sitting on a fortune in paintings but can’t afford to eat? That’s a brutal irony. Olivia: It is. And she devises this brilliant, almost cunning plan. She notices that American writers in Paris, like Richard Wright, get access to the American embassy commissary—where food and goods were sold at bargain prices—because they are published authors. So, she decides she needs to become one. Jackson: Wait, you’re telling me this legendary cookbook, this pillar of culinary literature, was conceived as a scheme to get cheap groceries? Olivia: That’s the origin story! It was a survival tactic. When a publisher first approached her for a book about her life with Gertrude, she famously replied, "Gertrude did my autobiography and it’s done." But then she had a counter-proposal. She said, "What I could do is a cook book. It would, of course, be full of memories." Jackson: That is genius. It’s a way to tell her own story, on her own terms, without directly competing with Stein's version of her life. She gets to be the protagonist of her own narrative, finally. Olivia: And she does it with such a distinct voice. It’s not just a collection of recipes; it’s a gallery of moments. There’s this wonderful story that shows you exactly who she was. She was testing recipes for the book and decided to host a lunch for her publisher and her old friend, the famous writer Thornton Wilder. Jackson: High stakes. Cooking for your publisher is one thing, but for a literary giant? No pressure. Olivia: And she’s so short on money she has to do all the cooking and serving herself, running back and forth from the kitchen. Every single time she enters the dining room with a platter, the excruciatingly polite Thornton Wilder stands up. Every. Single. Time. Jackson: Oh, that’s painfully awkward. I can just feel the tension. Olivia: Alice is getting more and more impatient. She comes out with this huge platter of fried chicken and tries to serve him, asking, "Light or dark meat?" Wilder, completely flustered, turns to his sister and asks for her opinion. Alice finally loses it. She puts the platter down and says, in her very direct way, "Help yourself, Thornton," and marches back to the kitchen. Jackson: I love that. No pretense, no fawning over the famous guest. Just a real person trying to get lunch on the table. That one little story tells you more about her than a whole chapter of a traditional biography might. Olivia: Exactly. The entire book is like that. Every recipe is a doorway into a memory, a personality, a moment in time. She’s not just giving you instructions for food; she’s inviting you into her world, a world that was rapidly disappearing. And it’s a world that isn't always as charming and polite as a lunch with Thornton Wilder. Sometimes, it gets quite dark.

Jackson: Okay, so it's a secret memoir. But you mentioned murder... in a cookbook? I'm still stuck on that. How does that even work? Olivia: She literally has a chapter titled "Murder in the Kitchen." And it’s not a metaphor. Toklas had this unflinching, almost brutally honest view of cooking. For her, before you get to the beautiful, delicious final dish, there’s often an act of violence. Jackson: Right, we’re so disconnected from that now. We buy our chicken in neat plastic packages. We don’t have to confront the… well, the murder. Olivia: She confronts it head-on. She tells the story of the first time she had to kill a live carp. The fishmonger sells it to her swimming in a pail but refuses to kill or clean it. She gets it home and has this moment of panic. She remembers seeing fishermen kill salmon by slamming them against a dock, but she doesn't have a dock. Jackson: This is not in any Gordon Ramsay show I’ve ever seen. What does she do? Olivia: She grabs the carp with a dishcloth, takes a knife, and plunges it into its spine. She describes the horror of the act, but also the necessity of it. It’s this shocking, darkly humorous moment that completely demystifies the romantic image of the French chef. She’s saying, ‘You want to cook? This is part of the job.’ Jackson: It’s so honest. It makes me think about the other kind of mayhem you mentioned—the social drama. It wasn't just the fish that were dramatic, right? Olivia: Oh, the servants were a constant source of drama. The final chapter of the book is this incredible, hilarious, and sometimes heartbreaking chronicle of all the cooks and maids who passed through their lives. There was Hélène, the perfect cook who left because her husband decided she shouldn't work anymore. There were the Indo-Chinese servants, one of whom was a gambler, another an opium addict. Jackson: It sounds like a revolving door of chaos. Olivia: Completely. But the most cinematic story is about Frederich, a talented Austrian cook they hired in the 1930s. He gets caught in this intense love triangle. He’s engaged to a sweet girl named Duscha, but is being pursued by another woman, whom Alice only refers to as 'the devil'. This woman threatens him, trying to force him to marry her instead. Jackson: This is a full-blown soap opera unfolding in their kitchen. Olivia: It gets worse. One day, 'the devil' shows up at the apartment with a bottle of Tokay wine, which she offers to Frederich. He’s convinced it’s poisoned. He throws her out, and then, in a shocking twist, he flees Paris… with 'the devil'! He just abandons his fiancée and runs off with his would-be poisoner. Jackson: You can’t make this stuff up. And all of this is in a cookbook? Olivia: Tucked right between recipes for Sacher Torte and Gypsy Goulash. But the mayhem goes beyond personal drama and into serious moral territory, especially when you look at their lives during World War II. Jackson: Right, I’ve read there's some controversy there. How did two wealthy, Jewish-American, lesbian women survive the Nazi occupation in Vichy, France? It seems impossible. Olivia: It’s deeply complicated, and the book doesn't shy away from it, though it tells the story through the lens of food. They survived partly because they were protected by a high-ranking Vichy official, Bernard Faÿ, who was a friend. And while they were in the countryside, they lived a relatively comfortable life, getting food from the black market and friends in the Resistance. Jackson: So they were navigating this incredibly dangerous gray area. Olivia: A very gray area. The book includes a shocking quote from Toklas, reflecting on the war years. She says, "Though Hitler and the presence of the Occupants was a menacing nightmare, I was happier then than today." Jackson: Wow. That’s a stunning thing for a Jewish woman who lived through the Holocaust to say. What could that possibly mean? Olivia: It’s debated. Some think it was because Gertrude was still alive then. Others see it as a reflection of the intense, focused purpose of survival. But it’s unsettling, and it forces you to see them not as simple heroines, but as complex people making morally ambiguous choices to survive. The book doesn't give you an easy answer. It just presents the memory, tied to the food they ate, and leaves you to grapple with it.

Olivia: That complicated wartime experience is just one stop on the map of their life that this book charts. For Toklas, food was their compass. It was how they navigated and understood the world. Jackson: It’s like a culinary passport, with stamps from different times and places in their life. Olivia: A perfect analogy. And one of the most vivid journeys is their 1934 tour of America. They shipped their Model T Ford, which they’d nicknamed "Aunt Pauline," over from France and set off on a cross-country road trip. Gertrude was on a lecture tour after the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Jackson: A road trip in a 1930s Ford sounds like an adventure in itself. What did they think of American food? I imagine two Parisian sophisticates being horrified by it. Olivia: That was their expectation! Gertrude was so worried about the food that she initially limited herself to only eating oysters and honeydew melon, which she deemed safe. But Alice, the more adventurous one, was gradually won over. Jackson: What changed her mind? Olivia: New Orleans. She was captivated by the market there. And then she had Oysters Rockefeller for the first time, a dish she said did more to promote goodwill towards the United States than any diplomat could. By the time they reached California, which she called 'God's own country,' they were indulging in what she described as 'gastronomic orgies' of crabs, avocados, and rainbow trout. Jackson: It's like the original Anthony Bourdain show! Discovering a country through its food, and having all your preconceptions shattered. It’s amazing that she was writing about food with that sense of discovery and cultural exploration way back then. Olivia: It’s incredibly modern in that way. But the heart of the book, the place where her connection to food is most profound, is France. Specifically, the vegetable gardens at their country home, Bilignin. Jackson: Ah, the garden. The source of it all. Olivia: She writes about it with such love and detail. The backbreaking work of fighting the weeds, the joy of experimenting with new vegetables like sweet corn—which their French neighbors considered savage food fit only for animals—and the deep, almost spiritual satisfaction of the harvest. Jackson: It sounds like the garden was more than just a source of ingredients. Olivia: It was everything. It was her sanctuary, her laboratory, her art. There’s this beautiful, poignant quote where she describes the first harvest of the season. She says, "The first gathering of the garden in May of salads, radishes and herbs made me feel like a mother about her baby—how could anything so beautiful be mine." Jackson: That’s incredible. It’s a connection to food that’s almost completely lost to most of us today. We don't have that relationship with what we eat. Olivia: And she felt it so deeply. The book ends, in a way, with her departure from those gardens. It’s a bittersweet farewell to a place that defined fourteen years of her life. The food, the garden, the memories—they were all one and the same.

Jackson: So this book is so much more than recipes. It's a survival story, a complicated historical document, a travelogue, and a love letter to a life lived through food. It’s kind of the ultimate proof that food is never just food. Olivia: Exactly. Alice B. Toklas teaches us that a recipe is never just a list of ingredients. It’s a story, a memory, a piece of a person's soul. In a way, she pioneered a genre that we see everywhere today, from personal food blogs to narrative cooking shows on Netflix. She understood that the most profound way to tell a life story is sometimes through the meals that sustained it. Jackson: And that famous hashish fudge recipe? It’s almost a red herring. It gets all the attention, but the real substance, the real shock and beauty of the book, is in everything else. Olivia: It’s the perfect cover story for the deeply personal, complex, and revolutionary book she was really writing. She smuggled her life into the pages of a cookbook, and in doing so, she created a masterpiece that redefined what a cookbook could be. She found her own voice, not by shouting, but by sharing a meal. Jackson: It makes you think, what's the one recipe that tells a major story from your own life? Is it the spaghetti your grandmother made, or the disastrous cake you baked for a first date? Olivia: That’s a beautiful question. We'd love to hear it. Share the recipe and the story behind it with the Aibrary community on our social channels. We all have a cookbook of our own memories. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.