The Alice B Toklas Cookbook

"If you ask most people about the Alice B Toklas cookbook, the recipe that comes immediately to mind is marijuana brownies. It needs to be rescued from that. One of the things that I love about this book is the wonderful way she writes the recipes. If you’re used to Elizabeth David, it’s not so strange, but if you’re used to most American recipes, there is something lovely and conversational about them. I wanted to include a book that had really good recipes. I defy anyone to read this and not get hungry, and not want to go into the kitchen and start cooking. It’s just a wonderful ode to food, and a cookbook. It’s one of the first cookbooks that I really sat down and read and found myself cooking from, as a kid. So it’s important to me that way. But again, it’s one of these books that’s about appreciating life, eating everything and living with the seasons. As a kid, when I read it, I thought, “Why isn’t my life more like this?” This is a book that, again, I feel has been unfairly overlooked and is a great ode to the fact that there were Americans who loved food even in the 1950s. Yes, it’s what Picasso likes. If you’re feeding artists, you have to feed them well. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes, but that’s not really American, it’s kind of bohemian, which is another reason that I love the book. It’s this conjunction of formality of food with a casualness in the way it’s served. In the 50s in America, there were a lot of rules about how you ate and how the table was set. In the book, there is a lot of thinking about how you’re setting the table, where you’re eating, picnics and so forth. Again, a kind of, let’s appreciate it, and think about how we’re going to sit down at the table. There is a lot of throwing out the rules – which, for me, is an important part of cooking and eating. I could probably open the book at any point and find a recipe I really love. Let’s see… her way of scrambling eggs [Oeufs Francis Picabia, named after the artist] is perfect. She does it in a double boiler so it is never directly on the heat and it’s very slow, but it’s fantastic."

"She was an amazing woman. She was Gertrude Stein’s great love as well as being her secretary. So this is a brilliant quirky tale of their travels and what they cook and eat as they go. They also hang out with a host of characters from Hemingway to Picasso . The book goes through pre-wartime France to post-war driving around in this enormous battered old truck, cooking in mess halls for the wounded. And later they went to America. The anecdotal part of it is a dream and also each recipe tells a story. There is a very funny one about their housekeeper and their valet, who was her boyfriend. The valet was wicked and evil and abandoned the housekeeper and ran off in the middle of the night. So they named this dish after him because the housekeeper would cook it every night and weep. It was called ‘the Evil Paul’s tart’ or something like that, I can’t quite remember."