Meet Alice B. Toklas, The Woman Who Put Cannabis in a Mainstream Cookbook
Picture it: Paris, 1954. A woman in her late seventies sits down to write a cookbook. Not just any cookbook. The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, memoir dressed up as a cookbook, full of recipes that had fed some of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century. And tucked somewhere in the middle of it, almost as an afterthought, is what might be the most famous cannabis recipe ever published by a major American press.
That woman is Alice B. Toklas. And this is the story I cover in Episode 358.
Listen to this episode:
Who Was Alice B. Toklas?
If you only know Alice B. Toklas as a name attached to a weed brownie joke, you’re missing a genuinely fascinating person. She was the life partner of Gertrude Stein, one of the most influential literary figures of the 20th century. For nearly 40 years, Alice and Gertrude ran one of the most celebrated salons in Paris from their apartment at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Picasso came through that apartment. Hemingway. Matisse. F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Gertrude got the credit for being a literary genius. Alice fed the genius.
She also managed the household, handled the correspondence, typed the manuscripts, and by all accounts ran the entire operation while Gertrude got to be the star. This is a dynamic I find both completely unsurprising and a little infuriating, if I’m honest. But Alice was sharp, funny, and had standards that had been tested on some of the most demanding creative minds of her era.
When Gertrude died in 1946, Alice was left alone in her eighties, dealing with grief and with 40 years of stories and recipes she hadn’t written down for anyone but herself. So she wrote a cookbook.
The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book
Published in 1954, The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book is not what you’d expect. It’s part memoir, part recipe collection, part social history of Bohemian Paris, and part extremely dry wit delivered with a completely straight face. Alice was funny the way that people are funny when they have absolutely no patience for foolishness.
If you have never read it, I want to encourage you to track down a copy. I borrowed mine from Internet Archive, which is where you can find it as well. Read it even if you never make a single thing from it, because Alice was a sharper observer than she’s usually given credit for, probably because her longtime partner cast such a long shadow.
The cookbook contains a lot of recipes from mid-century France that do not necessarily appeal to modern sensibilities (tomato aspic, anyone?). But it contains one recipe that changed the whole trajectory of the book’s legacy, and arguably contributed to the long cultural history of edibles in the English-speaking world.
The Hashish Fudge
Here’s the thing about the Hashish Fudge recipe: it wasn’t even Alice’s. It was submitted by her friend, the artist and writer Brion Gysin, a member of the expatriate circle that surrounded Alice and Gertrude for years. He sent it to her for inclusion in the book. Alice thought it was funny. She included it.
The American publisher, Harper and Row, either missed it entirely or decided not to worry about it. The cookbook was published in the United States with the recipe completely intact. It was only when it was reprinted in England that anyone noticed. The British publisher caught it and quietly removed it. Which means first editions of this cookbook exist with the recipe and editions without it, and the first editions have become a collector’s item because of exactly this.
What I find remarkable about this is the timing. This recipe appeared in a mainstream cookbook published by a major American press in the mid-1950s, at the height of Reefer Madness. And the sky didn’t fall. The children were safe. Life went on. Alice B. Toklas had been making food for artists and rebels for 40 years. Of course she included a cannabis recipe. It probably didn’t seem remarkable to her at all.
The Hash Fudge Recipe, As Written
Brion Gysin’s recipe is definitely not a fudge in any modern sense of the word. It’s more of a pressed fruit and nut situation. No baking. No heat. No decarboxylation, which in 1954 wasn’t even part of the conversation.
Here is the recipe as it appears in the book:
Take one teaspoon black peppercorns, one whole nutmeg, four sticks of cinnamon, one teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized 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 cannabis sativa can be pulverized. This, along with the spices, should be dusted over the mixed fruits and nuts, kneaded together. About a half cup of sugar dissolved into a big pad of butter, rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls the size of a walnut. It should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.
The recipe notes that “obtaining the cannabis may present certain difficulties” and suggests it should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed, while the plant is still green. Which, as I mention in the episode, raises the question of what potency anyone was working with back then.
I want to be transparent here: this is a raw preparation. The cannabis is ground and added directly to the mixture with no heat applied. Whether any THC would be activated in this preparation is a real question, and not one I can answer definitively for a recipe from 1954 with no standardized cannabis and no lab testing available. If you want to experiment with a modern version of something like this, I’d strongly recommend running it through the Bite Me Dosage Calculator before you eat a single piece, and starting with a very small amount. The note that “two pieces are quite sufficient” is doing a lot of work in that recipe without telling you very much.
What This History Actually Means
I talk a lot on this show about why I do what I do. And this history is part of that answer.
The people in Alice’s circle were not particularly interested in what they were supposed to do. They were interested in what was possible, what could be created, what could be experienced. They used food, and yes, cannabis, as part of a broader philosophy of how to live. The Beats picked that up. The counterculture of the 1960s made cannabis brownies practically a symbol of the whole era. And somewhere in all of that, making edibles at home became its own form of quiet resistance.
Not loud resistance. Not necessarily political marching, though some people did that too. Just the act of saying: I’m going to make my own. I’m going to decide what goes in it. I’m going to choose my dose, my kitchen, my rules.
That’s what I mean when I say your kitchen is the best dispensary you’ll ever have.
I do want to name something the romanticized version of this history tends to skip over. The legal consequences of cannabis in that era were not a joke, and they did not fall equally on everyone. The Bohemian Paris crowd had a particular kind of protection, social and financial and cultural, that most people didn’t have. I don’t want to gloss over that. What I do want to celebrate is the spirit of it: the willingness to treat cannabis as an ingredient, as a medicine, as part of a whole philosophy of living well.
That spirit is exactly why this show exists.
You Are Part of a Long Tradition
When you make edibles in your own kitchen, you’re not doing something new. You’re doing something very, very old, with better information than anyone who came before you had access to. You have lab-tested flower, infusion guides, dosage calculators, and a whole community of people who are happy to help you figure it out.
Alice didn’t have any of that. She had a recipe from a friend, a sense of humor, and a healthy disregard for what she was supposed to include in a polite cookbook.
If you want to explore more of this history, I’d recommend borrowing The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book from Internet Archive and reading it cover to cover. And if you’re ready to start making your own history in your own kitchen, the Cannabis Infusions Complete Guide is a good place to begin, along with the full cannabis edibles recipes collection on the site.
And before you make anything infused, please use the Bite Me Dosage Calculator. It’s always free. Do the math before you eat. Alice maybe didn’t have that option, but you do.
That’s it for this week friends. Please reach to me, I love hearing from listeners! Direct messages to stayhigh@bitemepodcast.com, or leave a voice message on the podcast hotline.
Support the show by subscribing, sharing, leaving a review or buying me a cookie! Whatever way you choose, I’m grateful that you’re listening.
Stay high,
Margaret
FAQ On Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
Who was Alice B. Toklas? Alice B. Toklas was an American writer and the life partner of Gertrude Stein. From the early 1900s through the 1940s, she and Gertrude hosted one of the most influential salons in Paris, where artists and writers including Picasso, Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald gathered regularly. Alice managed the household, handled correspondence, and cooked for this circle for decades. After Gertrude’s death in 1946, she published her now-famous cookbook in 1954.
What is the Alice B. Toklas Hashish Fudge recipe? It’s a no-bake pressed fruit and nut preparation, contributed to Alice’s cookbook by artist Brion Gysin. The recipe calls for ground cannabis, dried figs, dates, almonds, peanuts, spices and butter. It was published in the US edition of the cookbook by Harper and Row in 1954 and went largely unnoticed until the British edition was being prepared, at which point the British publisher removed it. First editions with the recipe are now collector’s items.
Was the Hashish Fudge recipe actually Alice’s? No. It was submitted by Brion Gysin, a writer and artist associated with the same expatriate circle. Alice included it in the cookbook and, by her own account, thought it was funny.
Is the Hashish Fudge recipe a reliable way to get high? Honestly, it’s hard to say. The recipe calls for raw, unheated cannabis, which means THC may not have been decarboxylated (activated). Without decarboxylation, the psychoactive effects would be significantly reduced or absent. This wasn’t something anyone was thinking about in 1954. If you want to experiment with a modern version of something similar, use infused butter with properly decarboxylated cannabis, and calculate your dose before eating anything.
Where can I find the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book? It has been in and out of print over the years but is findable. I borrowed a copy from Internet Archive, which is a good first stop. It’s worth reading for the writing and the social history, not just for the famous recipe.
Why does cannabis history matter for home edibles makers? Because it puts what we do in context. People have been cooking with cannabis for centuries across many cultures. The idea that cannabis and food belong together is not a product of the modern dispensary industry. Understanding that history helps strip away some of the stigma and reminds us that making your own edibles is part of a long, documented tradition of people choosing autonomy over what they’re told to consume.
How do I know how much cannabis to use if I make something like this myself? You don’t have to guess. The Bite Me Dosage Calculator is free and will help you calculate potency per serving based on your flower’s THC percentage and your batch size. Use it every time you make a new infused batch.
Is eating raw cannabis the same as eating decarbed cannabis? No. Raw cannabis contains THCA, which is the acidic precursor to THC. Heat converts THCA to THC through a process called decarboxylation. Without that step, you won’t get the same psychoactive effects, though some people do eat raw cannabis specifically for the THCA content in a wellness context. For a full breakdown of the infusion process, the Cannabis Infusions Complete Guide covers this in depth.
Speaker: 00:07
Welcome friends to episode 358, and today we're talking about Alice B. Toklis and the rebels who ate their weed. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Margaret, a certified ganger and TCI certified cannabis educator, and I believe your kitchen is the best dispensary you'll ever have. Welcome to Bite Me, the show about edibles. Grab a snack or a cool drink, and let's dive in. All right, so before we get into today's topic,
Speaker: 00:45
I am pretty excited about, and I think you'll see why as soon as we dive in. But I've got a few things to share first. And one is a fan mail that I got recently. And this one comes from a listener all the way in Australia. Loved this episode, Dr. Margaret. Great series. And I'm about to re-listen to your tolerance break interview with Madison. Wonderful work. And I just want to say thank you so much for that message. You can send your own fan mail message by I think there's a button somewhere in the show notes on your podcast platform that you're listening on. And I did reply because I can now reply. And they replied to me. Unfortunately, that is as far as it can go with fan mail messages. But the episode in question that they were referring to was the episode that I did on the endocannabinoid system. And if you want to learn more about that and why it's important, then I suggest you go and have a listen to that episode. I think it's called The ECS Explained. And also that tolerance break episode that I did with interview that I did with Madison was really great as well. Some of you may out there may know him as Freenugs. And I think that's in the title of the episode. It was done a little while ago, so I can't totally remember a lot of has happened since then. So thank you again for that message. I always love hearing from listeners because it reminds me that I'm not, you know, speaking out into the ether. There's somebody else on the other end. You can now leave a voice message when you do a fan mail message, if that's an option that you would like to partake in. You can always also send me an email or a voice message through SpeakPipe. The links are all in the show notes. Reach out if you dare. You may just have it read on the air. And that rhymed, and that was totally unintentional. And also just a little bit about what's happening in my life right now. It was recently my birthday, and that was one of the reasons why I did that birthday watermelon mint fizz recipe. If you haven't tried that yet, I really suggest that you do. I've tried it a couple ways now. One with I guess cartoned. I was gonna say bottled, but it was in a carton watermelon because the day the first time that I went to go try this recipe out, the watermelons were insanely expensive. And I was like, this is incorrect. So I tried it a different way. And I've tried it since with the actual watermelon when I found one at a more reasonable price point. So
Speaker: 03:12
happy birthday to me. I did kick off not long after my birthday with a camping trip, with just a couple days out in the woods with my daughter and her dog who had never been camping before, and that was an adventure. The first night was kind of rough, not gonna lie. But I brought edibles, so everything was okay. All right. Now I want to talk about a cookbook, and this isn't just any cookbook, but it is a cookbook that got somebody arrested. And that cookbook contains probably one of the most famous accidental recipes in culinary history. And it was written by a woman who was, by her own accounting, mostly just trying to keep the party going. And if you ask me, that's my kind of woman. So just picture it. The year is 1954, Paris, and Alice B. Tokless is sitting down to write
Speaker: 04:08
her memoir. Now, if you don't know who Alice B. Tokliss is, here's the quick version. And I am going to diverge here for a second and just mention I'm assuming Tokliss is the correct way to say it. I actually haven't looked it up. I see it written. I've known about Alice B. Tokliss for many years, but I've never actually have I ever actually heard anybody else say it out loud? I'm not sure that I have. So if I'm saying it incorrectly, apologies. But she was the life partner of Gertrude Stein, one of the most influential literary figures of the 20th century. And for nearly 40 years, Alice and Gertrude ran one of the most famous salons in Paris. Their apartment at 27 Rue de Fleuros was basically the living room of the modernist movement. Think Picasso, Hemingway, Matisse, F. Scott, Fitzgerald, they all came through this salon. And Alice cooked for them. Gertrude got the credit for being a literary genius. Alice fed the genius. She also managed the household, handled the correspondence, typed the manuscripts, and by all accounts ran the entire operation while Gertrude got to be the star. So when Gertrude passed away in 1946, Alice was left alone in her 80s dealing with grief and the practical problem of what to do with 40 years of stories and recipes. So she wrote a cookbook. The Alice B. Toklis cookbook was published in 1954, and it's not what you'd expect. It's part memoir, part recipe collection, part social history of Bohemian Paris, and part extremely dry wit delivered with a straight face. Alice was funny in a way that people are funny when they have no patience for foolishness. And that sounds like many an 80-year-old that I know. She had opinions, she had standards, she had recipes that have been tested on some of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century. The cookbook is wonderful. And if you can never get your hands on it, you should read it, even if you don't ever make a single thing from it. Because I'm sure if you've ever looked at cookbooks from the 50s, you know that what they decided was delicious, quite different than the standards we have today. And I am thinking immediately of something like tomato aspic. I don't even know if that's a 50s thing or not, but I just feel like tomato and jello don't really go together. But here we are today because of one specific recipe, one recipe that almost Alice almost didn't include. One recipe that when it was included changed everything. The recipe wasn't Alice's. It was submitted by her friend, the artist and writer, Brian Geisen, who was a member of that whole wild expatriate circle. He sent it to Alice for the cookbook. She included it. She apparently thought it was funny. The recipe is called Hashish Fudge. And I want to read the introduction of it because it is one of the most interesting pieces of cannabis writing I think ever put to paper. She writes, and I'm paraphrasing because I don't want to reproduce the whole thing verbatim, but the gist is she describes it as something that anyone can whip up on a rainy day capable of providing euphoria and brilliant ideas. And then she lists the ingredients, which include spices, dried fruit, nuts, and cannabis, and she notes very casually that the amount of cannabis should be adjusted to what is locally available. That's it. That's
Speaker: 07:35
a whole warning label. The American publisher, Harper and Rowe, either missed it entirely or decided not to worry about it. The cookbook was published in the United States with the recipe intact. It was only when it was reprinted in England that anyone noticed. The British publisher caught it and removed it. And so there are first editions of this cookbook circulating with the recipe and editions without it, which has made the first edition a collector's item. The recipe itself is definitely not a fudge. It's more of a pressed fruit and nut situation. No baking, no heat. You ground your cannabis, you mix it with the spices and dry fruits and nuts, and you shape it and you eat it. I've done many recipes like that on this show before. It's essentially what you'd call a raw cannabis preparation today, which is interesting because the decarboxylation question wasn't even part of the conversation in 1954. Whether the THC was even activated is a whole separate topic. And that also is interesting as well, because I just recently interviewed Robin Swann, who talks about why we shouldn't decarb, especially in a more medical context. Some people who want to preserve terpenes or preserve some medical properties of the cannabis would infuse it into a fat where there is a low amount of decarb happening during the infusion process, where you're going to have the result of a much less potent result. I'm thinking too much about this, but in this particular instance, she's just grinding up the weed and putting it right in the fudge. It's hard to say how potent those will be. Maybe we should all try it out. But here's what matters. This recipe put cannabis in a mainstream cookbook in the 50s, published by a major American publisher in the night mid-1950s at the height of reefer madness, with essentially no comment and no alarm. And the sky didn't fall. The children were safe. And life went on. Alice B. Toklis had been making food for artists and rebels and geniuses for 40 years. Of course, she had included a cannabis recipe. It probably didn't seem remarkable to her at all. And here's what I
Speaker: 09:58
love about this history, and what I think connects directly to why I do what I do. Eating cannabis has always been an act of a particular kind of person. The people in Alice Circle were not interested in what they were supposed to do. They were interested in what was possible, what could be created, what could be experienced. They used food and yes, cannabis as part of a broader philosophy of how to live. The beats picked it up from there. The counterculture of the 60s made cannabis brownies practically a symbol of the whole movement. And somewhere along the way, making edibles became its own form of quiet resistance. Not loud resistance, not political marching, though some people did that too. Just the act of saying, I'm going to make my own. I'm going to decide what goes in it. I'm going to choose my dose, my kitchen, my rules. And that's exactly what I mean when I say that your kitchen is the best dispensary you'll ever have. This has always been about autonomy. Alice wasn't selling anything. She wasn't a brand. She was just a woman with decades of knowledge, recipes collected from everywhere, and a healthy disregard for what she was supposed to include in a polite cookbook. It feels very much like ask for forgiveness, not for permission, kind a scenario. The glamorization of this history can sometimes skip over the whole part where people got hurt. The legal consequences of cannabis in that era were not a joke, and they did not fall equally on everyone. The Bohemian Paris crowd had a particular kind of protection that most people didn't have. And I don't want to romanticize that part. What I do want to celebrate is the spirit of it. The willingness to treat cannabis as an ingredient, a medicine, as a whole part of a philosophy of living well. That spirit is why this show exists. So what do we take from Alice B. Tokis
Speaker: 11:50
in 2026? Or in this, whenever you might be listening to this future listeners, a few things. First, edibles have a longer, weirder, and more interesting history than just than the dispensary industry would have you believe. Cannabis and food is not a new idea. I'm sure all of you inherently are aware of that. People have been doing this for centuries across cultures in ways that have nothing to do with a glossy plastic package with a QR code on it. Second, the rebels who ate their weed understood something that we talk about on this show constantly. The dose matters, and knowing what you're eating matters. Even in 1954, with no regulatory framework and a very casual attitude toward the whole thing, Brian Geison's recipe included a note about adjusting the amount. The basic awareness that you should probably think about how much you're consuming has always been there. Which brings me to where I always land. Please use the Bite Me Dosage Calendar before you make any infused batch of anything, especially if you're working from a scratch recipe or adapting something. The link's in the show notes. It's on the website, it's always free. Do the math before you eat. Alice maybe didn't have that option, but you do. And third, I think this is the thing I want to leave with you here today. Is that there is a long, real documented tradition of people treating cannabis as food, as medicine, as part of a creative life, as something worth cooking with and thinking about seriously. And you and I are part of that tradition when we make edibles in our own kitchen. You're not doing something new, you're doing something very, very old, but with better information. And if you want to dig into this topic more, I'd recommend trying to track down a copy of Alice B. Tokles' cookbook. It's been in and out of print, but it is findable on the internetarchive.org. I borrowed a copy of Alice B. Tokles' cookbook from InternetArchive.org, and I read an excerpt from the hashish fudge recipe at the end of this episode.
Speaker: 13:55
And read it for the writing, not just for the infamous recipe. In fact, the infamous recipe actually doesn't necessarily sound that good to me, but Alice was a hell of a writer and a sharper observer than she's usually given credit for, probably because her longtime partner was so well known. And if you've got thoughts on this or you have your own history with edibles that connects to a bigger story of why people have always wanted to cook with cannabis, I would love to hear it. Leave me a message on Speakpipe or email me at stayhi at bitemeepodcast.com. I appreciate you spending this time with me today. And I look forward to many more moments together, friends. If you enjoyed this episode, consider sharing it with someone else who would also enjoy it. And until next time, my friends, I'm your host, Margaret. Stay curious and stay high. I did find the exact recipe from thehashmuseum.com, and I will look for more online because I think it's super interesting. But her recipe, and this is in quotes, take one teaspoon black peppercorns, one whole
Speaker: 15:05
nutmeg, four sticks of cinnamon, one teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of stoned dates, I think she means here pitted dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts. Chop these and mix them together. A bunch of cannabis sativa can be pulverized. This, along with the spices, should be dusted over the mixed fruits and nuts kneaded together. About a half cup of sugar
Speaker: 15:32
dissolved into a big pad of butter, rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls the size of a walnut. It should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient. Obtaining the cannabis may present certain difficulties. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green. Should be picked and dried as soon as it's gone to seed. What kind of weed were they growing back then? Am I right? Oh, how times have changed, my friends.
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