Vive Les Gourmands! How Six American Expats In Paris Changed How We Eat
Q: Where did the idea for marijuana brownies come from?
A: From the highly-regarded “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook” published in 1954.
“Toklas put in a section entitled ‘Recipes from Friends,’ and one of those friends was an artist – Brion Gysin, then living in North Africa, where he helped run a restaurant. He wrote Toklas a note with the recipe for a North African sweet, “Haschich (Gysin’s chosen spelling) Fudge” — mashed-up dried fruit with nuts and cannabis (despite the name, the recipe calls for cannabis rather than hashish) rolled with butter. [It was a] tasty morsel to accompany your mint tea that supposedly brings on gales of laughter.
“Toklas, in a rush, typed up the note verbatim from Gysin, slipped it into the manuscript and sent that off to the publisher without realizing cannabis, or hashish, was a controlled substance, much vilified in America.
“The book went to press in the U.K. and America. The U.K. first edition (now a collector’s item) had the recipe; the U.S. publisher (Harper & Brothers) caught and excised it. But it was already in the papers that there was a hashish fudge recipe in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. This, combined with the facts that Read the rest of this entry »