CONCEPT
Of course, the most titillating aspect of reading this piece was the anticipation of coming upon the infamous recipe for “Haschich Fudge” on page 259. This arrival of this moment was somewhat disappointing. There’s nothing Earth-shattering about the recipe itself, nor is it presented with the colorful background information that surrounds most of the other recipes.
That out of the way, however, this is a cookbook that could be read for pleasure. In fact, I have to take as ironic the final comment, “as if a cook-book had anything to do with writing.” (280) Is it too speculative to suggest that anyone living with Gertrude Stein for decades would necessarily examine and reexamine any conventional writing with an eye for multivalence and ambiguity? Or that an American who so obsessively immersed herself in French culture and cuisine wouldn’t at least briefly consider the specifically Catholic understanding of the Eucharist as a possible parallel to writing, reading, cooking, and eating?
I’m inclined to think that these are reasonable inferences.
Regardless, The Cookbook is more integrated than it need be to simply offer a regional cookbook with a bit of local color. To begin with, the structure of the book does not favor finding a particular type of recipe with ease. The index is arranged by name, not type, and the table of contents is even less practical. There is, in broad terms, a general theme to each chapter that sometimes groups similar recipes; “Beautiful Soup,” for example, contains seven national variations on a single soup recipe. Many chapter titles, however, such as “Murder in the Kitchen” and “Servants in France,” suggest very little about the recipes they offer.
Organization is equally fluid and casual within each chapter itself. Recipe titles are given in caps with the instructions indented. However, the latter may spill over into the passages following the actual recipe, and there is no set distribution of recipe and anecdotes. Two chapters, “Little-known French Dishes suitable for American and British Kitchens” and “Recipes from Friends” almost exclusively consist of recipes and offer very little commentary. Other chapters go pages at a time without a single recipe presented. Two of the more dramatic examples of this, “Food in the United States in 1934 and 1935” and “Servants in France,” present stories-in-miniature, complete with characters and a discrete plot. In “Food in the Bugey During the Occupation” the recipes are even compromised; Alice almost always qualifies the formulas by explaining that, in actuality, she could not make the recipe as written due to wartime privations. “The flummery cried for cream. So did we.” (206) Add to this the frequent illustrations and the tendency of prose sections to lean toward exposition and description as much as toward storytelling, and The Cookbook often seems closer to an open amalgamation of written forms than a regional cookbook.
That is, while food is a constant thematic presence and the recipes are integral to every chapter, it is difficult to consider the work as only a cookbook, or as a collection of recipes independent from the other included stories and notes.
Finally, the chapters are sequenced in a loose thematic and chronological order; early on they both explain French cooking for the reader’s benefit while Alice recounts her own early explorations of French cuisine, through lunch and dinner parties and her own trial-and-error attempts. Later on, sequences of recipes appear amid broader recollections of Gertrude Stein’s lecture tour or the occupation of France. This keeps with the fluidity of transition between recipes and prose, and ultimately shapes the book, not as a collection of several hundred recipes, but as a sort of memoir that can be experienced in several ways.
Ultimately, these distinctions encourage reading The Cookbook progressively, from beginning to end. To return to my earlier speculations, the ideal way to experience The Cookbook, then, is on as many levels as possible. By reading the book in its entirety, returning to and preparing a desired recipe, and enjoying this with friends one can ingest the material as specifically French cooking, as cooking from the early 20th century, as cooking compiled by Alice with reference to her own experience, and in the immediate context of a present meal.
The Cookbook is a piece of organic writing in the most literal possible sense.
END OF POST.