Alice B Toklas Cookbook Part II, Eggs Francis Picabia

Dora Maar and 1946 portrait of Toklas 

Naomi Barry knew Alice B Toklas (1877-1967).   A stellar essayist at Gourmet Magazine (a publication that was thoughtful as well as delicious from its inception),  Barry wrote of Toklas :  “The most memorable table I have known in Paris was in an apartment over a printing plant at 5, rue Christine.  The entrance was little better than a slum, but in the old quarter of Paris the entrance tells little.  Once you were inside, the rooms were spacious and the furniture, the objets d’art, the bold individuality of taste, the reflection of strong personalities made you feel as though you had gone straight through the looking glass…. Alice B Toklas was the first true gourmet I ever met.  She knew how to grow, to buy, to prepare, to cook to savor, to serve –– and how to put food in its proper place.  She understood flavors so that you were deliciously tormented trying to grasp them. A lunch at the rue Christine lasted three hours if you broke away brusquely, but it was more likely to be a leisurely four hours, for the meal was meant to be a trampoline for conversation and pithy criticism.”

Stein and Toklas 5 rue Christine, Cecil Beaton 1928

After many meals of boeuf bourguignon, Singapore ice cream, perfect poached apple pies, eels in sauce verte and spaghetti au gratin, Barry felt  “in Miss Toklas’s apartment the food always fitted into the surroundings and the company.  In its preparation, she was always painstakingly finicky about every detail.” Perhaps it was because  she felt,  “If you want to be a good cook, you should go at it as a daily pleasure.  You should never economize in the kitchen.  Once the menu is established, the materials should be the very best.” (I found this essay in a great book called Remembrance of Things Paris: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet ).

Alice B Toklas, 1959, in one of her very expensive hats

A 1968 NYT article by James Mellow revealed more of Alice’s last years:  “In 1960, to avoid the rigors of a Parisian winter, Alice stayed for an extended period of time at a pension run by the Canadian Sisters of the Adoration of the Precious Blood in Rome (after Gertrude's death she had become a Roman Catholic convert). It was while she was in Rome that the landlord threatened to take possession of the apartment. The Stein heirs, finding the apartment unprotected and some of the pictures missing, had the collection sequestered in the Chase Manhattan vault.  With the collection impounded and little means of support, Alice was in straitened circumstances. She was in her mid-80's suffering from arthritis and barely able to see. Nevertheless, she maintained a healthy appetite. Her tastes could often run to the exotic –– a yearning for fresh peaches in mid-November –– and, with the true conviction of a gourmet, she insisted that the shopping be done at Fauchon, the most expensive green- grocer in Paris. When funds were at a particularly low ebb, friends would supply the maids with the distinctive black and white Fauchon bags and send them shopping around the corner.”

It is interesting to triangulate other's recollections of Alice and her own accounts of her life.  Her love of food and entertaining and the pleasures shared at her table come through all of them like a dinner plate  moon on an India ink night –– it was who she was.  And what of her glorious food?  In The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, inspiration for it came from unlikely sources –– like cars with names.

Photograph of Stein and Toklas by Cecil Beaton, 1939

In the chapter entitled “ Food to which Aunt Pauline and Lady Godiva led us” we discover Aunt Pauline was a Model T Ford that was driven by Stein during WWI for the American Fund for French Wounded.  It would only go 30 miles an hour so they were always late, even for rare well-provisioned lunches like the one in Saulieu with Panade Veloutée (a bread soup) and Peches Flambées (flaming peaches) or the one in Lyon at La Mére Fillioux where they had fish with a butter sauce, hearts of artichokes with truffled foie gras, steamed capon with quenelle (a kind of poached meat  dumpling) and Tarte Louise (an orange tart). It was remarkably fine dining considering what war was doing to the French table.  Even the hard work of stuffing a depot with war materials led to a great Catalan table for them to dine at after their labors.

Stein's favorite photo of herself  and Basket the poodle at Bilignin by Van Vechten, NYPL

After WWI, Stein retired Pauline and opted for a spare, stripped down vehicle christened Lady Godiva with which she  and Toklas could take field trips outside of Paris to country inns and restaurants all over France.  They toured Chartres, the Loire Valley, Cote d’ Azure and Rhone Valley and ate chicken and roast beef picnics with strawberry filled cream puffs, salmon with hollandaise, a Måcon cake with layers of  mocha, kirsch and pistachio, perch with fennel, hen à la Provençale. They returned a few times a month to Marseilles for bouillabaisse. Lady Godiva was finally retired after they found their favorite restaurant (belonging to a Madame Bourgeois in Priay), and finagled a lease on  their fairytale country house in Bilignin (this involved getting the current military-man tenant promoted and transferred but they were so in love with the place at first sight they pulled it off). 


But it is what Toklas prepared for Stein and their friends that resonates for us all these years later.

Atget,  Courtyard View, 1898

Jonathan Gold  (in Remembrance of Things Paris) said  “We all want to experience the Paris of Hemingway, of Picasso, of Baudelaire; we want to dine in Atget photographs, to sup on meals that Alice B. Toklas might have approved of, that Mére Poulard might have cooked.”  I can’t agree more.  The recipes are basted with greatness.  I could cook from this book for ages without getting bored. You can have a Midnight in Paris moment and imagine all her extraordinary friends around a table with each mouthful you take, enjoying Toklas's art,  and it was art, albeit an evanescent one.  Toklas art was the art of the table and entertaining.

Artist Francis Picabia

So why not share a favorite dish of hers ––  an artist's dish. Alice said “The only painter who ever gave me a recipe was Francis Picabia and though it is only a  dish of eggs it merits the name of its creator.”   Pay attention to the recipe. Yes, that much butter.  Yes, that long to make them.  Yes they are the most amazing eggs you will ever have, but I couldn't stop there.


Toklas and Stein had many cooks.  Many were not terribly good, others were great but extremely idiosyncratic and unspeakably unreliable.  One of these later types was named Jean who hailed from Martinique.  Her “cocotte” smile was endearing, as was her unorthodox way with eggs.  The dish that caught my eye was her Poached Eggs à la Sultane.   Placing poached eggs atop puff pastry shells is a fitting pedestal for beautiful eggs from pasture raised chickens. Knowing Alice, she would have insisted on the finest egg. The delicate pistachio sauce is something else. It is terribly elegant with a style that you don't taste very often –– subtle and delicate with the barest suspicion of pistachio.  May I say the sauce is great the following day and would be good on chicken or even a vegetable like cauliflower. It's a great sauce.

Eggs Francis Picabia serves 8 (they are VERY rich)

“Break 8 eggs into a bowl and mix them well with a fork, adding salt but no pepper. Pour them into a saucepan - yes a saucepan, not a frying pan. Put the saucepan over a very, very low flame, and keep turning them with a fork while very slowly adding in very small quantities ½ lb. butter - not a speck less, more if you can bring yourself to it. It should take ½ hour to prepare this dish. The eggs of course are not scrambled, but with the butter, no substitute admitted, produce a suave consistency that only gourmets will appreciate.”

*Just a tip, cooking the eggs over very very low heat is the key -- use the low heat burner set just above its lowest setting. I used a small heavy enamel pan for the mixture.  I buttered the pan and added the eggs, then added the butter in end-of-thumb size pieces and added more as each dissolved. The mix will not change until the last 8-10 minutes.  Then it will begin to look like scrambled eggs. You will see them come together.  Remove from the heat when they do and serve immediately.  They are worth the effort –– wicked rich, baying at the moon, bug-eyed loony great eggs.

Poached Eggs à la Sultane

“Bake puff paste in fluted pâté shells.  When baked and still hot place in each one a poached egg.  Cover with a sauce made this way:

For 6 pâté  shells, melt 1 ½  T  butter in a saucepan over low heat.  When butter is melted add 1 ¼ T flour.  Turn with a wooden spoon until thoroughly amalgamated, then add slowly ¾ c strong hot chicken bouillon.  Stir constantly over lowest heat for 5 minutes.  Add ½ c heavy cream.  Do not allow to boil.  Add ¼ c pistachio nuts that have had their skins removed by soaking for 3 minutes in hot water.  Dry and rub in cloth –– the skins will loosen and finally remain in the cloth.  Pound them in a mortar with a drop of water added from time to time to prevent the nuts from exuding oil.  When they can be strained through a sieve, add ¼ c and 1 T soft butter to them and mix together.  Add this mixture very slowly (called, naturally, pistachio butter) to the chicken bouillon cream sauce.  Heat thoroughly but do not boil.  Cover the eggs with this and serve at once.  As good as it looks”


Be sure to dry the eggs off (put them on paper towels for a moment before gently putting them on the puff pastry base).  When making the  pistachio, do add the drops of water as recommended.  Putting the pistachios in boiling water softens the nuts and makes it easier to butter them in the mortar.  I pushed them through a fine strainer to get a butter consistency that is necessary for the dish –– you don't want graininess in an elegant sauce. If you have pistachio butter, I would say use about 3 tablespoons for this dish instead of going through the steps to make it from scratch but make sure it is smooth–– you still may have to strain it. 


My favorite recipe for puff pastry is HERE