The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book
The original — memoir-rich where this is kitchen-practical.
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Aromas and Flavors of Past and Present
The sequel the Cook Book's success demanded — her recipes, annotated for American kitchens by the century's least likely collaborator.
- 1958
About Alice B. Toklas
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeFour years after the Cook Book made her famous, Harper wanted more, and the result is the odd couple of the shelf: two hundred of Toklas's recipes, printed as she wrote them, with an introduction and running commentary by Poppy Cannon — the American food editor celebrated for The Can-Opener Cook Book — translating them for U.S. markets and substituting where the ingredients ran French. Old-world exactness annotated by new-world convenience: the collaboration is the book's flavor, for better and for argument.
The story, in more detail
The 1954 Cook Book had made Toklas, at seventy-seven, an improbable bestselling author, and the sequel followed the market: a second collection, published by Harper in 1958, drawn from her files of recipes past and present. This time the memoir element thinned and the collaboration thickened — Poppy Cannon, the food editor famous for championing speed, cans, and the American supermarket, supplied the introduction and a running commentary that adapts Toklas's methods for U.S. kitchens, suggesting substitutions where the called-for ingredient lived only in a Paris market.
The pairing is the story: the era's most exacting home cook — a woman who measured by tradition and market-day — annotated by the apostle of convenience food. Read charitably, Cannon's notes are a bridge, and the reason American cooks could actually use the book; read loyally, they are a running argument printed in the margins of a purist's life work. Either way the volume completes the kitchen shelf of the rue Christine years, and its title is quietly true to the whole Toklas project: the past supplying the recipes, the present doing what it can with them.
The full story
The shape is a working cookbook rather than a memoir: some two hundred recipes from Toklas's files, French technique and market-day exactness intact, arranged for the table rather than the timeline. Around them runs the second voice — Cannon's commentary, translating, substituting, and encouraging, the tone of a television demonstrator escorting readers through a cathedral.
The interest for non-cooks is the dialogue itself: two philosophies of the kitchen, printed on the same pages, politely disagreeing about what food is for.
Why we recommend it
A duel in the margins
Old-world exactness versus can-opener modernity, printed on the same page — no other book on the shelf stages the fifties this neatly.
The working recipes
Less memoir than the Cook Book but more usable — the annotations exist so an American kitchen can actually cook the rue Christine's table.
The late career, completed
With the Cook Book and the letters, it rounds out the astonishing fact of a debut author in her late seventies.
What this book explores
Timeline
1954
The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book makes her, at seventy-seven, an improbable bestselling author.
1958
Harper publishes the sequel its success demanded — two hundred recipes annotated for American kitchens by Poppy Cannon of The Can-Opener Cook Book — with Toklas eighty-one.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Harper & Brothers
- 1958
Paperback
- Paperback
- Lyons Press
Reader reviews
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Staying On Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas
The letters record this collaboration from Toklas's side of the writing table.
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Aromas and Flavors of Past and Present: frequently asked questions
Who wrote Aromas and Flavors of Past and Present?
Alice B. Toklas, with an introduction and running commentary by the American food editor Poppy Cannon. Harper published it in 1958.
What is Aromas and Flavors?
A second collection of some two hundred of Toklas's recipes, printed as she wrote them, with Cannon's notes adapting them for American kitchens and substituting where ingredients ran French.
How does it relate to The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book?
It is the sequel the Cook Book's success demanded — less memoir, more working cookbook, commissioned four years after the first book made her a bestselling author at seventy-seven.
Who was Poppy Cannon?
The American food editor celebrated for The Can-Opener Cook Book — the apostle of convenience food, an unlikely annotator for the era's most exacting home cook.
What makes the collaboration notable?
It stages two philosophies of the kitchen on the same pages — old-world exactness annotated by can-opener modernity — politely disagreeing about what food is for.