I’ve been house-sitting, and while here I’ve encountered Gertrude Stein with unusual frequency First, I read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein borrows her lifelong companion Alice’s perspective in order to tell the story of their life in France up through the mid-thirties. When I liked it most, I learned a lot of charming details and eccentricities about artists and whomever they had on their arms while they visited the atelier at 27 rue de Fleurus and gazed by gas light at the paintings hung nearly to the ceiling.
Ambivalence!
Not having had enough gossip and descriptions of pre-war extravagance, I jumped right into reading The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook which has been sitting, barely explored, on my shelf for a couple of years now. Alice B. Toklas did actually write this memoir after Stein died, when she was engaged, as she would be for the remainder of her life, in devoting herself to promoting Stein’s work to the literary world and staving off destitution. This book does both often, tracing a trajectory, for the first half, that mirrors Autobiography so closely that I kept cross referencing to check if she was “self”-plagiarizing anecdotes. She wasn’t ever quite, which was kind of disappointing.
The Cookbook is larded with recipes linked to whatever memories Toklas explores in a given chapter. Buttered with recipes would be more accurate. The biggest reason I’ve not cooked from this book much yet is that many of these recipes call for an untenable amount of butter, wine, fillets, cream, and truffles (which never are possible). In other words, it’s not a very good resource when you’re looking at a half-empty fridge and trying to figure out dinner.
But this time, I read the book straight through, not planning to make anything in particular but imagining the preparation and serving of each meal. Actually, Alice wrote this book in 1954 while convalescing from “pernicious jaundice”, unable to eat anything rich or interesting. In “A Word with the Cook”, she supposes, “it was written as an escape from the narrow diet and monotony of illness, and I daresay nostalgia for old days and old ways and for remembered health and enjoyment lent special lustre to dishes and menus barred from an invalid table, but hovering dream-like in invalid memory.” This is a daydreamed cookbook good for a daydreaming cook.
Even so, I marked pages of promising looking dishes as I read and came away with a surprisingly long list of makeable and adaptable recipes to try. I plan to write about them in this space pretty often, hopefully making available again some ideas and stories from an out of print, old fashioned book that might otherwise be inaccessible to many cooks.
First up, what Alice Toklas refers to as “First Picnic Lunch”, a meal she would prepare for Gertrude Stein and herself when they were off in their Ford, Godiva, to gather wild-flowers. It’s not a recipe so much as an idyllic plan:
“A chicken is simmered in white wine with salt and paprika. Ten minutes before the chicken is sufficiently cooked add ½ cup finely chopped mushrooms. When cooked, remove chicken and drain. Strain mushrooms. The juice may be kept in the refrigerator to use as stock. Put the mushrooms in a bowl, add an equal quantity of butter and work into a paste. This is very good as a sandwich spread or may be thoroughly mixed with the yolks of 3 hard-boiled eggs and put into the hard-boiled eggs which have been cut in half.
For dessert fill cream-puff shells with crushed sweetened strawberries.”
I love the idiosyncratic vagueness of this recipe: the precise quantity of mushrooms is specified, but how much wine, salt, and paprika are not. We’re told to split the eggs into halves but not anything in terms of an appropriate technique for cooking the chicken besides to simmer it, no instructions appear anywhere in the book for making cream-puff shells. There are beguiling suggestions of flavors coupled with free-rein to devise a means to them.
I made up the following recipe. It worked very well, resulting in a tender, flavorful chicken, rich broth, and a mushroom compound butter that, truthfully, is more mushroom than butter. I didn’t make devilled eggs with it, and have been spreading it on toast and finishing plain vegetables with it instead. Keep in mind that the proportions and very ingredients are pretty flexible. I used what I had on hand in the way of aromatics and wine for the broth, but it would be just as lovely if a bit different with all sorts of others.
Instead of strawberry filled cream puffs, we picked raspberries by the handful off of the canes. Free, infinite raspberries are very much the best part of this house-sitting gig.
Alongside, we had green beans braised in a tablespoons of broth while the chicken rested. Also corn sticks to soak up some mushroom butter and because there was a cast-iron mold sitting out in this borrowed kitchen. Alice B. Toklas had a thing for cornsticks. When she and Gertrude Stein toured the US in the thirties, one of their hostesses, Miss Hockaday of Dallas, sent one of the molds along with Alice back to France, “It was my pride and delight in Paris where it was certainly unique.” Poor Alice, the Nazis stole it when they ransacked 27 rue de Fleurus. “What did the Germans, when they took it in 1944, expect to do with it? And what are they doing with it now?” She doesn’t include her recipe (oddly?) so I used this one, which is nice because it’s the perfect amount of batter for one seven-well cornstick pan.
One thing to note is that this is a delicious chicken, but not a visually striking one. I browned the outside of mine because I hadn’t really thought things through, and this might have added a bit of flavor, but it did nothing visually after the bird had simmered for two hours. I ended up serving the chicken skinned and in pieces with a pitcher of the broth on the side, not because it needed it, but because the paprika tinged broth is so pretty. If you were after more of a proper, away from home and away from cutlery picnic, it might be nice to slice the cooked meat and serve it with other sandwich fixings, including the mushroom butter.
If you have time, it’s well worth it to sprinkle your chicken all over heavily with salt and let it sit covered in the fridge for one or two days. To do this, remove any giblets and the neck (make stock with ‘em or giblet/veggie tacos or something) then salt the chicken inside and out. Tamar Adler advises three times as much as you would sprinkle on a chicken if you were just about to roast it. This sort of dry-brines your bird, adding seasoning and tenderness without as much mess as typical brining. If you were to roast the chicken, then the skin would be prettier and crisper, but I’m afraid that doesn’t matter for this recipe. I usually keep this process nicely contained in the dutch oven I’ll eventually cook the chicken in, but a lidded glass casserole works great to.
Picnic Chicken
1 heaping Tablespoon paprika
1 cup dry white wine or dry vermouth (what I used, I like to think it’s herbal notes lended depth)
1 to 2 cups water
1 chicken
a stalk parsley
a sprig rosemary
half an onion studded with two whole cloves
a lemon halved and juiced into the pot
a slice or two of dried porcini mushroom (optional)
½-1 cup finely chopped mushrooms
salt to taste
Pour wine, water, and paprika into a heavy pan, like a dutch oven, over medium-high heat.
Carefully place the chicken into the pot. The liquid should come a bit more that halfway up the sides. Arrange the herbs, onion, and lemon around the bird. Cover and let come to a simmer.
If using the porcini, soak for five minutes in a small bowl of water. When soft, mince and add to the pot. Strain the liquid through a fine mesh strainer or a cloth to remove the grit and add the mushroom liquid to the broth.
Baste the chicken periodically, or carefully turn it with a large spoon and a large fork. It should take between one and two hours to finish. (You’ll be able to tell because it will have an internal reading of at least 170 degrees and the joints will loosen)
When the chicken seems nearly done, add the remaining mushrooms and let simmer ten more minutes. Test the broth, add salt if necessary.
When the chicken is cooked, lift it carefully from the broth and let rest for a few minutes on a plate.
Strain the broth and reserve for other uses. It’ll be delicious.
Mix the mushrooms with an approximately equal amount of butter.
Skin* and slice chicken however you’d like, and it’s ready to serve.
*I always save skin and bones to make an additional pot of simmered or pressure-cooked stock with herbs and a spoonful of cider vinegar to draw out some of the calcium locked in the bones. The stock will cool with a layer of schmaltz on top. This is good cooking fat, especially for fried potatoes.
