Museum Notebook: Questionable cookbooks’ dope delicacies and home bakes

'The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book', printed in 1961. This cookbook contains a recipe for Haschich Fudge, described as an "entertaining refreshment for a ladies' bridge club". Whanganui Regional Museum Collection Ref: 2008.60.658

Cookbooks may not be contenders for any banned books list, but there have certainly been questionable cookbooks that have raised the eyebrows of their readers.

The Whanganui Regional Museum holds a collection of cookbooks that span hundreds of years, and some of them include some mind-boggling ingredients. Literally.

One such book is The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, first published in 1954. Alice Babette Toklas was born in San Francisco in 1877 and moved to France after the devastating 1906 earthquake. The day after she arrived in Paris, she met Gertrude Stein and became her life-long companion.

Together they hosted a literary salon, and entertained writers including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and artists such as Picasso and Matisse. At these salons, Stein was the entertainer and Toklas was the cook. After Stein’s death in 1946, Toklas wrote her book, which was part recipe book and part memoir. An edition printed in 1961 is in the museum collection.

Toklas stirred the pot with this work by including a recipe for Haschich Fudge sourced from her friend Brion Gyson. The recipe calls for a bunch of pulverised Cannabis sativa to be dusted over the other ingredients before mixing and forming the mixture into balls the size of walnuts. This controversial recipe was omitted from the first US printing as it was deemed “dangerous”, but was included in later versions. Toklas claimed she wasn’t aware of the “special” ingredient and didn’t try the recipe before including it in her book.

In the book, however, Toklas described the fudge as “the food of paradise” which “might provide an entertaining refreshment for a ladies’ bridge club”. She warns the reader to eat with care, and that two balls would be sufficient to produce “euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter, ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes”.

Another recipe book from the 18th century, although very popular at the time, shows how far we’ve come in the fields of cooking and medicine.

Frontispiece and title page from 'The Compleat Housewife', printed in 1739. This book of household recipes includes several medicines steeped with wormwood, which contains the potentially toxic and hallucinogenic chemical thujone. Whanganui Regional Museum Collection Ref: 1980.69.1

The Compleat Housewife, or Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion, was written by Eliza Smith and first published in 1727. The book was a firm favourite, with 18 editions published over 50 years. The museum has the ninth edition, published in 1739.

The book contains hundreds of recipes for sweet and savoury dishes, including the earliest known recipes for “katchup” and bread and butter pudding, as well as home medicaments and health tips.

One such recipe was for “Mr. Denzil Onslow’s Surfeit-Water”. Denzil Onslow of Pyrford (1642-1721) was a British politician who was renowned for the sumptuous banquets he would host, serving the bountiful game from his own estate.

Perhaps because of his feasts, Mrs Smith included his recipe for ‘surfeit-water’ – the 18th-century term for an antacid. The recipe requires a list of ingredients including a gallon and a half of brandy, half a bushel of poppies and a handful of wormwood.

Poppies of the Papaver genus are known for containing the narcotic opium, and the addition of half a bushel (equivalent to the volume of 1075 cubic inches) would likely have had some effect on the resulting medicine. Wormwood is a known ingredient in the alcoholic drink absinthe and contains a chemical called thujone, which can be toxic and cause hallucinations and seizures.

These and the other ingredients steeped in a copious amount of brandy may not have relieved indigestion but, after taking a dose, the sufferer probably wouldn’t care any more.

* Sandi Black is the archivist at the Whanganui Regional Museum.