A Dish Is a Dish Is a Dish

THE ALICE B. TOKLAS COOK BOOK (288 pp.)--Alice B. Toklas--Harper ($4).

It is reasonably certain that no man ever said to Alice B. Toklas: "If you could only cook!" Small, wiry and quite bereft of feminine charm, she was once cattily described as "the lady with the melancholy nose." But cook she could--or at least she went into the kitchen armed with glorious recipes.

For close to 40 years Alice was companion, housekeeper and quite often chief cook and bottle washer for Fellow U.S. Expatriate Gertrude Stein, who made her name a literary household word with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (which was, of course, the autobiography of Gertrude Stein). One thing the two spinsters and their arty friends loved was good food, and it was up to Alice to see that they got it, because Gertrude herself didn't like household work or even "to see work being done." Gertrude died in 1946 leaving Alice most of her estate. Now 78, Alice has written a book herself, and, since it is a cook book, it is probably more usable and readable than Author Stein's own volumes.

Bass for Pablo. The recipes range from serviceable to mouthwatering. They are, fortunately, not restricted to the elusive complexities of French cuisine, but make some gratifying forays into solid Viennese and Hungarian cooking. Their names alone are fascinating, e.g., Dublin Coffee James Joyce, Hot Toddy for Cold Night, Nameless Cookies, Very Good Chocolate Mousse, Tricolored Omelette, Chicken in Half Mourning, Scheherazade's Melon, Virgin Sauce.

But what gives the Cook Book its special charm is the stream of Alice's prattle, in which the recipes appear like floating islands, in no particular order. Her own recipe for striped bass, for instance, was worked out when she made lunch for Artist Pablo Picasso. He "exclaimed at its beauty" and modestly protested that it should have been created in honor of Matisse instead. In Palma de Mallorca, a French cook almost started a riot in the market place by showing Alice how to smother pigeons (the cook said it made them fuller and tastier). The information came in handy when Alice fixed some braised pigeons on croutons for Gertrude, using six "sweet young corpses" choked by her own hands. Her Frangipani Tart (decorated with homemade French and American flags) was the dessert following a liberation lunch when the U.S. Army moved into the town of Culoz, where Gertrude and Alice had settled down during World War II.

Competition for Chopin. The Cook Book may give a little trouble to brides who can't afford expensive ingredients or don't know their way about a kitchen. Alice assumes that her readers not only have money but know how to make dough and can keep several other kitchen operations going at once. She is very firm, too, about measurements and directions generally: "Pour them [the eggs] into a saucepan--yes, a saucepan, no, not a frying pan." This is richer cooking than most U.S. diners are used to, but it will be the fiercest Francophobe who can read Alice's recipes and not hanker for a taste, the dullest cook who will not want to get to the kitchen and try them out. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book is, after all. the work of a lady who can ask (and leave unanswered) the painful question: "If one had the choice of again hearing Pachmann play the two Chopin sonatas or dining once more at the Cafe Anglais, which would one choose?"

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