Dave Wood

I just received my new issue of The New Yorker magazine and was glad I renewed because it brought back my courtship days when I was pursuing the love of my life, Ruth Pirsig, a comely young graduate student from Chicago. No, no, The New Yorker didn’t do a story about us.

But when I saw the name Alice B. Toklas, a painful memory about my courtship surfaced almost immediately. You see Ruth was young and sharp and I the pursuer was way older, bald and much less attractive than the sleek young grad students who were also in pursuit of the charming young thing. What was I to do? Play ball on a different field than the sleek youngsters, that’s what. I had noticed from the beginning that Ruth had an enormous appetite, for 1) knowledge and 2) food. 

That’s where the New Yorker came in. My new issue reported that a flock of intellectuals had met for an elaborate dinner to celebrate the recent publication of a biography of the unreadable poet-philosopher Gertrude Stein (“A rose is a rose is a rose”). The New Yorker explained the new book was made possible because, although Stein was very hesitant to deal with authors, Alice B. Toklas, Stein’s mustachioed Polish mistress, was not.

So a new book would be available come October, thanks to Alice B., who was, essentially, Stein’s cook and bottle washer at the couple’s Paris love nest. And—here’s where my battle plan comes in. After Stein’s death Alice B. Toklas wrote “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook,” a recollection of their years together and the food she prepared for Stein’s elaborate Patrician soirees. Some of the recipes were outrageous. Once she served her pal Pablo Picasso a poached striped bass decorated with an elaborate design of sieved hard-boiled egg and red mayonnaise, to which Pablo commented, “This looks more like Matisse‘s work than mine.”   The Toklas cookbook became a surprise best-seller. The young students especially adored Toklas’s marijuana seed brownies. My pal Peter Genovese, a foodie and fellow student, loaned me his copy and I dove into it. How could my Windy City lass resist an old guy who actually read Stein (whose “Autobiography of Gertrude Stein by Alice B. Toklas,” whom Stein used as a pseudonym.) And who actually made recipes like “Ouefs Francois Picabia” (“Carefully cook one dozen freshly beaten eggs to which you carefully stir in one pound of butter.”)

Ruth Pirsig couldn’t and soon she was spending dinner with this old guy in a defunct golf course clubhouse in Bowling Green and dining on Toklas concoctions like whole chickens stuffed with chive-infused cottage cheese and roasted until the curds disappear. Ruth especially fell for Toklas’s “Gigot de la Clinique,” a leg of lamb injected with cognac and orange juice, then roasted.

Soon we were going on bicycle rides through the huge flat fields of tomatoes bound for the Heinz ketchup factory in town. My plan seemed to be working until one Sunday as we approached Portage on the Erie Canal. We stopped for a picnic I had painfully prepared in the old golf clubhouse. Another roast chicken? Well, yes. I had thawed the chicken, hoping to “Toklesize” it, but found that my larder was bereft of cottage cheese and chives. What could I substitute? What would Alice have done back when the German occupation emptied the farmers markets of everything but kale? Stuff it with whatever she had. I had green peppers and overripe peaches so into the cavity went this fairly vile combination. Well, after that picnic on the banks of the Erie Canal my courtship strategy slowed down considerably.

Ruth’s last name is corrupted Belgian for “Peach.” In the days before Affaire Erie Canale I called her “Peachy.” These days whenever we pass by a fruit stand, Ruth breaks into paroxysms of laughter.