In this memoir-turned-cookbook, Alice B. Toklas describes her life with partner Gertrude Stein and their famed Paris salon, which entertained the great avant-garde and literary figures of their day.

With dry wit and characteristic understatement Toklas ponders the ethics of killing a carp in her kitchen before stuffing it with chestnuts; decorating a fish to amuse Picasso at lunch; and travelling across France during the First World War in an old delivery truck, gathering local recipes along the way. She includes a friend's playful recipe for ''Haschiche Fudge'', which promises ''brilliant storms of laughter and ecstatic reveries'', much like her book.