'Her footnote filled us with ecstasy'

The opening paragraph of Janet Malcolm’s new book, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice:

When I read The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book for the first time, Eisenhower was in the White House and Liz Taylor had taken Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds. The book, published n 1954, was given to me by a fellow member of a group of pretentious young persons I ran around with, who had nothing but amused contempt for middlebrow American culture, and whose revolt against the conformity of the time largely took the form of patronizing a furniture store called Design Research and of writing mannered letters to each other modeled on the mannered letters of certain famous literary homosexuals, not then known as such. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book fit right in with our program of callow preciousness; we loved its waspishly magisterial tone, its hauteur and malice. “The French never add Tabasco, ketchup or Worcestershire sauce, nor do they eat any of the innumerable kinds of pickles, nor do they accompany a meat course with radishes, olives or salted nuts,” Toklas wrote, as if preparing a manifesto for us. Her de haut en bas footnote pointing out that “a marinade is a bath of wines, herbs, oil, vegetables, vinegars and so on, in which fish or meat destined for particular dishes repose for specified periods and acquire virtue” filled us with ecstasy.

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