Toklas suggests that chopped roast beef and chopped chicken with mushrooms make the best picnic sandwiches. When these were not enough, Toklas and her partner Gertrude Stein stopped at restaurants where they might dine on Morvan Ham with Cream Sauce, three-minute veal steak, grilled perch with fennel, puree of artichoke soup or bouillabaisse.
Toklas mischievously describes the picnic sandwiches in the chapter “Food to which Aunt Pauline and Lady Godiva Led Us.” The title is a joke because Pauline and Godiva are Ford motorcars, the only brand Toklas and Stein ever owned. Stein was always the driver, and Toklas took care of the rest.
Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Pavel Tchelitchew.
The recipes for the picnic sandwiches are real, but whether or not Toklas and Stein ever dined on them is uncertain. They do not give any instances.
First Picnic Lunch
A chicken is simmered in white wine with salt and parka. Ten minutes before the chicken is sufficiently cooked add ½ cup of finely chopped mushrooms. When cooked, remove the chicken and drain. Strain mushrooms. The juice may be kept in the refrigerator to be used as stock. Put the mushrooms in a bowl, add an equal quantity of butter, and work into a paste. This is very good as a sandwich spread or may be thoroughly mixed with the yolks of 3 hard-boiled eggs and put into the hard-boiled eggs, which have been cut in half
Second Picnic Lunch
One cup finely chopped roast rare beef, 1 teaspoon chopped parsley, 1 teaspoon crushed shallots, salt, pepper, 1 teaspoon tomato purée, 1 tablespoon sour cream, and a pinch of dry mustard. Mix thoroughly. Lightly toast on one side only eight slices of bread. Butter generously the untoasted sides. Spread on the buttered side four slices of the bread and the meat mixture. Cover, with buttered side over the meat, with the other four slices of bread.
To eat with these sandwiches, prepare lettuce leaves on which boiled diced sweetbreads are placed, 1-½ half cups for four large lettuce leaves.
Toklas is casual about spelling cookbook. Sometimes it’s cookbook, “cook book, ” or “cook-book.” This indecision was resolved in Aromas and Flavor of Past and Present, her second cookbook. She also dropped the picnic sandwiches but recommended pickled eggs—Eggs à la Hypcras (eggs in sweet wine)—a food she says, “Americans have savored all their lives as a great picnic treat.” Actually, it’s an English pub favorite. Americans looking for Eggs à la Hypcras will probably go hungry.
Featured Image: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Lady Godiva [a Model T Ford] (1927c.). By all accounts, Toklas never took the wheel, and Stein was a lousy driver. The photographer is unknown.http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/gertrude-stein-and-alice-b-toklas-papers
See Alice B. Toklas. The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954; Alice B. Toklas. Aromas and Flavor of Past and Present. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958