The Seducer’s Cookbook: A Vintage Guide to the Lost Art of Seduction

“Seduction … is becoming as much of a lost art as hand-caning and bookbinding. But while those two crafts can be replaced by machine work, seduction, if it is not done ‘by hand,’ will not be done at all.”

As a lover of unusual cookbooks and inventive recipes — from The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook to Modern Art Desserts to the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook to Patti Smith’s lettuce soup for starving artists — I was delighted to come upon The Seducer’s Cookbook (public library). This amusing 1962 gem by legendary food critic Mimi Sheraton, which falls somewhere between Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts and The Art of Kissing, presents a collection of “helpful and hilarious hints for situations into which men may lure women and vice versa,” including drink and dining menus, décor, dress, and dialogue. Gracing the book’s pages are illustrations by the great Paul Coker, who contributed to iconic counterculture magazine MAD and illustrated the wonderful 1968 volume MAD Better or Verse.

Sheraton sets the scene:

What we are concerned with here is the delectable and subtle art of luring, tempting, enticing, leading someone into going to bed with you in the most delightful way possible. For if the seduction is planned artfully, it can whet your sexual appetite in the same way that a piquant hor d’oeuvre prepares your palate for the main course to come.

Though it is true people are getting into bed with each other every day, seduction, as opposed to pushing, pulling, pleading and promising, is becoming as much of a lost art in America as hand-caning and bookbinding. But while those two crafts can be replaced by machine work, seduction, if it is not done “by hand,” will not be done at all.

She enumerates her three main goals:

I am for the game — as much fun, and often more, than the prize; hence this book for the following reasons:

1. To enable men to get the answer they want — Yes.
2. To give women a better reason for saying it.
3. To keep America from becoming, sexually, a have-not nation.

But behind this amusingly lewd and seemingly superficial premise lies a deeper meditation on gender politics and women’s empowerment in the Mad Men era — published months before The Feminine Mystique turned the tide and a decade before the second wave of feminism was in full swing. Sheraton challenges the era’s assumptions in a wonderfully heartening way:

The first question to be answered if we are to get anywhere is: Just exactly who is seducing whom? If we are to believe the editors (male) of the American College Dictionary we must assume that only men seduce women, else why the definition “to induce (a woman) to surrender her chastity”? Even masculine vanity in its most extreme form should permit the editors’ minds to allow as how sometimes a man is seduced — perhaps even to the extent of adding the definition “to induce (a man) to lead (a woman) astray.”

She argues for seduction as a gender-blind art, but one the mastery of which is as intricate as it is fruitful:

The whole thing becomes a kind of round robin, and if it is hard to tell the seducer from the seduced (everyone wants to be both), it is important for all of us to be on our toes, to develop our seductive proficiencies so we can play our roles properly should the need arise.

Sheraton even flips certain gender-perception conventions around to give the stereotypical pop-culture male more dimension, arguing against the idea that getting laid is his only consideration:

He has his ego, and nothing deflates it more than the thought that a woman’s sole interest in him is sexual. This may not sound plausible, but it’s one of the best-kept male secrets. Just let a man think any woman he’s at all interested in would have gone to bed with any other presentable male who chanced by, and he is enraged and starts competing. He will immediately begin to turn hand-springs on her lawn (intellectually and even physically), trying to convince her he’s really a pretty special guy — out of bed as well as in. This is where his talents as a seducer will stand him in good deal.

But what makes the relationship between food and sex so compelling, after all? Sheraton writes:

The urge to eat and the urge to procreate are basic, natural and deliciously intertwined … and certainly no other method of seduction is as healthful or nourishing. No matter what else may go wrong, at least you’ve had a good meal.

It may be worth noting here the three sorts of appetite described by Dumas père in his Dictionary of Cuisine — as applicable to sexual hunger as to gastronomic.

1. Appetite that comes from hunger. It makes no fuss over the food that satisfies it. If it is great enough, a piece of raw meat will appease it as easily as a roasted pheasant or a woodcock.
2. Appetite aroused, hunger or no hunger, by a succulent dish appearing at the right moment, illustrating the proverb that hunger comes with eating.
3. The type of appetite that is roused at the end of a meal when after normal hunger has been satisfied by the main courses, and the guest is truly ready to rise without regret, a delicious dish holds him to the table with a final tempting of his sensuality.

Sheraton goes on to offer several menus for various occasions and scenarios — from morning-after breakfast to seduction outside marriage to dumping someone by serving leftovers. Here’s a sampling from a menu for seducing young lovers:

STRAWBERRIES CHANTILLY

Wash ½ pint strawberries, drain on paper toweling, hull them and cut lengthwise into quarters. Leave 2 of the nicest berries uncut. Sprinkle with 1 tablespoon Cointreau, and a little sugar if they are sour, and chill them for ½ hour. Beat ½ cup heavy sweet cream until it is stiff, adding ¼ teaspoon sugar and the tiniest drop of rose water to it halfway through the whipping. Fold berries into the cream, pile into two individual serving dishes and top each with a whole strawberry. Chill for 1 hour before serving.

The Seducer’s Cookbook is delectable and diverting from cover to cover. Pair it with this fascinating read on ancient aphrodisiacs and anti-aphrodisiacs.

Thanks, Kaye

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Do It: 20 Years of Famous Artists’ Irreverent Instructions for Art Anyone Can Make

“Art is something that you encounter and you know it’s in a different kind of space from the rest of your life, but is directly connected to it.”

One afternoon in 1993, legendary art critic, curator, and interviewer extraordinaire Hans Ulrich Obrist — mind of great wisdom on matters as diverse as the relationship between patterns and chance and the trouble with “curation” itself — sat down in Paris’s Café Select with fellow co-conspirers Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier, and the do it project was born: A series of instructional procedures by some of the greatest figures in contemporary art, designed for anyone to follow as a sort of DIY toolkit for creating boundary-expanding art. Over the twenty years that followed, manifestations of the project popped up in exhibitions around the world, from the most underground galleries to the most prestigious museums.

Twenty years later, Obrist is releasing Do It: The Compendium (public library) — a wide-ranging medley of artist instructions spanning performance art, sculpture, urban intervention, philosophical reflection, and even recipes from, contributors like Lawrence Weiner, Louise Bourgeois, Ai Weiwei, Douglas Coupland, David Lynch, and Sol LeWitt. The project, above all, explores art as unbridling of author and authority, art as internationalism, art as a homage and a middle finger to Art. It lives somewhere between Yoko Ono’s instructions for art and life, John Cage’s interpretable notations, and Philip Glass’s notion of authorship as transformation.

Obrist, who considers do it “not a sprint [but] a marathon” and the book a “progress report” on a perpetually open-ended project, writes:

Do it rejects the notion of the original in favor of an open-ended conception of the creation of the work. … No two versions of do it instructions are ever identical when carried out. … The exhibition takes place in the inter-spaces between interpretation and negotiation. … It is important to bear in mind that do it is less concerned with copies, images, or reproductions of artworks, than with human interpretations.

Here is a selection of the contemplative, silly, subversive, profound, playful, and infinitely diverse contributions, stretching our conception of what art is, who should enact it, and how — the essence of Obrist’s gift.

Celebrated architect, educator, and architecture critic Cedric Price adds to The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook in a 2005 piece titled Gilding the lily part II:

RECIPE FOR BUCKY FULLER

Skin but do not stone a peach. Brush lightly with a weak mixture of clear golden syrup (corn syrup) or melted brown sugar and brandy. Heat more brandy in a soupspoon. Ignite, and pour over the peach. Eat immediately.

A particular favorite of Bucky’s.

Sculptor Nairy Baghramian (2012):

Following Gertrude Stein, every now and then sit with your back on nature.

Many are intently irreverent in the face of the art establishment. Performance artist and invisible media maestro Robert Barry (2012):

Do something unique that only you and no one else in the world can do.

Don’t call it art.

Paris-based self-described “readymade artist” Claire Fontaine (2012):

Whatever you do, do something else.

Lawrence Weiner: A 36'' x 36'' removal to the lathing or support wall of plaster or wallboard from a wall (1968)

Conceptual art pioneer Lawrence Weiner, regarded as one of the greatest modern artists of our time, in a 1968 piece Cat. #21 and presented in characteristic all-caps:

A 36 X 36″ REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL-BOARD FROM A WALL, 1968
MATERIAL: LANGUAGE + THE MATERIALS REFERRED TO

PLEASE DO NOTE THE WORK IS PRESENTED NOT AS A COMMAND OR INSTRUCTION. IT IS PRESENTED AS FACT (PAST PERFECT) WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF AN INSTRUCTION EXHIBITION.

Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (2001):

A black not straight line is drawn at approximately the center of the wall horizontally from side to side. Alternate red, yellow, and blue lines are drawn above and below the black line to the top and bottom of the wall.

Some fall at the intersection of the profound and the sentimental. Federico Herrero, in a 2002 piece titled Secret Friend:

Choose a person you like, or that you would like to love, or at least, a person you have good feelings for.

Leave small gifts for him/her in personal places for five days.

During those five days, secretly record in secret conversations with that person. The recording can be for a short time or as long as possible.

Listen to the taping every night before bed.

Louise Bourgeois: Instruction (2002)

French-American artist, sculptor and confessional art founder Louise Bourgeois (2002):

When you are walking, stop and smile at a stranger.

Paul Chan: Instruction (2005)

Artist and publishing provocateur Paul Chan (2005):

When you meet someone new tell them the following:

“Our modern age is characterized by a sadness which calls for a new kind of prophet.

Not the prophets of old who reminded people that they were going to die, but someone who will remind them that they are not dead yet.”

Do not be embarrassed.
Do not be afraid.

(This is a riff on the following passage from the 1912 novel Manalive by G. K. Chesterton: “There should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet. The intellectuals among whom I moved were not even alive enough to fear death. They hadn’t enough blood in them to be cowards. Until a pistol barrel was poked under their very noses they never even knew they had been born. For ages looking up an eternal perspective it might be true that life is a learning to die. But for these little white rats it was just as true that death was their only chance of learning to live.”)

Danish-Icelandic sculptor and large-scale installation mastermind Olafur Eliasson (2002), in a piece titled Physiological Memory:

1) Choose a person, older than yourself, you see frequently — not too often by approx once a week or once a month. Maybe one of your grandparents if they are still alive.

2) Every time you meet the chosen person you press your 2 pointing-fingers firmly against your eyes for 10 to 20 seconds until various colors and patterns arise.

3) Try to note or memorize the patterns and colors in connection with the context and repeat the practice every time you meet the chosen person for a as long as possible, minimum 6 months.

4) After minimum 6 months of this practice you can recall the person, virtually by pressing your eyes for a while. In the midst of the colors and pattern a sense of presence of the chosen person arrives even after the chosen person has died.

Some expose the role of art as a tool of sociopolitical reflection. Italian-American postmodern choreographer and musician Simone Forti (2012):

Think about climate change.

Sit for some moments in dumb grief, dumb knowing, dumb amazement.

Others are decidedly, if subversively, dogmatic, like Ten Commandments for Gilbert and George by graphic art duo Gilbert & George (1995):

I. Thou shalt fight conformism
II. Thou shalt be the messenger of freedoms
III. Thou shalt make use of sex
IV. Thou shalt reinvent life
V. Thou shalt create artificial art
VI. Thou shalt have a sense of purpose
VII. Thou shalt not know exactly what thou doest, but thou shalt do it
VIII. Thou shalt give thy love
IX. Thou shalt grab the soul
X. Thou shalt give something back

Others are unabashedly playful. Conceptual artist Stephen J. Kaltenbach (1969):

Start a rumor.

American artist Ben Kinmond, in a 1997 piece titled The possibilities of trust as a sculpture and the question of value for each participant:

Invite a stranger into your home for breakfast.

Swedish installation and video artist Klara Liden (2012):

LOST — street sign exchange program

Take down a street name sign.
Go to a different city.
Put up the sign in place of another sign.
Repeat.

Austrian artist and “one-minute sculptor” Erwin Wurm (1995):

Put on a pullover — but don’t stick arms or head through the normal openings — squat down and pull the end of the pullover down over your knees and feet.

In this position, endure for 20 seconds.

One of the most irreverent and wonderful contributions, at once charmingly dated for its tech references and timelessly delightful in its spirit, comes from Canadian novelist, design writer, and media commentator Douglas Coupland (2004):

Instructions:

1) Go to an instant print shop run by a multinational company such as Kinko’s.

2) Log onto the internet.

3) Open a blog page account on a blogging site such as bloggers.com. It’s free.

4) Give your blog home page a name composed of two relatively unusual nouns such as ducklingspaghetti. There is a reason for this which will come shortly.

5) On another on-screen window go to Amazon.com.

6) Select a book that you’ve read many times in your life.

7) Chances are that Amazon has many pages from that book excerpted. Select one page.

8) Go back to your blog page.

9) Transcribe into it the page you selected from Amazon.

10) Post that blog page on the internet.

11) Now go to Google.de or Google.fr or Google.nl or any Google for a language you don’t speak.

12) On this foreign Google site, search for your blog entry using the name of your blog page. The unusual nouns selected for your page will make it easy for Google to find it.

13) Once your blog page appears, click Google’s translation button. Your page will be translated within a second or two.

14) Print out this page on 8.5 x 11 paper or A4 or whatever is the standardized letter paper dimension for the country you’re in.

15) Return to your blog account.

16) In a new blog entry, paste into it the freshly translated page.

17) Using Google from another country, repeat the above procedure, translating your page from, say, Dutch to French.

18) Print out this ext translation but do it on a differently colored page of letter paper.

19) Continue this process repeatedly, always from one language into another, printing onto a differently colored sheet of paper, until you have used up all colors of paper available at your specific Kinko’s.

20) The final sheet of paper should be in your mother tongue.

21) For final presentation, paste the sheets like a checkerboard onto a wall, in sequence. The proportions of the pasting should be a vertical rectangle as close to 8.5 x 11 or A4 as possible.

In this short video interview, artist and curator Richard Wentworth, one of the original contributors to do it, adds to history’s notable definitions of art and echoes Adrienne Rich with a meditation on the project and its significance:

The point about art is it’s all in its interpretation. Art is something that you encounter and you know it’s in a different kind of space from the rest of your life, but is directly connected to it. … It’s a great privilege to be near art because when you’re near art, you can be another kind of person, and it allows you to think differently about things that you have never done.

Do It: The Compendium, a refined addition to these activity books for grown-ups, is marvelous and endlessly delightful in its entirety.

Thanks, Rachel and Bettina

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How One of Literature’s Greatest Loves Began: The Fateful Meeting of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein

“She had remarkable eyes, very large and lively, the kind that seem to send off sparks, that sometimes look glowing with an inner fire.”

Alice B. Toklas, born on April 30, 1877, is remembered for two things: being Gertrude Stein’s great love and writing her unusual, revered memoir-disguised-as-cookbook chronicling their life together. On September 8, 1907, her first day as an American expat in Paris, Toklas met Stein. The two fell instantly in love and remained together for the next 39 years, until Stein’s death. Stein often referred to Toklas as her “wifey” and addressed her as “baby precious.” Writing late into the night, the author liked to leave notes next to the pillow for Alice to find in the morning, signed “Y.D,” short for “Your Darling.” In an ideal, civilized world of human rights and equality, theirs would have been a marriage — and it would have been one of the happiest and most exemplary in literary history.

In her memoir, What Is Remembered (public library), Alice relays the fateful encounter, conveying with admirably few words the immense, intense mesmerism of their relationship:

It was Gertrude Stein who held my complete attention, as she did for all the many years I knew her. I knew her until her death, and all these empty ones since then. She was a golden brown presence, burned by the Tuscan sun and with a golden glint in her warm brown hair. She was dressed in a warm brown corduroy suit. She wore a large round coral brooch and when she talked, very little, or laughed, a good deal, I thought her voice came from this brooch. It was unlike anyone else’s voice — deep, full, velvety, like a great contralto’s, like two voices.

In the foreword to the Folio illustrated edition of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, M. F. K. Fisher paints an expressive portrait of Toklas, which seems to begin rather ungenerous but quickly turns lovable, bewitching even:

Her face was sallow, her nose was big or even huge, and hooked and at the same time almost fleshy, the kind that artists try not to draw. And she had a real moustache, not the kind that old women often grow, but the sturdy kind, which started when she was first going into adolescence. I don’t think she ever tried to shave it, or have it plucked out or removed chemically or with hormones, as a woman might do today. She wore it unblinkingly, as far as I can tell, although of course as a person of unusual awareness she must have known that some people were taken aback by it. A friend of mine who admired her greatly, and often traveled with her in her last years, wrote that Miss Toklas wore her close-cropped hair, which stayed black well into her eighties, in bangs “faintly echoed by a dark down on her lip.” This amuses me. It is typical of the general reaction to something that would have been unnoticed except for her obvious femaleness. Another friend said more aptly, or at least better for my own picture, that her strong black moustache made other faces look nude.

She had remarkable eyes, very large and lively, the kind that seem to send off sparks, that sometimes look glowing with an inner fire. Probably people who were intimidated at first by her fixed upon them with relief … that is, until they forgot their shyness in the deft, supple way she moved and talked.

She was a tiny person, not five feet tall, I think, and she dressed with a studied daintiness, except for the clunky sandals on her pretty feet. … She loved dramatic hats, and after Miss Stein’s death she wore them oftener in rare gaddings … big extravagant creations with feathers and wide brims, and always the elegant suits and those clunky sandals. Nobody has ever written, though, that she looked eccentric. Perhaps it was because of her eyes. . . .

Slim and simply worded yet incredibly moving, What Is Remembered endures as a projection of Toklas herself, one that stays with you long after the lights have gone out.

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The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook: A Rare 1961 Treasure Trove of Unusual Recipes and Creative Wit

“Permit two egg yolks to recline.”

There is indisputable charm to cookbooks inspired by modern art, literature, and science, and the authentic recipes of favorite poets hold a special allure, but none come close to the magnificent The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook (public library) — a lavish 350-page vintage tome, illustrated with 19th-century engravings and original drawings by Marcel Duchamp, Robert Osborn, and Alexandre Istrati. Originally published in 1961, it features 220 recipes and 30 courses by 55 painters, 61 novelists, 15 sculptors, and 19 poets, including such luminaries as Man Ray, John Keats, Marcel Duchamp, Lawrence Durrell, Robert Graves, Harper Lee, Irving Stone, William Styron, and Georges Simenon. The diverse contributors take the assignment with various degrees of seriousness, some sharing their recipes in earnest and others using the cookbook as a canvas for wit and creative deviation — but all having invariable and obvious fun with the project.

The foreword comes from none other than Alice B. Toklas, who knows a thing or two about literary cookbooks. She offers three of her favorite famous concoctions, among which an omelet recipe which George Sand once sent Victor Hugo:

OMELETTE AURORE

Beat 8 eggs with a pinch of salt, 1 tablespoon sugar and 3 tablespoons heavy cream. Prepare the omelet in the usual manner. Before folding it, place on it 1 cup diced candied fruit and small pieces of marrons glacés which have soaked for several hours in 2 tablespoons of curaçao. Fold the omelet to keep the fruit in place, on a fireproof serving dish. Surround with marrons glacés and candied cherries. cover at once with frangipani cream made by stirring 2 whole eggs and 3 yolks with 3 tablespoons of sugar until they are pale lemon-colored. Then add 1 cup of flour and a pinch of salt, stirring until it is perfectly smooth. Add 2 cups of milk and mix well. Put the mixture in a saucepan over the lowest heat and stir until it is quite thick. It must not boil. Be careful that the cream does not become attached to the bottom or sides of the saucepan. When it has thickened remove it from the heat and add 2 tablespoons of butter and 3 powered macaroons. Stir and mix well. Pour the sauce over the omelet and sprinkle ¼ cup diced angelica over the top. Then sprinkle 6 powered macaroons on top and, finally, 3 tablespoons of melted butter. Place the omelet in a preheated 550-degree oven only long enough to brown it lightly.

Tucked inside my original edition was also a flyer featuring several beautifully typeset teaser cards.

Irving Stone speaks to the life-anchoring power of a writerly routine and outlines “The Perfect Writer’s Luncheon”:

I am one of those writers who, as he gets halfway through a long book, decides that there is nothing he can possibly eat that will agree with him. I start out at page 1, line 1, weighing some 170 pounds, and a quarter of a million words later, in seventh draft and ready for the printer, I have come down to 145 pounds. With particularly long books, I get so thin that there is nothing around my hips to hold up my slacks; and, during the last chapters I find it nearly impossible to write sitting down because there is no flesh left to sit on.

As a consequence I have evolved the perfect writer’s luncheon, and I have not deviated from it in thirty-five years. My sole and complete lunch consists of an American cheese sandwich on toast and a dish of tea. There are times when the monotony of this lunch is almost unbearable. However, during the last year of the writing of each book, if I attempt to substitute a tongue or beef sandwich, or even a piece of chicken, I am so distressed that I am unable to set down a line during the afternoon.

By a rough estimate, I think I have eaten ten thousand cheese sandwiches during my thirty-five years of concentrated writing. They reached their point of diminishing returns twenty-five years ago, but when one has to make a decision between dietary ennui or indigestion — what choice is there?

2 slices of white bread — dull, factory-baked, full-of-air, unadorned kind.
1 slice pasteurized American cheese — presliced too thin, to be sure no pimento mixed in, too exciting.

Toast bread, lay cheese on one slice, cover with the other. On festive, daring occasions put open face in oven for a few minutes to get holiday change.

Beloved author and anti-censorship opinionator Harper Lee shares her tongue-in-cheek recipe for “Crackling Bread”:

First, catch your pig. Then ship it to the abattoir nearest you. Bake what they send back. Remove the solid fat and throw the rest away. Fry fat, drain off liquid grease, and combine the residue (called “cracklings”) with:

1 ½ cups water-ground white meal
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 egg
1 cup milk

Bake in very hot oven until brown (about 15 minutes).

Result: one pan crackling bread serving 6. Total cost: about $250, depending upon size of pig. Some historians say this recipe alone fell the Confederacy.

Denise Levertov, an all-time favorite poet, presents her signature unnamed dessert:

This is a dessert I invented. No name attached.

Mix
equal quantities of:
Sour cream
Tart applesauce
Mashed bananas

Add:
Maple syrup to taste
(If you put too much,
add a little lemon juice)

Top
with: Sliced bananas and walnuts

Creative culture icon Marcel Duchamp reveals his secret to Steak Tartare:

Let me begin by saying, ma chere. that Steak Tartare, alias Bitteck Tartare, also known as Steck Tartare, is in no way related to tartar sauce. The steak to which I refer originated with the Cossacks in Siberia, and it can be prepared on horseback, at swift gallop, if conditions make this a necessity.

Indications: Chop one half pound (per person) of the very best beef obtainable, and shape carefully with artistry into a bird’s nest. Place on porcelain plate of a solid color — ivory is the best setting — so that no pattern will disturb the distribution of ingredients. In hollow center of nest, permit two egg yolks to recline. Like a wreath surrounding the nest of chopped meat, arrange on border of plate in small, separate bouquets:

Chopped raw white onion
Bright green capers
Curled silvers of anchovy
Fresh parsley, chopped fine
Black olives minutely chopped in company with yellow celery leaves
Salt and pepper to taste

Each guest , with his plate before him, lifts his fork and blends the ingredients with the egg yolks and meat. In center of table: Russian pumpernickel bread, sweet butter, and bottles of vin rosé.

Legendary photographer and Dadaism godfather Man Ray takes a liberty of defiant proportions with his “Menu for a Dadaist Day”:

Le Petit Dejeuner.

Take a wooden panel of an inch or less thickness, 16 to 20 inches in size. Gather the brightly colored wooden blocks left by children on the floors of playrooms and paste or screw them on the panel.

Déjeuner.

Take the olives and juice from one large jar of prepared green or black olives and throw them away. In the empty jar place several steel ball bearings. Fill the jar with machine oil to prevent rusting. With this delicacy serve a loaf of French bread, 30 inches in length, painted a pale blue.

Dîner.

Gather wooden darning eggs, one per person. If the variety without handles cannot be found, remove the handles. Pierce lengthwise so that skewers can be inserted in each darning egg. Lay the skewered eggs in an oblong or oval pan and cover with transparent cellophane.

Anna Tolstoy, dedicated biographer of her father, serves up her Russian Mint Cookies:

Mix well. Make balls the size of an apricot. Heat stove — 350 degrees. Bake for 12-15 minutes till bottom of cookies gets light brown. Keep in closed jar or in a bag in the refrigerator.

2 cups sugar
1 cup water
Boil and cool off
Add:
3 tablespoons vegetable oil (any kind)
1 teaspoon baking ammonia (must be ground into powder)
25-30 drops peppermint oil
5 ½ cups white flour

Complement The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook with the legendary Alice B. Toklas Cookbook and the delightful John Keats’s Porridge, then wash down with some artful parody of famous writers’ imaginary recipes.

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