Naively, I asked for larks. The grocery clerk seemed perplexed.
“You know,” I added … “song birds? And, laurel branches, please.”
Armed with my shopping list from my 1954 edition of the Alice B Toklas cookbook (the Hashish Fudge recipe was expunged from that edition) I was beginning life as a newly wed. I didn’t realize that Alice B Toklas was not Betty Crocker; that our local grocery store in Fort Worth, Texas was not a wildfowl and gourmet food purveyor circa Paris 1920’s; and that I wasn’t cooking for Picasso, Hemingway, Matisse or Braque. I was a recently graduated art student and lookin’ to live La Vie Bohème. Anything that associated delicious food and painting was what I most wanted in life. Since I was a woman and not a man-with-a-wife, if I wanted it, I was going to have to do it all myself! And, so … arm in arm with Alice, I started my career as a would-be painter/chef. Never made Alice’s Larks. However, the super impressed clerks at my market thought I was an authentic epicurean, and I never dared tell them otherwise.
