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A sweet cake or cookie containing cannabis, like a hash cookie, is variously known as an Alice B. Toklas brownie, bud brownie, magic brownie, hash brownie, electric brownie, or special brownie. Eating such a brownie can result in a similar psychoactive effect or "high" as smoking marijuana, although it may be delayed or mitigated due to slower absorption of the tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) through the digestive tract. Some believe it imparts a smoother "high". However there are many accounts of stronger, sometimes scary, longer lasting highs resulting from eating cannabis. Products containing cannabis are widely available in cannabis coffee shops in the Netherlands (and various European cities), where consumption use of marijuana is effectively legal.
History
The name derives from Alice B. Toklas, the lover of Gertrude Stein, who included a recipe for "Haschich Fudge" in her 1954 Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, a volume intended not so much as a cookbook but as reminiscences on her life with Ms. Stein. However, prior to publication Ms. Toklas was short of recipes, and the recipe in question was contributed by her friend Brion Gysin as a joke. The recipe was introduced this way:
- "This is the food of Paradise.... it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies' Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR.... Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one's personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better."
The suspicious ingredient ("canibus sativa" *) was not spotted by Ms. Toklas before the book was published, and though it was removed in the American edition, it was printed in the British one.
Once the press discovered the recipe, the book received wide publicity. To quote a reviewer in Time,
- The late Poetess Gertrude (Tender Buttons) Stein and her constant companion and autobiographee, Alice B. Toklas, used to have gay old times together in the kitchen. Some of the unique delicacies that were whipped up will soon be cataloged . . . in a wildly epicurean tome . . . Perhaps the most gone concoction (and also possibly a clue to some of Gertrude's less earthly lines) was her hashish fudge.
Terminology
Other terms for an Alice B. Toklas brownie include "bud brownie", "space cake", "pot pie", "Scooby Snack", "hash brownie", "special brownie", or "magic brownie". The latter term has been used as a source for just about any other food item that contains marijuana or "magic" mushrooms: "magic tea", "magic cake", etc.
The term Alice B. Tokin' brownie may have started as a pun on the word Alice B. Toklas brownie; combining imagery from the stoner-classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in which the eponymous heroine eats different foods to strange effect, with the concept of to be tokin'/toking from the stoner vernacular to toke, or to smoke cannabis. Hence, an "Alice is getting high (Alice be tokin' ) brownie". However, it is equally likely that the Alice be tokin' explanation is a folk etymology created by people who mis-heard Alice B. Toklas as Alice B. Tokin' , without any doubt due to the ubiquitous association of the works of Lewis Caroll with all things psychedelic.
"Toklas" may also be read as "Toke-less," as the brownies are smokeless.
The brownie, rather than the writer, lent its name to the 1968 film I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, in which a character portrayed by Peter Sellers becomes disillusioned with his mainstream life after falling in love with a free spirit, only to become just as disillusioned with the hippie subculture. Marijuana-spiked brownies are a key plot element.
See also
External links
- The Straight Dope column on Alice B. Toklas brownies (includes original text of recipe)
- Erowid.com recipes for cooking with cannabis, including Cannabis Brownies and Hash Brownies
"Alice B. Toklas brownie"