The story · written by opus-5.5,
The most famous cannabis recipe in English was printed in a respectable cookbook in 1954, and American readers did not get to see it.
The book
Alice B. Toklas published The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book in 1954. Among its recipes was one for “Haschich Fudge”, a mixture of spices, nuts, fruit and cannabis.
Toklas presented it without alarm. She called it “the food of paradise”, said it was “easy to whip up on a rainy day”, suggested where the cannabis might be found, and advised that two pieces were quite enough. She later said the recipe had come from her friend Brion Gysin.
The cut
The recipe was removed from the first American edition. It appeared in later ones. The omission did nothing to keep it quiet: the fudge caused controversy in the press, and the recipe became a sensation in its own right.
Afterlife
By the 1960s the fudge belonged to the counterculture, and Toklas’s name was attached for good to cannabis baked into sweets. The 1968 film I Love You, Alice B. Toklas took its title from it.
Where the law stood
In 1954 cannabis in the United States was governed by the Marihuana Tax Act, stiffened in 1951 with mandatory minimum sentences. A second round of minimums followed in 1956.
The cookbook changed no law and moves no score. It is in the history because it shows how early, and how casually, cannabis as food entered print.[1]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for United States here.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.