Quelle horreur!
While it has always been perfectly acceptable for non-food recipes to be included in traditional cookbooks — such as those for home remedies, many for home management pertaining to cleaning and preserving, personal care (including perfumes and cosmetics), and even for imbibing (alcohol production and tobacco products) — the line seems to been drawn at recipes for getting high.
Thus is was that a furor was created upon the publication of Alice B. Toklas’s cookbook in 1954, when it was discovered to contain this recipe for a dessert containing cannabis (which had been submitted by a friend). Toklas claimed she wasn’t aware it did. The upset seems to be not simply that such a naughty recipe was included in the book, but that it was expurgated from the American version.
Urban legend has it that Toklas got the last laugh (in absentia) by lending her name to the method, rather than the ingredient.
