"You may do anything you please except eat it"

April 6, 2022 8:53 PM

Alice B. Toklas reads her "Recipe for Hashish Fudge" (as provided to her by Brion Gysin).

(lifted from ubuweb's Twitter feed)

posted by thatwhichfalls (9 comments total)

Thanks for the small window into the past.
posted by Alex404 at 11:49 PM on April 6, 2022

Alice B. Tokeless?
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 5:03 AM on April 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

I note that the recipe recited calls for plain, dried cannabis, and not actual hashish.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:39 AM on April 7, 2022

You've read the recipe, now see the movie.
posted by condour75 at 7:25 AM on April 7, 2022

Woah, Ubuweb! That's a site I didn't expect to still be around.

The recipe doesn't seem to involve any chocolate. Nor heating. I'd read somewhere that decarboxylation was essential to activate the psychoactives. Perhaps this recipe is more important as a bridge between American hippie culture and an earlier era of intellectuals and cultural rebels.

I love Ms. Toklas' patrician voice. Is this recording an example of the Mid-Atlantic accent? She grew up on the West Coast of the US, in a Polish Jewish family, didn't move away until age 30. Perhaps her accent is more of a cultural signifier than a geographical one.
posted by Nelson at 7:29 AM on April 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I remember someone actually making the original recipe, back in ye old elder days of the web, and that it tasted better than they expected. But I think they may have cheated by reducing the spices, and that there was an argument in the comments with someone who had done it with the original spices and said that also worked. I wish I could find it, but that was in another country, and besides, the web is dead.
posted by tavella at 9:01 AM on April 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Nor heating. I'd read somewhere that decarboxylation was essential to activate the psychoactives

I can attest that, in the days when pot arrived from Colombia in the form of freighters full of bricks made from material that had been harvested months before, the product with seeds and stems removed was orally active without heat treatment or extraction of any kind. You could just eat it and it would work.

I have since seen many assertions that cannabis flower is not active unless it's been heated, to which I always answered "bullshit." I've recently seen some information suggesting that decarboxylation is important but that has become noticeable only with the common availability of very fresh material. Because decarboxylation also happens spontaneously at room temperature, only slowly. I bet you could take an eighth of fresh dispensary weed, put it on a shelf someplace not too cool for a year, and get high AF by eating the aged material raw.

In Toklas' day, no cannabis procured by anybody likely to buy her book was going to be fresh. Even the preparation, finely grinding the material, would accelerate the decarboxylation of any remaining THCA.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 11:00 AM on April 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

Because decarboxylation also happens spontaneously at room temperature, only slowly. I bet you could take an eighth of fresh dispensary weed, put it on a shelf someplace not too cool for a year, and get high AF by eating the aged material raw.

I'm very strongly reminded of tea, and oxidation therein. (I know, they're not the same chemical process, but as-described that sounds like overlap)

I'll leave it to a proper chemist to chime in, near as I know THC-A to Δ9-THC has a minimum activation energy but there could well be other factors at play that gets what you've observed.
posted by CrystalDave at 11:34 AM on April 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

so we're talking about cold brew weed? neato.
posted by ZaphodB at 11:39 AM on April 8, 2022 [1 favorite]