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We can attribute the whole edible craze to a refugee from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Alice B. Toklas, who fled her native city for Paris six months later and wound up there in the warm, welcoming embrace of another refugee, Gertrude Stein. Together, they invented the Twentieth Century, leisure class version!

The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, published in 1954, seven years after Stein’s death, although full of recipes, is really an autobiography, but since Ms. Stein had already published the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1933, Ms. Toklas called it a cook book!

Brion Gysin’s recipe for Haschich Fudge

(which anyone can whip up on a rainy day)

This is the food of Paradise – of Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises: it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies Bridge Club, or a chapter meeting of the DAR. In Morocco, it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather, and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of hot mint tea. 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 if you can bear to be ravished by ‘un evanouissement reveille.’”

Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverised in a mortar. About a handful each of stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of cannabis sativa can be pulverised. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.

Obtaining the cannabis may present certain difficulties, but the variety known as cannabis sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognized, everywhere in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa; besides being cultivated as a crop for the manufacture of rope. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called cannabis indica, has been observed even in city window boxes. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green.

Bonus content

The laborious and painstaking research required by this project is rewarded from time to time by the unlikeliest nuggets of wisdom found, such as this passage from the chapter called Servants in France:

“Helene was without humor and was always practical. When the Titanic sank, she said she thought the Anglo-Saxon gallantry of saving women and children first was unintelligent and unnatural. She believed families should be saved first, then single people.”

I suppose that each side of proposition will always have champions, but I like the emphasis it gives the family, which I believe is the best idea in human history. History must be on my side, too, because it travels through families, not people.

The opportunity to catch a Frank Zappa concert presented itself in the month before Nixon’s landslide re-election (CREEP was his MAGA), lest you think having Frank Z. in town makes life bearable – it still wasn’t, but was fun as hell to get away every once in a while. I was in my last semester of college, working on an underground weekly, where I was sports editor and a variety of other things on the distribution and sales end. It was enough to make me think I might score an interview.

When the gig was ending, he had an 8 or 9 piece, very jazzy, outfit – maybe called the Petite Wazoo? I told my pals to wait for me, I was going to talk to Frank. They did, and I did, too. I guessed the side door they’d be likely to exit, and after Frank climbed aboard the bus, still with a leg brace for the assault the year earlier in London, a large security guy blocked my entry. (Photo credit: By Helge Øverås – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1878412)

Knowing that the last thing he’d be interested in is another college kid asking inane questions about the true color of the sky, or if he knew the original lyrics to Louie Louie, I told the security guy not to worry, that I was a sports writer. Frank calls up front, What’d he say? Guy says he says he’s a sportswriter. Frank says, let him in.

I was under the influence of many foreign sources at the time, such as Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, and Julian Beck and the Living Theatre – they are American but didn’t act like it. I’d also recently spent a year as a philosophy major, which is a major obstruction along any path to Nirvana. So I opened my pocket notebook and asked Frank a series of questions as if for his high school yearbook profile. I threw in an existential question, for balance, and he played along like the sport I knew him to be.

Then he asked me if I really worked on an underground newspaper and I gave him the same sales pitch I did to everybody back then. I was very proud of our unbelievably naive attempt to take on the establishment in a one newspaper town. I asked if I could send him a copy for his feedback and he took the notebook and wrote his business address and F. ZAPPA, in case I’d forget. I did lose the notebook, though, and never got around to send him a copy because my interview got printed in a box in the middle of a full-page review of the concert by the paper’s hair care guy. Yup, we had a weekly column on how to take good care of your freak flag, your flowing sacramental locks.

Guy must’ve had hairballs in his ears because he wrote as stupid a concert review as I’ve ever seen – and I’ve written plenty bad ones myself. It would embarrass me to have Frank think I consort with such squares, and it would be fake of me to pretend that I don’t. Consequently, I’ve been stranded between the hooks of a dilemma for fifty years!

The CannaBiscuit Flour Power Hour aims to evoke awesome the way it was when you could turn the radio on and dance free all day long.

Our role model is King Biscuit Time, which has been on the job every day since 1941, when Sonny Boy Williamson II got the rock rolling!

CannaBiscuit what???

Some ask what a CannaBiscuit is, others ask what CannaBiscuit flour is good for – but, if you wonder “CannaBiscuit skip across water?” you’re likely to feel right at home here!

Whether you knead it or not, CannaBiscuit Flour adds power by the hour!