Food: Alice’s Cookbook

April has been a big month in the life of Alice May Brock, 28. She met her husband in April (1961) and left him in April (1968). She opened a small Stockbridge, Mass., restaurant in April (1966) and closed it in April (1967). She was hired for the movies in April (1968), as the nominal leading lady (a professional actress played her role) in the Arlo Guthrie hit, Alice’s Restaurant. She can look forward to still another big April (1970)—when she pays her income tax.

Now that Alice Brock and her shortlived hash house have been immortalized in song and screenplay, she is making the most of it. She is franchising a coast-to-coast chain of Alice’s Restaurants; the first four (in Boston, New York, Nashville and Los Angeles) are scheduled to open this year. Money is already pouring in from her Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook (Random House; $5.95), which has a first printing of 40,000 copies.

Short on recipes (fewer than 100 in all), long on pictures (Alice in low-cut dress, shot from above; Alice in tight-fitting pants suit, shot from below), the cookbook is hardly aimed at self-styled Escoffiers or even Julia Children. “Recipes aren’t as important as the philosophy behind them,” says the author. “Good food is food you eat with your friends, when everybody is having a good time. So making sure that everyone is having a good time is the key to a successful meal.”

Pot and Potted. Alice, who got her start as a sous-chef in the kitchen of a girls’ reformatory in Hawthorne, N.Y. (“I was a rotten kid”), dismisses international cuisine in four sentences. “Don’t be intimidated by foreign cookery,” she writes. “Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good.” She is similarly cavalier about the tools of her trade. “Other books say, ‘Do not, do not! Do not try to make a souffle unless you have a souffle dish.’ They make cooking sound like a fantastic science, and that makes a lot of people afraid to cook.” Never fear, is Alice’s message; to party givers who run short of plates, she suggests improvising with tinfoil-lined automobile hubcaps.

For all her iconoclasm, Alice hews to a couple of basic rules for her cookery. For one: “You have to have one really big pot, something you can boil macaroni and rice in, cook corn-on-cob in, wash your hair in, wash your dog in. Get one that’s big enough so that a mop will fit.” For another: “Wine and liquor are great for cooking, and also for the cook. In fact, more important for the cook than for the cooking.” Thus armed, pot and potted, Alice’s disciples are advised merely to improvise and advertise. “If you tell people that what you’re cooking is absolutely fantastic—if you squeeze their arm and whisper in their ear that this meal is the greatest yet—they’re going to love it. They’ll never suspect that that strange taste in the potatoes is just that you’ve burned them.”