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4 Classic Cannabis Cookbooks We Can’t Believe Exist

Stuffed mushrooms à la cannabis, stoned clams, and a legendary pot brownie recipe.
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This story is part of the Healthyish Guide to Cooking With, Eating, and Truly Enjoying Weed in collaboration with Broccoli. Check out this story and more in their spring issue, and click here to read more about how to make cannabis delicious.

A potboiler is a low-quality creative work that caters to the popular taste of the moment. These vintage cannabis-themed cookbooks are not that, but they are time capsules of a different moment in weed history — and they will certainly get your pot boiling (so to speak). Written decades before the legalization of cannabis was even on the table, they range in tone from novelty gift to manifesto, and though it’s unclear how seriously these were meant to be taken by their audience, the underlying message is one of normalization and acceptance. Since they come from a time before today’s strain connoisseurship, THC:CBD ratios, and fancy extraction kitchen gadgets, their offerings might be less sophisticated than modern cannabis cookbooks, but the devil-may-care approach to dosing makes cooking with weed seem fun, approachable, and nostalgically thrilling. Historically, cookbooks have been gendered reading material, and this list this lists shows that women have been interacting with weed—and taking a winkingly subversive approach to homey subjects—for decades/generations. Their recipes are served up with plentiful punning (some things about stoner culture never change), a playfulness that belies the controversiality of the topic like a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.

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    1/4

    The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, 1954

    Facing the deadline for her cookbook, Alice B. Toklas asked friends for help, and Brion Gysin supplied a recipe for “haschich fudge”— a treat based on majoun, a traditional Moroccan sweet. Toklas didn’t notice that “canibus” was the key ingredient, and when the recipe was published, controversy erupted. Most of the book is a tapestry of memories and musings from the author’s life with Gertrude Stein, but the fudge holds a special place in weed lore.

    Buy it: The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, used from $3.75.

  • 2/4

    Cooking with Grass, 1971

    No bigger than a child’s picture book, this “arresting collection of pot dishes” by Ardis Allen and Ramona Scott doesn’t contain a single ounce of weed; the inside dust jacket flap explains that the “pot is a put-on,” a clever joke for a book full of one-pot dishes. The authors promise that you can gift the book to your Aunt Elspeth without “landing the dear old lady in jail.”

    Buy it: Cooking with Grass, used from $20.

  • 3/4

    Cooking with Marijuana, 1974

    Penned by none other than Evelyn Schmevelyn (yes, she did that), this cookbook is filled with jovial 1970s illustrations and forward-thinking notes on edibles outlining the “spiritual and physiological” reasons one might choose to consume. The recipes range from baked apples to tacos, published with the hopes that “some bright day, marijuana should become legal.”

    Buy it: Cooking with Marijuana, used from $25.

  • 4/4

    Brownie Mary’s Marijuana Cookbook and Dennis Peron’s Recipe for Social Change, 1996

    Can a weed brownie change history? There’s a case to be made that Mary Jane Rathbun’s legendary pot brownies, baked for AIDS patients in 1980s San Francisco, helped to push medical marijuana into the mainstream. Her cookbook does not contain her famous brownie recipe (she hoped to sell it and share the proceeds when weed became legal), but captures a moment in history through news snippets, and offers a manifesto for cannabis activists.

    Buy it: Brownie Mary’s Marijuana Cookbook and Dennis Peron’s Recipe for Social Change, used from $20.

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