Project Website: cookingthehashishcookbook.com
Project Instagram: instagram.com/thehashishcookbook
The Hashish Cookbook, first published in 1966, is a product of the Beat Generation and responsible for bringing traditional, psychedelically powerful, recipes for marijuana edibles to the United States. Selling out its first two print runs, the cookbook introduced techniques for THC extraction that would become central to the production of edibles in America, with recipes reprinted in The East Village Other and High Times. The cookbook’s author is Panama Rose, the pseudonym of artist Rosalind Schwartz, a fact obscured until very recently. The cookbook was published by Schwartz’s partner, Beat poet and publisher Ira Cohen, following their return from Tangier. While Schwartz contends the project was negotiated as part of the break-up of their romantic relationship, it is one of the first examples of the dawn of factory-style collective creative projects ultimately “owned” by men of the Beat and Hippie movements. As a result, THC brings to the fore important questions about creative ownership and authorship, as well as troubles the prior understanding of the Beats as predominantly male, inwardly focused, and representing a stark contrast to hippies.
The work of Ira Cohen and Rosalind Schwartz reframes our understanding of the Beats in these and other ways. Their artistic collaboration and partnership reached from Beat Morocco to the Lower East Side and on to Katmandu. The work is an extension of the social circle of the Beats in Morocco. The trajectory of Cohen and Schwartz–their connections to performance artist and influence of Andy Warhol, Jack Smith and Velvet Underground original drummer Angus MacLise. We see them looking outward to pre-Islamic mystical traditions in North Africa, and connecting the Hippie Trail to the Velvet Underground. Unlike Kerouac, they are thrilled by the changes in the world in the 1960s, excited by the hippies and the values and possibilities they represented. Cohen and Schwartz show the continuity between Andy Warhol’s studio and the kitchens of Tangiers. Taken together, these links, embodied in the artifact of The Hashish Cookbook, challenge the declension narrative of the 1960s, which positions drugs as undoing the political commitments of the Civil Rights and the 1950s. In contrast, the era of psychedelics The Hashish Cookbook helped to usher in facilitated rich artistic production grounded in the countercultural values of a transnational orientation and attitude and a postmodern bricolage, bringing together multiple traditions.
Much of the research regarding Ira Cohen and the start of this project was conducted through my time at Yale University, after the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired the Ira Cohen Papers. Important to the project are the Ludlow Santo Domingo archives, and the Schlesinger Library invaluable research on cooking and cookbooks. I am already in contact with the Santo Domingo Family—which continue to be enthusiastic about psychedelic projects and endeavors through music, and countercultural artifacts.
While the Beinecke Library does indeed hold many of Cohen’s materials, without the archives found within the Schlesinger Library, and the specific resources of Harvard’s Divinity School, the project could not come to fruition. Both of these sources become invaluable as they contribute to the fascinating mix of contemporary and historical elements, both essential for the development of the project.
Andrew Green Hannon 