Food Tips
If you like to cook and have foodie friends, here's what you need to do
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Food Tips
If you like to cook and have foodie friends, here's what you need to do
Combining your favourite things—cooking, trying new foods, spending time with friends—a cookbook club is a recipe for success. It mixes the best elements of a traditional book club and potluck dinner together for a fun night in.
All too often, the cookbooks we'd purchased with the best of intentions end up languishing under-used on the shelf. And potluck dinners (though a great concept) frequently result in an overabundance of pasta salads, or last-minute additions bought from the store. By contrast, imagine a dinner party in which you only have to contribute a single dish, but you get to enjoy a wide variety of interesting and mouthwatering food—all the while expanding your horizons as a cook. This, my friends, is the beauty of the cookbook club. It has all the best elements of traditional book clubs and the potluck dinner,
The concept is simple: with a small group of food-focused friends, you choose a single cookbook and everyone makes a different recipe from this book; on a chosen day, you all gather together to feast on the fruits of your labour.
Why start a cookbook club?
Cookbook clubs offer a great way for beginner and expert cooks alike to come together over a single meal. Those who are just getting started with cooking can follow a given recipe to the letter, and those who are more comfortable in the kitchen can deviate from or adjust a recipe if they so prefer.
Having several people cook from a single book is a great way to gain new perspectives into cooking techniques, the process of recipe writing/testing, and to think about what makes a cookbook successful. As you eat dinner, it's helpful to go around the table and have each member discuss the recipe they made, what worked or didn't work for them in terms of the method, and what they did (or sometimes didn't) enjoy about the cookbook overall.
The best recipes often become home staples. At every meeting, there are usually one or two dishes that really stand out, and whoever cooked them can then share the recipe with the group, so that people can later reproduce them at home. Even the most ardent food-lovers can sometimes fall into a recipe slump, cooking a variation of the same dishes on repeat, but having a cookbook club helps provide motivation and inspiration to mix up one's regular routine.
How do I start one?
1. Choose a cookbook: It's not often that more than one member will own the same cookbook, so use your public library system whenever possible to obtain more copies of the chosen book. It helps to choose cookbooks that have multiple copies available in your city. E-books are also a great resource. If your library system isn't that comprehensive, though, simply adjust the parameters of your club and choose a magazine (or a website) instead. Members can divvy up the recipes that appear in a particular issue (or on a culinary website) to cook from.
2. Rotate the hosting duties: Changing up the setting of your meetings ensures that no one member is unfairly burdened with the task of hosting—and the subsequent dishes that come with the cleanup. When choosing recipes, it's a good idea for the host to be responsible for the dish that acts as the ‘main' (since they have the least far to travel), thereby freeing up other members to bring more portable dishes such as sides, starters, drinks, and dessert.
3. Communicate: Social media platforms can help make a group like this more manageable. For example, you can use Facebook to create a group page, then organize individual meetup events within that page's parameters. This allows other group members to easily see how many people are attending in order to scale the size of their dishes accordingly, and each member can post about what they're bringing to avoid having duplicates. If Facebook isn't your thing, though, simply organize it on the social media or event-planning platform of your choosing, or use a group email thread, or even organize it by phone (with the host taking the lead).
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