I Have Seen the Future of Entertaining and It's Cookbook Club

For me, anyway. You do you.

At the beginning of the year, I made 53 goals. I realize this sounds a touch insane, but in my defense, I divided them up into 5 sub-categories of goals (writing, family, relationships, self, house) and also some of them were not so much “goals” as “items on my never-ending to-do list” that I figured might carry a little more weight if I rebranded them. Some of these goals were also absolute softballs (“use the spa gift card I got for my birthday a few years ago,” wow, sure you can handle that?) and some of them were just so nebulous and handwave-y that it will be impossible to achieve them in my lifetime and they will likely still be languishing on my 2073 to-do list (“figure out how to be more patient,” for example. Has anyone ever?)

Anyway, one of my 2023 goals was “start a cookbook club,” which I realize is not, like, “cure cancer” or “achieve world peace” or whatever, but was something I had been interested in doing for a long time. I thought about this in January. I finally acted upon this in August. In the intervening months, I wish I could say I crossed off another 50 of my 53 goals, but mostly I did not. (I am currently at 16 and am not feeling super hopeful. On the upside, I have not yet used that spa gift card, so there’s one easy A in my future.)

So in August, I sent an email to 10 of my friends. The gist of it was “hey, remember when I asked you in January if you wanted to be in a cookbook club and you were interested-to-mildly-interested and then I did nothing about it for 6 months? I’m doing something about it now!” In the email, I outlined the general structure of cookbook club, which I kind of winged and kind of repurposed from the book club I’m in, which is phenomenally well-run (not by me, lol). Basically, what I outlined was this:

1. We meet every 6 weeks on a Thursday night at 7pm. Obviously, every date won’t work for every member; you just add your name against the dates you can make.

2. One person signs up to host on each date. The host is responsible for choosing the cookbook and opening up their house for the dinner party.

3. Everyone who's coming chooses a recipe to make from the cookbook.

4. On the night, everyone brings the dish they've chosen, plus whatever they want to drink.

Then I made and linked to a spreadsheet that looked like this:

I added a second sheet so people could write what they were bringing, as well as make note of any allergies or dislikes:

Pleased to report that nobody made anything that included cat hair.

I hosted our first meeting and, as you can see, I chose “Nothing Fancy” by Alison Roman. I loaned my copy to one friend, and took a picture of the table of contents — and then a few of the recipes she found appealing — for another. One person bought the cookbook, some found recipes from it online, and someone else got it from the library. Basically, it was pretty easy and accessible for everyone. As the month went by, I got super excited to see what everyone had chosen to bring and was pleased to find that we had a diverse group of appetizers, mains, sides, and a dessert. (Also a spritz bar. One of my friends brought a full-on spritz bar.)

So spritzy!

On the day of the dinner party itself, I was extremely chill. If we have ever had even a glancing interaction, you are now assuming that I’m straight-up lying, because I am many things in life but I am not chill, and I am especially not chill on the day I’m throwing a party.

But I was! And this is because the genius of cookbook club is that it’s like one of those chain letters from the 90s; basically, you do one thing and you get many things back in return! Send one envelope of stickers to someone’s friend-of-a-friend in Ohio because otherwise bad luck will befall you and everyone you love? Get nine envelopes of stickers in the mail! Send one email with the link to a cookbook? Get nine people arriving at your house carrying foil-wrapped dishes they made! Amazing!

Knowing that I only had one thing to make was extremely liberating; plus, it gave me extra time to make the table pretty, which is my favorite part of entertaining anyway.

Don’t worry, we removed that small tree in the middle before we started eating.

And the food! The food was really good. I kept saying to people, “wow, this is delicious, will you give me the recipe?” before realizing I already had the recipe. In the cookbook I had suggested.

All of this is to say that I think cookbook club is my new favorite way of entertaining— you have a guaranteed get-together with friends every 6 weeks, you only have to make one thing but you eat an entire dinner, and you get to discover new cookbooks and recipes. Plus if you’re the host, you get leftovers! (Did I have sesame-turmeric dip for breakfast the next day? Heck yes, I did!) The only downside is that I do now have to figure out who all these serving platters belong to and get them back to them, but it’s a small price to pay. I’ll just make that a 2024 goal.