PITTSBURGH — Desirous to make associates and take a look at new issues when she moved again to Pittsburgh after retiring 19 years in the past, Jan Haltigan turned to what’s all the time been a welcoming house to attach: her native library.
Rising up in Pittsburgh, she spent numerous hours studying books on the Carnegie Library on Fifth Road. So she was fairly certain when she walked by means of the doorways of Shaler North Hills Library on Mt. Royal Boulevard, she’d discover some sort of enjoyable.
It turned out to be Meals for Thought, the cookbook membership that grownup companies librarian Marie Jackson began to deliver collectively house cooks to swap recipes and share cooking experiences. Haltigan grew up cooking for her household and Jackson, regardless of not being a lot of a cook dinner herself, may speak anybody into something.
“So right from the get-go, it just felt right,” Haltigan says of the group, which since 2006 has met on the second Wednesday of the month to discover meals, cooking and cookbooks. She even satisfied her sister, Judy Enz, who lives in Shaler, to develop into a member, too.
Almost 20 years later, each girls are nonetheless at it, making an attempt their palms at cooking unfamiliar meals and celeb recipes every month for a potluck lunch that’s adopted by a dialogue on what they realized making the assorted recipes.
“It’s just a fun thing,” says Enz.
It’s additionally a good way so as to add slightly selection to your weekly menu for those who get uninterested in consuming the identical factor a number of days in a row.
“And you really fall in love with everyone,” she says with a smile. “It’s the highlight of my month.”
One tasty mashup
Ebook golf equipment have been round for many years and so has the custom of the fashionable potluck dinner, which rose in reputation throughout the Nice Despair to assist struggling households pool sources. The cookbook membership combines the 2, permitting members to get pleasure from a meal collectively whereas additionally introducing them to new cuisines, methods and flavors.
They are often held at libraries — there are greater than a dozen energetic golf equipment within the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh system — however they’re additionally popping up in bookstores. And a few cookbook golf equipment meet in members’ properties.
Each group does it slightly completely different. Some select a theme whereas others decide a specific cookbook, favourite chef or area of the nation or world. The aim is all the time the identical: to study one thing new about meals, nosh on a dish you may not in any other case attempt to above all, have some enjoyable and nice dialog.
Right here’s the way it typically works in Shaler and at many different libraries:
Members arrive with no matter dish they’ve made and set it out on a communal desk. If it’s from a cookbook, they bring about that alongside, too.
After the potluck meal (typically a buffet) and a few socializing, attendees get all the way down to the nuts and bolts of what they realized — the place to search out that one bizarre ingredient, how lengthy a dish took to make, what number of pots and pans ended up within the sink and maybe most vital: Would they ever make it once more?
At Fort Shannon Public Library, for instance, members typically cook dinner from a title chosen by circulation desk supervisor Donelle Mayausky, typically based mostly on options. Their decisions have embraced all kinds of cuisines, culinary traditions and well-known cookbook authors.
Since they began 5 years in the past, members have cooked from Snoop Dogg’s “From Crook to Cook,” Chrissy Teigen’s “Cravings” and meals blogger/social media influencer Tieghan Gerard’s “Half Bake Harvest” cookbooks.
To make it simpler to affix in, Mayausky sometimes reserves cookbooks from the library’s catalog to have readily available. Participation has grown from only a handful of attendees to start with to upwards of 25 contributors on the potluck dinners, relying on the subject.
Members of the 21/2-year-old Cooks and Books group at Cooper-Siegel Group Library in Fox Chapel, which meets on the second Thursday of every month, additionally typically cook dinner out of a particular cookbook. They tackled “Nothing Fancy: Unfussy Food for Having People Over” by Alison Roman in January and can discover “Ever-green Vietnamese” by Andrea Quynhgiao in March. Attendees may additionally get to experiment with recipes from a specific delicacies, chef or seasonal ingredient.
Data companies division head Kelley Beeson began the group in 2022 after having fun with nice success with an analogous group at Western Allegheny Group Library in Oakdale. The Fox Chapel membership attracts between 15 and 20 folks each month — everybody from skilled cooks to folks merely cooking for his or her households.
“It’s such a great way to bring people in,” Beeson says.
Libraries, she notes, present a good way for communities to attach. However cookbook golf equipment are additional particular.
In Fox Chapel, as in different libraries, “it has grown to mean a lot to the people who come, with the friendships that have formed.”
Make new associates
The chance to fulfill new folks is what drew musicians/performers Andres Zara and Audrey Pernell, who moved from Philadelphia to Bloomfield in August, to the 2-year-old Squirrel Hill Cookbook Membership at Riverstone Books.
“We love to cook and trying new recipes,” says Zara, who’s initially from Chile. “And we love to eat.”
Which they did loads of on the bookstore’s Valentine’s-themed occasion on Feb. 5. (It’s free, however bookseller Abby Sewell likes to know what number of will attend).
Requested to deliver recipes they love, the cooks proved fairly artistic. Garrett Lee, who lives within the South Facet and works in accounting, introduced ribs, whereas Tishanna Lewison of Rankin shared a candy bread she grew up consuming in Trinidad. The potluck additionally embrace crab palmiers, mango sticky rice, apple cake and roasted crimson pepper pasta.
Lewison’s dish was a favourite of her late maternal aunt Cynthia, from what she calls the “bible” of Trinidadian meals — “Naparima Girls’ High School Cookbook,” which was first revealed in 1988 and reissued in 2002. Crammed with dried fruits and grated coconut, the recipe match the theme completely, she says, as a result of “there’s a lot of love in this dish.”
Lewison, who works in well being care, says she stumbled upon the group on-line in January whereas looking for methods to reconnect together with her tradition. “And what better way to do that than with food?”
Carrie Helms was additionally seeking to meet extra folks when she began a home-based cookbook membership in 2017.
Whereas the Munhall resident had associates at Chatham College, the place she’s an affiliate professor of English and chair of the humanities division, she needed to broaden her circle.
As a result of she writes about meals — she has authored two books about cookbooks, together with the just-released “Unpalatable: Stories of Pleasure and Pain in Southern Cookbooks” — beginning a cookbook group with associates from Fb made sense.
“I never met anybody before they came to my house,” she remembers with fun, “but we had lots of things in common” — and doubtless wouldn’t have met in any other case.”
They often decide that month’s cookbook on the finish of the earlier assembly, and other people simply type of “claim” completely different dishes. There’s a baker who all the time will get dessert, some are the salad folks, others all the time select a protein. “Then we go in a predetermined direction to create a meal out of what seems to be cohesive, if not intentional,” she says.
Organizing a cookbook membership may be numerous work, Helms admits, nevertheless it additionally creates a invaluable connections. “I got divorced in the middle of it and one person in the group met their partner in the second meeting,” she says. The membership additionally noticed members by means of the pandemic and the lack of dad and mom.
“We’re like a team now,” she says. “We’re a community of people.”