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Cookbook club is the new book club. Here’s how to host your first gathering.
If you love to try new recipes, cookbook club just might become your new book club. While regular book club has its draws—like the motivation to read, the hanging out with friends and the drinking of wine—cookbook club has just as many. Pull out those cookbooks that have been collecting dust on your kitchen shelves, call your friends and get your grocery list ready.
Here’s how to host a cookbook club gathering that your friends will want to continue month after month. No more putting off those dog-eared recipes!
What is a cookbook club?
A cookbook club is similar to a book club in that everyone “reads” from the same book. However, instead of reading the entire book, each member chooses one or two recipes to prepare for everyone to try together in a potluck-style setting. This way, you can divide and conquer the cookbook and taste more recipes from it than you would have been able to tackle on your own—at least, in a single day.
While it’s more conventional to have members mostly prepare their recipes at home and bring them to the gathering like a potluck, you could also have everyone bring the ingredients for their dish and prepare the recipes together in one afternoon or evening. This will feel like Thanksgiving morning, where you have so many loved ones in the kitchen at once preparing for a holiday meal.
Just like book club, you’ll have a lot to chat about—whether it’s the difficulty of each member’s assigned recipe, the author’s writing style, the images in the book, a new skill you learned, any new tools you picked up … all while you enjoy the delicious food.
How to Host Cookbook Club
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With a little bit of planning, it’s easy to host a cookbook club gathering. Here’s our complete step-by-step guide.
Step 1: Pick a cookbook
Well before the gathering, pick a cookbook that everyone agrees on. You can choose a book that focuses on a cuisine you want to familiarize yourself with, a specific appliance or tool such as an Instant Pot, or even a category of food, like appetizers or sides. The sky is the limit!
Just like in book club, some members may choose to purchase every book for themselves, while others may choose to find it at the library. As long as one person has the cookbook, you can take photos or make scans of all the recipes and distribute them, which allows people to see if they like enough of the recipes to make purchasing the cookbook worth it.
Editor’s Tip: Create a running shared note or document that allows the members to keep track of cookbooks they’d like to consider for the future gatherings.