Community cookbooks reborn of scarcity and sharing
Chef and artist Krystal Mack’s favorite cookbook has no beautiful photos of food. Its recipes aren’t professionally tested. Its authors aren’t food writers or restaurateurs.
It’s a 1988 community cookbook called “Naparima Girls’ High School Diamond Jubilee 1912-1987,” filled with contributions from students and staff of a school in Trinidad and Tobago that she has never visited. The paperback has a loud magenta cover, and the recipes are basic: Caribbean rice and peas, teriyaki chicken, vanilla poundcake.
Now, isolating at home in Baltimore, Mack is making a community cookbook of her own, “How to Take Care,” that includes poetry and activities. The book, released last week as a digital edition, costs $5, with all proceeds going to national organizations supporting victims of domestic violence.
The more than 25 recipes, gathered from fellow artists and chefs, are simple and inexpensive to make, such as a savory fruit salad and a ginger-tea recipe that asks readers to “sing or chant, so that those vibrations are also infused into the brew.”
“These are cookbooks that put the power back into the people’s hands,” Mack said. “Versus opening up a cookbook from today that’s like, ‘Oh, you don’t have a Pacojet or a dehydrator?’ ”
In an age of celebrity chefs, glossy coffee-table books and multimedia cooking websites, the community cookbook may seem an anachronism, a dog-eared remnant of church suppers and Junior League fundraisers. But the coronavirus pandemic has given the form a new life, as co-workers, choirs, mosques, friends and even complete strangers seek new ways to connect from a distance and swap recipes.
These cookbooks look different from their predecessors, showing up more often on Google Docs than on physical pages, their recipes sometimes presented as videos. And they diverge from the flawlessly styled photographs and aspirational tone of the contemporary cookbook — instead taking a practical and personal approach, and documenting life not as it could be, but as it is.
“We are at this powerful moment of living through an epic part of history,” said Mack, 34. Cookbooks like hers are “time capsules, so we can look back and see how we chose to survive and come together collectively.”
One early community cookbook that became popular in the United States was “A Poetical Cookbook” by Maria J. Moss, published in 1864 to raise money for injured Union soldiers during the Civil War. Later in that century, suffragists produced cookbooks to spread their message. Since then, institutions including churches, libraries and local governments have relied on community cookbooks to raise money and share recipes.
The format grew less popular as platforms such as Instagram and Facebook have become robust online forums for home cooks. But now, the community cookbook is becoming part that conversation.
In mid-March, the pediatric residents at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, were all at home, waiting to be called as backup. One of them, Cyrelle Fermin, started posting recipes to the residents’ WhatsApp group; she turned that into an online spreadsheet where about 20 of her co-workers have submitted recipes, along with photos of themselves making one another’s dishes.
Since then, most of the residents have worked shifts in the hospital, but Fermin said they’re still cooking and exchanging recipes.
“As health care providers, we are immersed in a lot of scary things on a day-to-day basis,” she said. “It’s cathartic to channel our energies” toward a tangible activity such as sharing recipes.
At the Valley Ranch Islamic Center in Irving, weekend prayer sessions usually bring together about 1,000 Muslims, and are a primary means of collecting donations. Now that those gatherings are canceled, Nye Armstrong, the mosque’s creative director, is asking members to email recipes and photos so she can design a digital and print cookbook to be released around the end of Ramadan, in late May, to raise money. She also hosts weekly teatimes on Zoom where 15 to 20 members eagerly discuss their recipes.
Though the cuisines and dishes vary widely, the community cookbooks share one goal: comfort. They’re filled with straightforward recipes, often from childhood or previous generations, that have been made time and time again.
The 60-member Seattle Ladies Choir is creating a digital community cookbook called “Comfort Food in Challenging Times.” Nani Vishwanath, 33, who is leading the effort, said most members turned to their roots for their submissions — she shared a recipe for upma, an Indian porridge, an Italian-American member submitted one for cacio e pepe pasta, and someone from Texas offered a peach cobbler.
“It is a different way of getting to know each other,” Vishwanath said. The cookbook will also include sheet music for members’ favorite arrangements, “to make it feel like ours.”
Many of the new community cookbooks call for inexpensive, shelf-stable ingredients because access to food is growing more difficult for many people.
This is especially important to Jillian Norwick, a supervisor at NADAP, a social service agency in downtown Brooklyn, who is putting together a cookbook for her clients, all low-income New Yorkers. Most are on food stamps and can no longer meet with their case managers in person. Norwick thought a community cookbook could be both a helpful resource and a way for clients and managers to stay in touch.
On top of the limitations posed by the coronavirus, her cookbook must consider that not everyone in the program has a kitchen, measuring utensils or fresh produce. The recipes include a pea dip that can be made with frozen peas and blended with a fork, and ideas for jazzing up bottled tomato sauce.
“We can give them all the emergency resources,” said Norwick, 27, but a cookbook “is this very human way of sharing.”
Community cookbooks can also be whatever their creators want them to be. There are no rules, no marketing metrics, no need to make recipes fit into categories.
Rhia Jade, an artist in New Orleans who is organizing a digital cookbook for queer people called “Queers in the Kitchen,” said that was the appeal of the medium. It’s fine for a book to resonate with just a small group, Jade said, or for the stories and recipes to feel relevant only to this moment.
A community cookbook is more about coming together than producing a polished product for a mass audience, Jade added — it’s about “being meaningful to whoever wants to find meaning in it.”