Potluck cookbook club starts with Angelou
Here’s a poll for all the home cooks out there. How many cookbooks do you own? Of those, how many do you cook from on a regular basis?
I have 13 and cook from one of them regularly. They look quite pretty sitting in rainbow order on my kitchen shelf, but they hadn’t been getting much attention. That is, until a friend stumbled across a Serious Eats article about cookbook clubs.
The idea behind these gatherings is simple: The host chooses a cookbook, everyone picks and prepares a recipe from the book and brings it to share, potluck style.
For our inaugural club meeting, we cooked from Maya Angelou’s “Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes,” which a friend selected in celebration of Black History Month as well as for its soulful, Southern-inspired recipes. This book more than makes up for in beautiful writing what it lacks in food photos. The stories reveal fascinating nuggets of Angelou’s life and made for great conversation at our communal table.
Collectively we cooked 12 dishes, purposefully choosing a variety of entrées, sides, salads and desserts to create a balanced feast. I made two dishes for the event and chose two more that were so good, I decided to repeat them at home to share here.
Savory Fried Meat Pies were a much-loved main dish. A mixture of shredded pork and caramelized onions is kissed with cinnamon and red pepper flakes before being folded into a tender biscuit dough and pan-fried until golden brown.
Being a group of mostly dietitians, we made a few ingredient substitutions along the way, but the flavors were kept true to Angelou’s original recipes. Here, whole-wheat pastry flour and non-hydrogenated vegetable shortening were used in place of white flour and lard.
A vegetable-laden Minestrone Soup, slowly cooked with care, was a steaming presence on the crowded table. This colorful array of veggies in a tomato and herb broth with tender, swollen macaroni noodles and topped with grated Parmesan cheese, is the perfect dish for a chilly, late-winter day. Lima beans were especially tough to find, but shelled edamame made a respectable replacement.
This recipe is accompanied by a funny tale of a restaurant mix-up between Minestrone and Minnesota Wild Rice that Angelou shares in her signature autobiographical voice.
The book’s final recipe, Mixed Salad with Feta and Golden Raisins, came about through Angelou’s quest to make vegetarian dishes good enough to win over any meat eater. Our group loved this salad for its combination of tender greens, salty feta, sweet raisins and bright, lemony dressing.
Watercress, like arugula, has a hint of peppery bite and impressive nutritional benefits. Mark my words, this aquatic green just may be the next kale.
The very first recipe to catch my eye and pique my appetite when browsing through “The Wel- Table” was humble Banana Pudding. This Southern classic spoke to my nostalgic side with its layers of bananas and vanilla wafers.
Baking the custard topped with a thick layer of meringue forced me outside the literal box of pudding mix I used to make as a kid. It was well worth the effort; this dessert sings comfort food, updated for adulthood by way of homemade compocome nents.
The proof is in one of the cookbook’s stories, titled “Good Banana, Bad Timing”; this is the dish Angelou made right after she discovered her boyfriend with another woman.
There are many reasons why a cookbook club is a magical concept. First, you cook just one dish and receive the pleasure of trying a dozen more. Second, it encourages members to go beyond their culinary comfort zones, to cook dishes they otherwise may have only swooned at the glossy photos of.
A complicated or intimidating cookbook gets
its moment in the sun as a group of food lovers pores over its pages and decides which recipes to bring to life. New friends are made, new cuisines are tasted and a new little community is formed.