How to create your own cooking club

And the pitfalls to avoid …

Xanthe with a tray of Brazilian cheese bread

I’ve mentioned my cooking club a couple of times over the past couple of years I’ve been writing this Substack and as the idea seems to appeal I thought it might be useful to go into how we set it up and how you could create one of your own.

The idea stemmed from the fact that I missed cooking with my late husband, Trevor and thought how nice it would be to get together with friends who enjoyed cooking too and make a meal together from time to time. 

Admittedly I’m lucky in that I have friends in Bristol who are seriously into food, three of whom (Xanthe Clay of the Telegraph (above), cookery writer and educator Jenny Chandler and chef Barny Haughton) are professional cooks and the other regulars - Caroline, Luke and me - sufficiently competent to keep up. (The core members cook, their partners join us to eat)

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So the first thing I would say is that you need a group with a broadly similar level of skill and experience - a group of existing friends who you eat with regularly is ideal. The idea is that it should be collaborative with no-one bossing the others about or being prima donna-ish. In fact we called it the Collaborative Cooking Club, CCC for short. There has been the odd outbreak of bossiness, I confess, not least from yours truly, but being friends we’ve worked out way through it.

You don’t want too many people in the group given that it’s all taking place in a domestic kitchen - in fact only three of us have kitchens of the right size. You draw the short straw if you host one as although we try and clear up as we go along there’s inevitably a pile of dirty dishes at the end of the evening so you need to take it in turns. Hosts do get the leftovers though.

Moqueca Brazilian fish stew

As I explained in this earlier post there’s always a theme to the evening. Since we started back in 2018 we’ve cooked Chinese, Brazilian, Mexican, Sicilian, Iranian, Palestinian and other middle-eastern food, classic French, and most recently English summer food. The idea being to make things you wouldn’t attempt on your own, preferably from scratch. Xanthe, by far the most intrepid of us, once memorably ground her own soy beans for tofu.

We all have a think about what we’d like to make, often inspired by cookery books or dishes we’ve eaten on our travels and knock around ideas on WhatsApp then one of the members, generally Barny, crafts it into some kind of menu so we don’t end up making absurd amounts of food or find we haven’t got time to make all the dishes we’ve planned.

If there’s time we make something two ways - Xanthe again made the addictive Brazilian cheese bread pão de queijo from a packet and from scratch 

We each take responsibility for a dish, though often work in pairs making it, particularly in the early days when there were a few more members than now though as I’ve said too many cooks isn’t ideal. I’d say 4, 6 max.

Everyone sources the ingredients they need, some of which can be quite obscure or only obtainable online so you need to plan ahead. But if someone’s going to a specialist retailer like a fishmonger they often buy ingredients for the others.

Barny now lives on the Welsh coast so was able to pick up the sensational fresh crab and sea bream we had the other day. Luke and Caroline’s son Hugo is for obvious reasons our resident greengrocer.

With the odd exception like puff pastry, no pre-prep is allowed - the idea is not to bring things we’ve already made but to cook together. We start cooking at about 4 and eat around 8. Ish. You might want to start a bit earlier depending on your menu. Wine is poured from around 6 which may occasionally result in a slight lapse in concentration.

At the start we held a session every couple of months but since lockdown when we had to stop for obvious reasons, it’s been more like twice a year. Three or four times a year - autumn, winter (such a nice thing to do in January/February), and early summer would be ideal - it just depends how busy you all are. 

Moneywise everyone’s asked to keep tabs on their spending then someone less mathematically challenged than me works out who owes who what. Partners pay their share. I get let off as I bring the wine. If you don’t have a handy wine writer as part of the group you will need to deputise someone to buy the booze.

L to R - Luke, Caroline and Barny

And that’s more or less it except to reiterate what an absolute joy it all is. The odd member drops by the wayside - our resident mixologist Barry sadly disappeared back to Ireland depriving us of his excellent espresso martinis and, as I mentioned, Luke and Caroline are off to live in Marrakech which may result in a special Moroccan edition of the CCC.

Can’t wait to make a pigeon pastilla from scratch - so long as it doesn’t involve catching pigeons . . .

Have you ever done anything similar? If so do share how it worked for you. 

PS I slightly regret that apart from photographs we haven’t catalogued our sessions more fully, jotting down the menus and the recipes we used. If you start one you might want to think of doing that.

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