The Dish

A look inside Boston’s newest cookbook club

Parkside Bookshop recently started a cookbook book club hosted once a month — in a time where the food literary genre has grown tremendously.

Cookbook club group at Parkside Bookshop on Feb. 19, discussing "Zahav Home."

February 28, 2025

4 minutes to read

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No surprise here, but I love food and restaurants. Annie Jonas, my lovely, whip-smart colleague behind the Book Club newsletter at Boston.com, loves books. We both assumed we must know our way around a cookbook.

But, it turns out we are both just victims of the overwhelming food media market and suckers for pretty pictures. For this reason, we both own rarely-used cookbooks that serve more as coffee table decor than as a tool for building our home-cooking skills.

So naturally we went to a cookbook club held by Parkside Bookshop, a new addition to the South End. Bookseller Laurel Sgan decided to put the program together because she loves cooking, but has also seen a clear demand for books about food.

“Cookbooks and food lit are really hot right now. Our collection is always flying off the shelves.”

It may seem like cookbooks would be a dying breed, considering the proliferation of free recipes on social media, but cookbook sales actually grew from 2010 to 2020, “with sales numbers boosted even further by the pandemic,” according to The Guardian.

Annie wrote about the rise of niche bookstores around Greater Boston last year, with shops choosing to specialize in genres or highlight demographics. In our region, foodies are lucky enough to have not one, but two stores that focus on cookbooks and food lit, Over the Tunnel Books and Wild Child.

Laurel assumed there would be demand, but she didn’t want it to be a typical cookbook club-turned dinner party. She wants to dissect the cookbook like any other book.

Last Wednesday, that meant a group of more than a dozen homecooks chewing on questions about voice-y cookbook introductions, the approachability of each recipe, how long we spend cooking through a cookbook, and how pictures play a role in how we understand recipes. The inaugural meeting focused on “Zahav Home,” the newest cookbook from the award-winning team behind the always-booked Zahav in Philadelphia.

It wasn’t necessary that attendees actually look through the cookbook before the club or bring some food they cooked from the book, though both were welcome and felt like they added to the experience (we ate za’atar-rubbed lamb chops off of paper plates while discussing where to get hard-to-find ingredients in Greater Boston.)

Maybe I was out of my element — I should have known better, given the fact that I eat out at restaurants most nights and ordered catering for my last Thanksgiving — but at no point did I feel like I couldn’t participate.

Had Annie and I not gone, we probably wouldn’t have made hummus after hearing from the group that 1) the recipe was easy and 2) that these pro-home chefs just used canned chickpeas instead of the called-for dried beans. “It was so smooth, like at a restaurant,” Laurel noted.

A week later, Annie and I found ourselves in her kitchen, splitting a bottle of wine and figuring out how to use my immersion blender that I haven’t touched since I was gifted it three years ago. We improvised (Googling “how to strain something without a strainer”), we taste-tested it (the recipe needed more citrus, but sadly we were out of lemons), and we’re now very fond of my immersion blender.

Are we on our way to opening up Sarma’s competition? No! Did our hummus desperately need something to cut down the nutty flavor from the tahini? Absolutely. But our hummus was so smooth, and more importantly, I don’t think I would have ever attempted cooking a recipe from this cookbook without the encouragement from Boston’s newest cookbook club, open to all levels of home-cooking skills.

P.S.: The next cookbook club meeting at Parkside is March 24 at 6:30 p.m., with a focus on “Big Veg Energy” by Christina Soteriou.

For your reading list

🍲 Eat at these Mattapan restaurants
🍕 Even pizza isn’t inflation-proof
🍲 Eater’s 8 Dine Out Boston picks (Eater Boston)
🍳 The former slave who elevated oysters (Globe Rhode Island)

For your calendar

⚜️ Let the good times roll at Time Out
🍿 Trident’s Oscars watch party is back
🍔 Burgers & Burgundy at Eastern Standard
🌭 Sullivan’s opening day

What I’ve been eating this week: Chicken Karaage at Mimi’s Chūka Diner

As if I needed another reason to walk five minutes to Aeronaut Brewery, the new addition of Mimi’s Chūka Diner has made it even harder to say no to an after-work Robot Crush. Chūka is already a fusion of Japanese and Chinese cuisine, but the team behind this pop-up favorite fuse their concept even more with the American diner. Juicy, salty, and crispy, it’ll be a challenge not to order the Chicken Karaage again, but I also have my sights set on trying the Ebi Chili next.

— Katelyn Umholtz