Book clubs transform regular meetings into taste nirvana
By Tom Valeo, Special to the St. Petersburg Times
In a famous episode of
Seinfeld, George Costanza brings a pastrami sandwich to bed, along with his girlfriend. "Food and sex; those are my two passions," he explains to Jerry. "It's only natural to combine them." These days members of book clubs who are passionate about books are doing the same thing. Well, without the sex. They're combining literary discussions with food inspired by the book they've read. While most clubs have some type of refreshments, others go the extra mile and meticulously match cuisines with contents. We've even heard of punitive book clubs where the steadfast rule is: If you don't read the book, you have to make the food. That's one way to make sure people are prepared.
Some books provide obvious ideas such as Kate Jacob's
Comfort Food (Putnam, 200
about a TV cooking show host obsessed with birthday cake. (See accompanying story and luscious coconut cake recipe.) Other books don't provide such clear direction.
Kristin Henderson's post-9/11 memoir
Driving by Moonlight (Seal Press, 2003) is about a cross-country trip she makes with her German shepherd after her husband is shipped off to Afghanistan with the Marines. The author struggles with her Quaker heritage and the and the call to war, concluding that "the world needs both Quakers and Marines. So does my marriage. And within myself, so do I." Whew. What does a book club have for dinner after something like that?
"We had the author," Amanda Moonitz of Tampa says. "One of our book group members e-mailed Kristin, who was in Florida at the time, and she came and joined us for dinner. After she wrote her next book,
While They're at War, she was coming to Inkwood Books in Tampa on her book tour, and she joined us for dinner again. We now have our own author."
One book club in Tampa takes its cooking as seriously as its reading. The last chapter of
The Glass Castle, a memoir by Jeannette Walls, inspired a complete Thanksgiving dinner at a recent gathering.
"My husband Joe, who loves to cook, essentially replicated the menu, right down to the homemade apple pie," said Judy Davis McCormick, who hosted the meeting at her home in Tampa. "I even had the perfect squash casserole made from my mom's recipe. Everyone wanted the recipe for that."
The menu also included turkey, sausage dressing, mustard creamed onions gratinee, and cranberries with pecans.
Because the book mentions geodes, a type of hollow rock, McCormick decorated the dining table with pots of crystals surrounded by smooth river stones.
That may have been more elaborate than usual, but almost all of the meetings of this group, which has no name, include memorable food.
The perfect setting, the perfect servings
When McCormick's group read
Audrey Hepburn's Neck by Alan Brown, members ate Japanese foods mentioned in the book, including sushi, yakitori (skewered chicken), edamame (soybeans in the pod), red bean paste buns, gyoza dumplings (with pork and cabbage filling), green tea tiramisu and, of course, sake.
When they read
A Painted House by John Grisham, which is set on a farm in Arkansas in 1952, McCormick and another member, Nancy Savage, served Southern cuisine including black-eyed pea cakes, turnip greens, cheese grits, sweet potato casserole, corn bread, chocolate foolers (fold-overs) and chess pie (a custard pie that takes cornmeal instead of flour).
"We're both from Arkansas, so we used the recipes we grew up with," McCormick says. "We can't remember serving any meat, so we must have done 'poor Southern.' They were the original vegetarians."
And when they read
Our Founding Mothers by Cokie Roberts, McCormick and her husband turned to
The Williamsburg Cookbook for inspiration, creating a menu that included cheddar cheese and olive balls, meat patties in crust, Virginia ham biscuits, sweet potato muffins and Williamsburg pecan bars.
"I love Colonial Williamsburg," McCormick says. "My husband and I have visited there several times, and this gave me an excuse to cook some of my favorite foods from there."
All the meals included one other essential ingredient: wine.
"We always have an unlimited supply of wine," McCormick says. "My husband calls us a wine club that reads books."
Some meals remain simple and austere. When the group read
The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom, a novel whose main character was a maintenance man at Ruby Point Amusement Park, they had cotton candy, corn dogs, popcorn and other amusement park food.
Creative combos served your way
All of this sounds like a pretty good idea to the people here at Taste, so every month we're going to name a book that seems to be popular with area book clubs and suggest a recipe or two to go with it.
(See first column, top right.)
Some will be loose associations a Middle Eastern dish like baba ghanouj to go with
The Kite Runner, perhaps, or an African peanut stew to go with China Achebe's classic,
Things Fall Apart.
Whatever the combo, the goal will always be the same: to enhance the discussion of the book with food worth talking about.
We'll also keep in mind that not everyone has the time or inclination to cook from scratch. Our suggestions will include takeout ideas, too.
Who knows? Someday we might even get an opportunity to suggest a pastrami sandwich.
Tom Valeo is a freelance writer based in St. Petersburg.
Linear Mode
