Since The Book Club Cookbook was first published in 2004, we’ve been fortunate to continue our dialogue with thousands of book discussion group members. We’ve met our readers at hundreds of book events across the country, corresponded with them online, and met them on Facebook and over the phone. Our website, www.bookclubcookbook.com, has turned into a virtual community with more than 100,000 visitors each year. There you can find news and information about authors, books and other book clubs, peruse recommendations from book clubs, find new recipes to pair with your reading, and see what popular authors have to say about their new books.
With access to hundreds of book clubs at our fingertips, it was a cinch to solicit feedback for the new titles to add to the second edition of The Book Club Cookbook. Book clubs that gave us feedback almost a decade ago, such as the Bookwomen of Encinitas, California, and the Last Thursday Book Club of Albuquerque, New Mexico, were more than happy to help us with new suggestions from their past ten years of reading. And we identified new book groups who wanted to join this effort, such as the Dixie Divas of Birmingham, Alabama, and the Eight Amigas Book Club of Austin, Texas. For this new edition, we surveyed more than five hundred book clubs. The most oft mentioned reading favorites from this round of surveys included Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, and The Help by Kathryn Stockett.
We also learned that many titles featured in the first edition, such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, remain book club favorites, with many groups now reading them for the first time. Some titles that were just emerging when our book was first published, such as Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, have since become “book club classics,” read far and wide year after year.
Readers tell us they especially enjoyed learning why authors chose to incorporate certain foods into their books, and reading about and preparing the recipes authors contributed to our first edition, such as Sue Monk Kidd’s honey cake paired with The Secret Life of Bees or Lalita Tademy’s peach cobbler paired with Cane River. Author recipes making their first appearance in The Book Club Cookbook include Emma Donoghue’s Jack’s sixth-birthday cake with Room, Markus Zusak’s vanilla kipferls (crescent cookies) with The Book Thief, and Annie Barrows’s potato peel pie and non-occupied potato peel pie with The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, among many others. Readers’ fascination with author recipes has been so strong we recently launched a “Featured Authors and Their Recipes” page on www.bookclubcookbook.com.
We’ve added several new sections to this edition. Whether your group is newly formed or a veteran group looking for ideas to spice up the book club experience, check out our “Recipe for a Book Club.” And for advice on pairing food and literature in creative ways, please browse our “Creating Novel Noshes” section.
Finally, many readers have suggested that photographs would add life to The Book Club Cookbook, and in this second edition you’ll find images that capture the variety and imagination of the foods featured in the book.
Some fans of The Book Club Cookbook may not know that we have written two other books in the years in between the first and this second edition: The Kids’ Book Club Book is a complete guide to creating and running reading groups for children and young adults, and Table of Contents is a compendium of recipes and reflections by fifty contemporary authors.
When we first started working on The Book Club Cookbook nearly a decade ago, we had no idea that the effort would lead to the creation of a wonderfully diverse, nationwide community of readers who shared our passion for pairing good food and good books. It’s been a very gratifying journey and we’re happy you have shared it with us.
Enjoy the adventure of discovering a new, delicious angle on literature. Happy reading, and bon appétit!
—Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp