Category: Cookbook Club

Last night, we set our ovens to 350°F and opened the doors of the Food52 HQ to welcome our community of cooks in celebration of friends, food, and Hetty Lui McKinnon’s Tenderheart, our Food 52 Cookbook Club’s cookbook of the year. The cityscape in the background, the dripping candles, the vibrant chatter, and “This Charming Man” by The Smiths softly playing—it all painted a picture of gratitude. Here are three more gifts we’re appreciating from Thursday night:

Food isn’t just about sustenance—it’s a catalyst for thoughtful conversation, deeper connections, and an uplifting community. Friendships blossomed over plates of Tenderheart’s recipes for Mapo Eggplant, Tomato and Gruyère Clafoutis, and Hazelnut Hasselback Potato Gratin (her Thanksgiving must-have).

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Following a festive Friendsgiving, we're keeping the Food52 Cookbook Club gatherings going with a holiday-themed sweets swap! This time, we’ll be baking and sharing treats from Dolci! by Renato Poliafito. If you were a fan of his former Brooklyn bakeshop, Baked, or a stan for Ciao, Gloria in Prospect Heights, then you know Renato is a master of irresistible cookies, pastries, and savories. In his new cookbook, he gives Italian classics an American twist and on December 5 he’s coming to Food52 HQ bearing cookies from Dolci! to swap with our club.

Together we’ll pool our treats to create a holiday table filled with the sweet and savory (but mostly sweet) recipes from the book, like his Spumoni Loaf (essentially a giant rainbow cookie), his decadent Amaretto Caramel Brownies, and dozens of cookies.

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Food52’s Cookbook Club has been “meeting” for over seven years—on Facebook. Now, we’re finally gathering IRL! Together with NYC cookbook club organizer Stephanie Lau, we’re throwing a Cookbook Club Friendsgiving on Thursday, November 14 with special guest Hetty Lui McKinnon. You don't need to be a member to join us, but you'll want to get your hands on a copy of Hetty's book, Tenderheart, or hunt down some of her Tenderheart recipes online (we can help!).

We’ll be bringing and sharing dishes from this IACP Award-winning cookbook that our members have been cooking from as our “Book of the Year.” It’s a love letter to vegetarian cuisine and the produce that Hetty’s father sold and shared with family and friends, with an emphasis on Asian-influenced flavors and techniques. Her sweet and savory recipes cover 22 vegetables in all, including fall favorites like squash, sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and cauliflower. It’s the perfect book to dig into ahead of Thanksgiving to find your new favorite main, side, or dessert for this year’s feast.

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Months after we launched our Food52 Cookbook Club as a Facebook Group in 2017, our club moderator Linsey Sowa realized our pastry, pie, cake, bread, and cookie-loving members wanted a place to go deep on baking. So we began a dedicated Food52 Baking Club that followed the same rules.

Together, we’ve cooked through nearly 100 cookbooks together. To make the titles easy to find for our new and current members—over 32,000 and counting!—we're listing them here for easy access and inspo.

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Since the Food52 Cookbook Club launched as a Facebook Group in 2017, we've cooked through nearly 100 cookbooks together. To make the titles easy to find for our new and current members—nearly 40,000 and counting!—we're listing them here for easy access and inspo.

The way our members cook together across continents and time zones is simple: We post pics and reviews of the recipes we make from one of our chosen books. This could mean our "Book of the Month," our annual "Bonus Book," or any past cookbook we've covered for a Throwback Thursday or Throwback Month (August and February) post. Even if you can't get your hands on your own copy, we make sure you can still cook along with us, by excerpting recipes from our chosen cookbooks and only selecting titles that you can also download to a device.

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Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Six Seasons. Tenderhart. Bravetart. Dessert Person. Midwest Made. These are just a handful of the nearly 200 cookbooks the Food52 Cookbook Club and Food52 Baking Club have collectively cooked together since 2017. And each one of them is fair game to cook through during August.

Of all the times to join the clubs, this so-called “throwback month” (which we also hold in February) is probably the easiest time to get into the groove of our Facebook Groups. You are almost guaranteed to have at least one of the cookbooks from our list sitting on your shelf, ready to crack open again. And if you don’t, we always post recipes excerpted on Food52 that you can cook from. Case in point: I don’t own Sweet Enough, which was our July pick in the Baking Club, but I still made Allison Roman’s Blueberry Cornmeal Shortbread Tart from the book because we shared the excerpted recipe. Once everyone began raving about it and posting their own pics, it was only a matter of time before I felt compelled to try it, too. (Verdict: it’s easy and so, so good.)

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Portland, Ore. chef Naomi Pomeroy died tragically last week. As the news reverberated that the city had lost one of its most consequential, trail-blazing chefs, everyone whose life had been touched by her friendship and her cooking expressed their anguish. She was only 49.

“She was an extraordinary person. The whole city is grieving,” said Karen Brooks, the food editor of Portland Monthly, who broke the news about Naomi. She drowned while tubing on the Willamette River with her husband.

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