At Philly’s only cookbook store, the book club isn’t just a roundtable, it’s a potluck

On an unseasonably warm Sunday evening in March, Daryl Chen set down a bowl of japchae on a makeshift dinner table inside Binding Agents, a cookbook store in the Italian Market. As soon as she pulled back the plastic wrap to reveal a family-sized serving of the glossy Korean sweet potato noodles, she was surrounded.

Chen, 55, was beaming. “It’s a hard time with what’s going on in our government, in our country,” she said. “I’m also looking for a job — and it’s a lousy time to look for a job — so it just felt like a real treat to make something and to have it turn out to be the kind of thing where it’s like, ‘I made this.’”

Later that night, during a roundtable discussion about the cookbook Banchan with author Caroline Choe, Chen whipped a Y-peeler out of her bag. The room erupted into laughter. She explained that the peeler came in handy when she noticed the japchae recipe called for a carrot cut into matchsticks. “It’s my favorite tool and I think everyone should own it,” she said.

The Binding Agents cookbook club is one of many book clubs across Philadelphia. But these monthly events, hosted by store owner Catie Gainor, are a food-filled soirée where home cooks are invited to bring a dish from the featured book. Since January, members have cooked from Özlem Warren’s Sebze, Hetal Vasavada’s Desi Bakes, Caroline Choe’s Banchan, and, most recently, Melissa Clark’s Dinner: Changing the Game.

Hosting a monthly book club was always part of the plan for Binding Agents, Gainor said. While cookbook clubs have been around for decades, Gainor noticed a growing number of them online, especially after the pandemic ushered in a new wave of get-togethers, from dinner parties to potlucks. “I just thought it was a really special way to connect with other people who love to cook and eat,” she said.

Since January, when she soft-launched the club with Sebze, attendance has grown — so much that there is often a wait-list for each event. For $15, attendees can reserve their spots ($40 will get you the cookbook as well).

In the first year of the pandemic, as more people spent time at home, cookbook sales spiked about 16%. They remain steady, fed across the country by cookbook stores, more literary formats like hybrid memoirs, and rising stars like By Heart author Hailee Catalano.

Gainor suspects the continued sales are driven in part by how people’s relationships to cookbooks changed during the pandemic. “The democratization of cooking and recipes — made possible by the internet, but now reflected, and in some ways, better reflected, by cookbooks — both cultivated and responded to the public‘s desire,” she said.

The Binding Agents club isn’t necessarily tied to new releases. Instead, Gainor lets the season and the energy of that month guide her. “February is a sweet month and I didn’t want it to be Valentine’s coated,” she said. “But I did think there was something cute about the month of February having a sweet spin.” So everyone made cookies, cakes, tarts, and pies from Hetal Vasavada’s Desi Bakes.

Currently, each event is capped at 20 participants (in April, 40 people participated in Dinner: Changing the Game across two sessions). Attendees are required to participate in the potluck, but Gainor wants all levels of home cooks to feel welcome. “I try to pick books with range, so that might look like assembling a dip or a beverage, or it might look like manti [a Turkish dumpling],” she said.

A week before each cookbook club, Gainor sends an email linking to a spreadsheet with dish categories and sign-up slots. Over the course of a couple of hours, the slots fill in with the names of dishes. For the Banchan club in March, Pat Feehan, 34, a regular, signed up to make kimchijeon (kimchi pancake). He accidentally arrived an hour early. His scheduling error turned out to be a stroke of luck: Feehan said he wasn’t “super happy” with how his dish turned out, so he decided to use the extra hour to go home and make a new one. “For something like this,” he said, “there’s a little pressure to make something good.”

Pressure aside, Feehan said he returns each month happily because “it’s a lot of fun to meet people, especially as an adult when it’s harder to make friends.”

The opportunity to meet new people is also what drew in Dana Levy, 35. Levy moved to Philadelphia during the pandemic and struggled to meet people around her own age, especially as a new parent. “Having specific community events that don’t just ask you to show up but ask you to do something that you already like is incredible,” Levy said. “We’re all here because we love food and cookbooks.”

When it was her turn to discuss the kimbab she made, she said she was excited to make it from scratch because it’s one of her favorite Korean dishes. “When I picked up the book, I saw that it recommended that I make a trip to an Asian supermarket to get some precut vegetables. That was my first trip to H-Mart, which is really exciting!”

“It was a little emotional to hear my recipes being said out loud and why you decided to make them,” Banchan author Choe later said. “This was emotionally fulfilling as an artist, but also as a chef and as a writer. This kind of takes it to a whole other level.”