124-year-old cooking club that's still going strong

Wichita, Kansas

TEXAS cattle, Turkey Red wheat and Pizza Hut all helped build this city on the Plains. And in its own quiet way, so has the Thursday Afternoon Cooking Club.

For the last 124 years, its members have cooked through generations of culinary trends both excellent and unfortunate, holding together what is said to be the oldest continuously operating club devoted to what its founders called the exchange of ideas in cooking and domestic science.

The club should "stand for the higher and better things in life", its founder wrote, but always honour practical cooking.

"What you are talking about is a live version of a community cookbook," said journalist Laura Shapiro, who wrote about women who cooked at the turn of the last century in her book Perfection Salad. "The fundamental thing going on there," she said, "is very personal cooking with huge emotional value."

The recipes the cooking club codified may best be categorised as an aspirational version of the middle-class culinary canon. It is food that fed a specific slice of America, reflecting not only the nation's penchant for fads and shortcuts but also the delicious power of a pork roast made by someone who cares. The recipes - like chicken Florentine phyllo pie seasoned with curry powder, or orange- scented muffins baked in extra-small tins - might have debuted in a traditional women's magazine or a mass-market cookbook, but they had enough appeal to be made over and over again.

The weight of all that history hovers over every luncheon. Sure, the members know a ladies' cooking club is anachronistic, but they feel like members of a baseball team on a historic winning streak. No one wants to mess it up. So they follow the rules as they were written in 1891.

Cooking club meetings have priority over all other engagements. New members can come in only through nomination and a vote. Three members host each luncheon and must cook and present the food themselves, serving plates from the left and removing them from the right. Older women who can't host luncheons anymore become treasured honorary members. And when a member dies, the cooking club is to deliver a meat-and-cheese tray to the family.

"Structure is really the reason it survives," said departing president Melody Moore, who is the kind of cook who will have warm muffins and homemade sand plum jelly waiting for guests who stop by for coffee.

The food can seem quaint in a world of ramen burgers and sous-vide machines. The club's 1922 cookbook holds excellent takes on stalwarts like date-nut bread and stewed chicken with hand-rolled noodles. Modern menus are kind of a mash-up between James Beard and the Pioneer Woman, with a little Barefoot Contessa thrown in.

A recent lunch menu at the ranch home of Barbara Mohney, 70 - a retired high school principal whose great-grandmother was a founding member - featured cold yogurt soup studded with avocado and chopped cucumbers and a crisp green "fiesta" salad with cold chicken tossed in lime-cilantro vinaigrette. Dessert, served in covered dishes donated by a member who died, was a strawberry pot de crème whose secret ingredient was a box of lemon Jell-O.

Gracious entertaining is a key component. "Today, so many people want to go out to eat, you can't find people who want to entertain," said Jodie Louis, a seven-year cooking club veteran, who at 83 is the oldest member.

But a certain degree of culinary exploration also matters. Members share the name of a new butcher or tips on finding ingredients they may not have heard of before, like soba noodles or Arborio rice. When raw kale first showed up on the menu six years ago, it was news to several members. "Many of the gals had never heard of kale salad," Ms Moore said. She even bought an extra bunch of kale to pass around.

The cooking club began as part of the larger women's club movement, which rose up after the Civil War and gained speed as kitchen mechanisation started to make life a little easier, the Gilded Age was starting to fade, and middle and upper-middle-class women searched for ways to expand their intellectual and social lives. The era produced the Junior League and other groups dedicated to civic efforts like building libraries and helping refugees, along with the League of Women Voters and the Daughters of the American Revolution.

The cooking club was much more singular in focus. Its founders feared that cooking was a dying art and that people who relied on servants couldn't cook at all. In the minutes of the first meeting, which featured lessons on homemade mayonnaise, oyster patties and angel food cake, there was much hand-wringing.

"The accomplishment of cooking is in nine times out of 10 sadly neglected among our young ladies," the secretary wrote, "and, I might truthfully add, with many of the ladies who depend entirely upon servants for all their good recipes and dainty dishes if perchance they happen to have any."

Jodie Mason, 86, an honorary member, explains the reason behind the club's birth more plainly. At the time, Wichita had a wave of new, wealthy residents who wanted to help move the city forward. To do that, it was going to need some young women who knew how to set a proper table and cook a proper dish.

"We had all these bankers and lawyers coming to town, and the only people around here for them to marry were ranchers' daughters," she said. "Those girls were farm girls, and they could do a lot of things - but they didn't know which fork to pick up."

Over the generations, cooking club members have stood witness to births and deaths and marriage troubles. They have looked out for one another and for their shared history. "There just comes a time," said Margaret Houston, 64 and a member for 18 years, "when your grandmother's recipes start to matter and you realise it's your job to protect them." NYT