Cookbook Club, Sao Paulo Edition: Jubilee

A spread of African-American dishes from our cookbook club meeting, including (from clockwise, top left) a lamb curry by Romano, fried chicken by yours truly, fried okra by Jonathan. and a broccoli salad by Kate

We were fortunate to arrive in Sao Paulo last July, just as the pandemic started to ease in Brazil. We hit the ground running, and we’ve gone basically a solid year saying YES to every single thing. Carnaval parade that lasts all night? YES. Wine dinner with multiple courses outdoors? YES. Sitting in lawn chairs in front of our condominium building while eating homemade tacos in our sweatpants and wearing masks in between? ALL THE YESSES.

But, now, our new normal is actually really close to regular normal. And so it is thrilling to me to attend an actual Cookbook Club meeting that wasn’t fraught with pandemic-laced logistics.

Cookbook Club attendees sample the spread

Longtime readers of this blog know the Cookbook Club concept well (see here, here and here for some of my favorite meetings). While I haven’t blogged about Cookbook Club meetings since we left London in mid-2020, we’ve had a smattering of outdoor meetings with various crowds when the pandemic allowed for it.

This time we “reviewed” Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, a James Beard award winning cookbook that celebrates African American recipes in a way that has previously been better memorialized through church and community organization cookbooks.

When you’re living in a foreign country and cooking the cuisine of another, sourcing ingredients is always a key piece of the puzzle in both selecting a cookbook but also the right recipes in that cookbook. Our Brazilian life doesn’t include readily available orange sweet potatoes, cornmeal, or vegetable shortening, so some of our attendees substituted with local white sweet potatoes, semolina, and good ol’ fashioned lard. This is a perpetual challenge, I think, of writing a globally appealing cookbook; you’ve got to make sure that if the ingredients your recipes call for aren’t easily found outside of a specific area of the country (or internationally), that substitutions can be made.

For me, the most heartwarming part of Cookbook Club is that everyone has contributed to the meal and therefore takes ownership and pride in the meal being served. It’s the potluck where everyone pulls equal weight, by putting their efforts into seeing a meal come to life. My husband and I have now hosted eighteen (!) of these meetings, and every time I’m blown away but how intentional and thoughtful folks are about what they bring, and the stories we can share by having experienced a cookbook together.