Borough Market’s Cookbook Club Goes Digital: Community of home cooks open to new members at no cost

London’s Borough Market is renowned for bringing people together over a shared love of great quality food. Now its longstanding Cookbook Club is moving online, while the UK remains in lockdown, giving everyone from experienced home cooks to kitchen novices the chance to get involved.

Borough Market’s Cookbook Club is organised and hosted by award-winning food writer Angela Clutton. The club is free to join and designed for anyone who loves good food, good cookery books and good company. Each event celebrates a selected cookery book, and members are sent a couple of recipes in advance from the book to cook at home, which they then discuss with the group.

Kicking off the 2021 series is Rosie Birkett’s The Joyful Home Cook. This cookery book is Rosie’s third and embraces her fundamentally practical approach to home cooking; returning to basics, minimising waste, following the seasons and keeping things simple to create effortless meals packed with flavour. Members are invited to come along ready to talk about the recipes chosen by Rosie for the evening, or anything else they might have made from the book, or to just share thoughts about the book and home-cooking in general. The event takes place on Thursday 25th February from 6.30pm – 8pm via zoom.

For March’s Cookbook Club, members will be joined by award-winning author Caroline Eden, who will be talking about her latest book Red Sands – reportage and recipes through Central Asia from Hinterland to Heartland. This cookbook is a follow-up to Caroline’s Black Sea and is a reimagining of traditional travel writing using food as the jumping-off point to explore Central Asia. In a quest to better understand this vast heartland of Asia, Caroline navigates a course from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the sun-ripened orchards of the Fergana Valley. It is a book filled with human stories, forgotten histories and tales of adventure as well as recipes. This event is set to take place on Wednesday 17th March from 6.30pm-8pm via zoom.

Borough Market’s Cookbook Club host, Angela Clutton said: “Taking Borough Market’s Cookbook Club online is such a great way for this community of food and cookbook lovers to carry on coming together to celebrate good food, despite not being able to leave our homes. We want to give people the opportunity to continue learning about new foods and trying new recipes (or perfecting old ones) while being able to share this experience with others. Chatting about food with each other – and even with some fabulous food writes – from the comfort of their own home is just the tonic needed right now.”

For more information on the events and how to join Borough Market’s Cookbook Club, visit: Digital Cookbook Club / Borough Market

Those joining the Cookbook Club can shop for ingredients at Borough Market, which remains open to locals, as a provider of essential food and drink. For Londoners who are having to shield, Borough Market’s internet-based delivery and collection service, Borough Market Online, is available either by click and collect or via a doorstep drop delivery service, for those within a 10-mile radius of the Market. And for people who live further afield, Borough Market has also launched a carbon neutral postal delivery service – Borough By Post – for food lovers across the UK.  For more information, visit: https://boroughmarket.org.uk/