The chef and artist Krystal Mack’s favorite cookbook has no beautiful photos of food. Its recipes aren’t professionally tested. Its authors aren’t food writers or restaurateurs.
It’s a 1988 community cookbook called “Naparima Girls’ High School Diamond Jubilee 1912-1987,” filled with contributions from students and staff of a school in Trinidad and Tobago that she has never visited. The paperback has a loud magenta cover, and the recipes are basic: Caribbean rice and peas, teriyaki chicken, vanilla poundcake.
Now, isolating at home in Baltimore, Ms. Mack is making a community cookbook of her own, “How To Take Care,” that includes poetry and activities. The book, released last week as a digital edition, costs $5, with all proceeds going to national organizations supporting victims of domestic violence.
The more than 25 recipes, gathered from fellow artists and chefs, are simple and inexpensive to make, like a savory fruit salad and a ginger-tea recipe that asks readers to “sing or chant, so that those vibrations are also infused into the brew.”
“These are cookbooks that put the power back into the people’s hands,” Ms. Mack said. “Versus opening up a cookbook from today that’s like, ‘Oh, you don’t have a Pacojet or a dehydrator?’ ”
In an age of celebrity chefs, glossy coffee-table books and multimedia cooking websites, the community cookbook may seem an anachronism, a dog-eared remnant of church suppers and Junior League fund-raisers. But the coronavirus pandemic has given the form a new life, as co-workers, choirs, mosques, friends and even complete strangers seek new ways to connect from a distance and swap recipes.
These cookbooks look different from their predecessors, showing up more often on Google Docs than on physical pages, their recipes sometimes presented as videos. And they diverge from the flawlessly styled photographs and aspirational tone of the contemporary cookbook — instead, taking a practical and personal approach, and documenting life not as it could be, but as it is.
“We are at this powerful moment of living through an epic part of history,” said Ms. Mack, 34. Cookbooks like hers are “time capsules, so we can look back and see how we chose to survive and come together collectively.”
One early community cookbook that became popular in the United States was “A Poetical Cookbook” by Maria J. Moss, published in 1864 to raise money for injured Union soldiers during the Civil War. Later in that century, suffragists produced cookbooks to spread their message. Since then, institutions like churches, libraries and local governments have relied on community cookbooks to raise money and share recipes.
The format grew less popular as platforms like Instagram and Facebook have become robust online forums for home cooks. (NYT Cooking hosts large, active communities on both.) But now, the community cookbook is becoming part that conversation.
In mid-March, the pediatric residents at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, were all at home, waiting to be called as backup. One of them, Cyrelle Fermin, started posting recipes to the residents’ WhatsApp group; she turned that into an online spreadsheet where about 20 of her co-workers have submitted recipes, along with photos of themselves making one another’s dishes.
Since then, most of the residents have worked shifts in the hospital, but Ms. Fermin said they’re still cooking and exchanging recipes.
“As health care providers, we are immersed in a lot of scary things on a day-to-day basis,” she said. “It’s cathartic to channel our energies” toward a tangible activity like sharing recipes.
At the Valley Ranch Islamic Center, in Irving, Texas, weekend prayer sessions usually bring together about 1,000 Muslims, and are a primary means of collecting donations. Now that those gatherings are canceled, Nye Armstrong, the mosque’s creative director, is asking members to email recipes and photos so she can design a digital and print cookbook to be released around the end of Ramadan, in late May, to raise money. She also hosts weekly teatimes on Zoom where 15 to 20 members eagerly discuss their recipes.
Some cookbook projects have drawn in strangers. Alicia Cohn, a product marketer in Seattle, started sending friends a newsletter containing her favorite recipes. Soon, friends of friends were signing up for the mailing list and contributing recipes.
Ms. Cohn has founded the Quarantine Recipe Club, and compiled all the recipes into an online spreadsheet where people can share feedback. She said at least one-quarter of the 110 contributors are people she doesn’t know.
But she is happy about the unexpected recruits. “It’s bonding over your shared circumstance,” said Ms. Cohn, 27. “We are all people who are trying new recipes, and succeeding and failing and wanting some place to share that doesn’t feel like an echo chamber. With Instagram, you are just putting stuff out there but not getting stuff back.”
While the cuisines and dishes vary widely, the community cookbooks share one goal: comfort. They’re filled with straightforward recipes, often from childhood or previous generations, that have been made time and time again.
The 60-member Seattle Ladies Choir is creating a digital community cookbook called “Comfort Food in Challenging Times.” Nani Vishwanath, 33, who is leading the effort, said most members turned to their roots for their submissions — she shared a recipe for upma, an Indian porridge, while an Italian-American member submitted one for cacio e pepe pasta, and someone from Texas offered a peach cobbler.
“It is a different way of getting to know each other,” Ms. Vishwanath said. The cookbook will also include sheet music for members’ favorite arrangements, “to make it feel like ours.”
At home in Minneapolis, Justine Santa Cruz has no shortage of cookbooks to turn to for inspiration. But now that she can’t travel or see family, she has been craving the food of her Filipino-American upbringing. Her relatives are spread out from Minnesota to Vancouver, British Columbia, to Manila, and suddenly cooking a lot more than they used to. So she started a Google document to compile their recipes for staples like chicken adobo and sinigang, a sour soup.
Ms. Santa Cruz, 30, said she finds the sheer amount of food content on the internet to be overwhelming, from chefs’ online cooking classes to celebrities’ kitchen tours on Instagram Live. Many cookbooks have “such a stringent point of view,” she said. “It is not a conversation.”
Compiling her family’s recipes, on the other hand, has spurred lively discussions. The process feels more intimate, she said.
Many of the new community cookbooks channel the voices of the contributors. In “Bone Apple Tea: The People’s Cookbook,” assembled in a folder on Google Drive, a recipe for a chicken sandwich is laid out as a PowerPoint presentation, with steps like “Season from the heart,” and an instruction to drink a beer while grilling. The cookbook was begun by Lauren Belak-Berger, Benjamin Davenport and Jack Redell for a group of about 10 friends scattered across the country.
On the “Introduction & Welcome” page, Mr. Redell, 27, who teaches fourth-graders in Brooklyn, challenges readers to be creative — to post a recipe that would elicit the tingling sensation known as autonomous sensory meridian response (or A.S.M.R.), or to make a video of someone sitting on a cake.
Ms. Belak-Berger, 26, a graduate student now isolating in Los Angeles with her family, is vegetarian, so she can’t cook the many meat dishes in the cookbook. “I just love reading them,” she said. “I can hear my friends’ voices. It feels as close as it can to us hanging out.”
That voice-first approach also runs through “Easy Does It,” a digital cocktail book by Andrew Calisterio and Dominic Alling, with contributions from six bartenders in San Francisco (including Mr. Calisterio).
Mr. Calisterio, 32, said too many cocktail books use bartending jargon and rely on complicated methods. He wanted this book to feel more like a conversation, with recipes that call for everyday ingredients. Nonna Titulauri, who worked at the Chinese restaurant Hakkasan San Francisco before the coronavirus shutdown, developed a version of a Bloody Mary that can be made with jarred salsa.
“Got chips? Stick one in your glass!” the recipe reads. (The book costs $30, and proceeds are split among the contributors, who are all out of work.)
Many of the new community cookbooks call for inexpensive, shelf-stable ingredients, because access to food is growing more difficult for many people.
This is especially important to Jillian Norwick, a supervisor at Nadap, a social service agency in Downtown Brooklyn, who is putting together a cookbook for her clients, all low-income New Yorkers. Most are on food stamps, and can no longer meet with their case managers in person. Ms. Norwick thought a community cookbook could be both a helpful resource and a way for clients and managers to stay in touch.
On top of the limitations posed by the coronavirus, her cookbook must consider that not everyone in the program has a kitchen, measuring utensils or fresh produce. The recipes include a pea dip that can be made with frozen peas and blended with a fork, and ideas for jazzing up bottled tomato sauce.
“We can give them all the emergency resources,” said Ms. Norwick, 27, but a cookbook “is this very human way of sharing.”
Community cookbooks can also be whatever their creators want them to be. There are no rules, no marketing metrics, no need to make recipes fit into categories.
Rhia Jade, an artist in New Orleans who is organizing a digital cookbook for queer people called “Queers in the Kitchen,” said that was the appeal of the medium. It’s fine for a book to resonate with just a small group, Mx. Jade said, or for the stories and recipes to feel relevant only to this moment.
A community cookbook is more about coming together than producing a polished product for a mass audience, Mx. Jade added — it’s about “being meaningful to whoever wants to find meaning in it.”
