This Local Book Club Only Reads Cookbooks—And Doubles as a Supper Club

It all started with Samin Nosrat, or more specifically, her popular cookbook, Salt Fat Acid Heat.

Lutherville resident Anita Posterli had been reading it, and watching the accompanying Netflix docuseries, when in early 2019, a group of her friends suggested that they start a book club. Posterli, 65, pictured center, who is a regular host of dinner parties, said, “I don’t read books. But I read cookbooks.” The first assignment? Salt Fat Acid Heat.

At that inaugural meeting, Posterli made Nosrat’s buttermilk-marinated roast chicken and tahdig, a Persian crispy rice dish, tasking the other six women with making homemade mayonnaise and discussing how the fat and acidity functions in this classic emulsion. It was obvious that this particular book club would only read cookbooks—and double as a supper club.

The members are all in their 60s, with many having known each other for decades. Posterli, Elisa Lawson, pictured right, and Renee Boyd were all born within days of each other at Mercy Hospital and attended Mercy High School in Northeast Baltimore. Ann Marie O’Hare, pictured left, Mary Myers, and Susan Schmitz are longtime friends, while Susan Waesche’s daughter is married to Lawson’s son.

“We’re one big happy family,” says Posterli, who is The Bmore Cookbook Club’s unofficial president. Her love of food began early, having grown up over Woodlea Bakery on Belair Road, which her father founded and her family still runs. Her husband’s side is Italian and she has spent the last 27 years hosting cappelletti-making Christmas parties. Not all club members were as food-minded, at least initially, but it has been the common theme to bring them together.

“All of us have learned so much from each other—experimenting with recipes, trying things we’ve never tried before,” says Posterli.

In the three-and-a-half years since the group began, they’ve covered well over a dozen books—some well-known, some obscure, from Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking to Alison Roman’s Nothing Fancy to Allie Rowbottom’s Jell-O Girls—meeting every few months at each other’s homes in Baltimore County.

“It was an awful book, because it was so sad,” says Posterli of Rowbottom’s culinary memoir, “It was about how the Jell-O family was cursed.”

But the group had a marvelous time anyway, using Posterli’s old molds, making salmon mousse and jiggly drinks with Prosecco and raspberries.

The club has also covered a variety of subjects (grilling, dumplings, puff pastry) and regions (paella for Spain, al pastor for Mexico, and porchetta for Italy). Their September book is J. Kenji López-Alt’s massive, James Beard Award-winning The Food Lab.

“That’s a lot of book,” says Posterli with satisfaction. “And then he has a new one, The Wok. I love cooking in a wok—there are so many techniques. That’s the next one we’re going to do. I told them, ‘You’re not going to get out of it.’”