WICHITA, April 22 — 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 the 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 really 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,” Moore said. She even bought an extra bunch of kale to pass around.
The cooking club began as part of the country’s 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 9 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.”
At the luncheon this month, questions about the historical and social importance of the Tomorrow Afternoon Cooking Club were given polite consideration. But really, one can overthink these things.
“We are really just a small group of intelligent women with a shared history and an interest in cooking,” said Mary Ellen Randall, 69, who has been a member for about 15 years.
Her husband is a retired surgeon and pilot who golfs. She serves on several charitable boards and some purely social ones. She plays a mean game of tennis. Which is not to say she is a member of the Wichita elite, but it is hard to tell. A hallmark of Wichita society is to never act as if you are Wichita society.
Cooking club members are usually retired. Their children are mostly grown. As a result, the youngest member is in her early 50s. But this is not a frivolous group, said Mary Aikins, 89, who specialized in aerobatic flying and worked as a pilot examiner for the Federal Aviation Administration. She has moved on to honorary status and lives in an assisted-living centre, where several other members live. “We are not about needlepoint and bird-watching,” she said.
In the early years, the club sponsored essay contests in which young women were encouraged to ponder questions like, “Can systematical and economical housekeeping be carried on in conjunction with keeping up your intellectual pursuits?” Members knitted sweaters for soldiers in World War I and rolled bandages during World War II. Lunches then reflected food rationing, with honey instead of sugar on the baked apples, and tea substituting for coffee.
The lunches were educational as well. Members who travelled to New York at the turn of the century came back and demonstrated omelettes, which were all the rage. There were debates over whether commercial baking powder, new on the market, would hurt their buckwheat cakes. It did not. A salesman showed off his beaten biscuit machine in 1917. In 1934, Mrs. Hex instructed members on how to bone a duck.
The menus ebbed and flowed with the times. By the 1960s, lunches were built on crab puffs and pineapple mint surprise. Those dishes gave way to hot curried fruit and deep-sea casseroles in the 1970s. In the healthful 1990s, turkey tenderloins were glazed in raspberry.
A recent addition to the luncheons is alcohol, which seems to have at least enlivened the minutes.
“There was a rumour that the pies actually came from Spears, thanks to an oversampling of the crème de menthe,” Betty Menehan wrote in March 1999, referring to a local bakery. “Janet insisted that the rumour was groundless.”
Always, the pressure is on to test and retest recipes, devise clever ways to seat two dozen women comfortably and set artful tables, the decorating of which is always recorded in the minutes. Hosts practice their recipes for grateful spouses, who join other husbands when the cooking club has a rare evening get-together. And of course, one worries about how the house looks.
“You all but cleaned out the nail holes with a toothpick,” Mason said.
Randall said: “We don’t do it to be showy. We do it because we care and want to show these ladies our very best. We are saying you are important and we want to show you our very best.”
Most of the women say their cooking is better for being in the club, but not all of them. Melodee Eby’s great-grandmother was a member, so she gave it a try. But when she found herself picking cilantro out of her salad because she had mistaken it for Italian parsley, she decided it might be time to quit.
“I was not asked to resign, but I like to anticipate,” she said.
Scandals and gossip are hard to unearth. There were the Great Napkin Wars of the 1980s, when the traditionalists balked at the fancy new folds being trotted out by what one retired member called “the creative types.”
And any true kitchen disasters are told and retold until they become loving family lore. There was the time in the 1990s at Velma Wallace’s house. She was the widow of the man who ran Cessna Aircraft Co., and one of the group’s more famous members. Someone forgot to turn on the oven, and the chicken breasts lay cold in the pan when lunch was to be served.
“In her defence,” one honorary member said, “it was a new house.”
Although it is called a cooking club, its value lies beyond what the members present on their best china once a month, the women say.
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 in life,” said Margaret Houston, 64 and a member for 18 years, “when your grandmother’s recipes start to matter and you realise it is your job to protect them.”
Date Cake Delicious
Time: 90 minutes
Butter, for greasing pan
3 1/4 cup/454 grams flour, sifted, plus additional for dusting pan
2 cups/340 grams pitted dates, each date cut into three pieces
1 tablespoon shortening
1 cup sugar
1 egg, beaten
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1 cup chopped pecans or other nuts
1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour two 6-cup (8-by-14-inch) loaf pans; set aside.
2. In a mixing bowl, combine the dates, shortening and 1 1/2 cups boiling water. Set aside to cool, stirring frequently. In a separate bowl, combine the sugar and egg; whisk to combine. Add to the date mixture and stir well until combined.
3. In a large mixing bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cloves and nutmeg. Add the date and sugar mixture and stir just until combined. Stir in the nuts.
4. Divide batter between the pans. Bake until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean, being careful not to overbake; 50 minutes to 1 hour. Cool for 10 minutes, then remove from pan and finish cooling on a rack.
Yield: 2 loaves — New York Times
