New Cookbook from the Monday Morning Cooking Club
Members of the Glen Innes Gourmet Fiesta Committee were delighted to recently catch up with an old friend while she was visiting town, Merelyn Chalmers from the Monday Morning Cooking Club.
The connection between the cooking group and Glen Innes dates back to 2018, when the Gourmet Fiesta Committee invited the Monday Club cooks to appear as Celebrity Chefs at the Glen Innes Show.
Merelyn remembers the visit fondly. “We were all blown away by the welcome in the community and how much we had in common in the way we cooked, our shared love of home cooking rather than takeaways, and cooking from scratch,” she said.
“The hit recipe at the Show that year was our Lavosh Cracker Biscuits which were very, very popular.” Since that first visit, Merelyn and her husband have returned to Glen Innes almost every year. “We come back because we love it. Honestly the country and community here fill a piece of the jigsaw in our hearts,” she said.
The Monday Morning Cooking Club began in Sydney more than 20 years ago when a group of Jewish friends decided to work together on a cookbook project for charity. “Some of us knew each other previously, but most of us had met in the schoolyard through our kids who crossed over in age,” Merelyn said.
At the beginning there were six women who shared what she describes as “the seed of an idea”. “We wanted to write a cookbook for charity that was beautiful enough to sit on any bookshelf in the world.”
The women began gathering recipes from friends and family, carefully testing and refining them until they worked perfectly. “We were in pursuit of the perfect iteration of the recipe,” she said.
The collaboration soon grew beyond Monday mornings. “Gradually Monday mornings extended to Tuesdays and Thursdays. These days we are on the phone pretty much every day.”
The Monday Morning Cooking Club is a not-for-profit organisation and all profits from its books are donated to charity.
It took five years for the group to publish their first cookbook. Their latest book, the fifth in the series, was launched last month. The first four books were anthologies, combining recipes with stories from contributors about what the dishes meant to them.
“Our recipe books are full of food which Jewish people like to cook but are not necessarily Jewish recipes,” Merelyn said.
Their newest release, A Year of Jewish Cooking: Recipes we can’t live without, takes a slightly different approach. “The new book focuses on the food that Jewish people cook but written through the prism of the Jewish calendar,” she said. “At the beginning of each chapter there is an explanation of the festivals that we celebrate which will give a bit of insight into our culture.”
Encouraging younger people to cook was one of the key motivations behind the latest book. Twenty years on from those early schoolyard meetings, the children who first connected the group are now adults cooking for themselves.
“We already knew most of the recipes in this book but we have adapted and streamlined old recipes and added some new ones to make them more accessible,” she said.
After more than two decades cooking together, Merelyn says there are a few recipes that consistently receive the biggest response. She nominates two – the popular egg and onion smear, often spread on bread, and her mother’s chiffon cake. And does she still use the cookbooks herself? “Every day,” she said. “I literally pick up one of the cookbooks every day.”
A Year of Jewish Cooking: Recipes we can’t live without is published by Simon & Schuster and is widely available through bookshops and major retailers.
