Garden club dabbles in the kitchen

Info :

“Perennial favorites,” the cookbook compiled by the River Bend Garden Club, is available by special order. Call 633-9322 for more information.

River Bend Garden Club meets at Town Hall on the second Tuesday of each month at 1 p.m.

RIVER BEND — Barbara Pilcher believes there’s no such thing as having too many cooks in the kitchen.

In fact, when she talks about “Perennial favorites,” the cookbook that she edited for the River Bend Garden Club, the thing she is most proud to mention is how many women submitted their recipes. Nearly every member of the club participated, she says.

From chicken divan to clam chowder and from cinnamon-swirl salad to kiwi ice cream, every recipe comes from a member of the club and is just what the name says — a favorite. And every recipe comes with a story: who made it first, who loves it most, and whether it has any special ingredients that simply cannot be left out.

“We wanted it to be a collection of recipes that were foolproof,” Pilcher said. “Almost every one of these was submitted because they were made for somebody special or because they are really easy to make. They come from women who have been cooking for most of their lives, so they are all winners.”

But even the gardeners were surprised at how their “little cookbook,” turned into a project that took off.

Member Julie Hendricks brought up the idea of making a cookbook for the garden club about a year ago, Pilcher said. The cookbook would be sold and the money raised would go toward projects that the club supports.

“It seemed like a very simple thing to collect and edit the recipes of a club that is 100 percent women,” Pilcher said. “And it has been wonderful, but it is something that we have worked on for more than a year. There was a committee of nine women and the funny thing was the natural division of labor that happened organically as we worked.”

Even the recipes seemed to come together without much of an extra push.

“We were worried that we’d have18 chocolate-chip recipes, but everything just seemed to separate into natural categories without one being heavier than the other,” she said.

To save money, the club members decided to publish the cookbook by themselves and spent hours collating and binding all 300 copies.

The cookbooks were ready the first week of November, and have been so popular that as of Sunday night, there were just three copies left. The group is already planning its second printing, and is hopeful that the cookbook sales will reap many benefits for the projects and nonprofit organizations the club supports.

They volunteer their time and landscaping abilities wherever they see a need in Craven County.

Their club, about 100 members strong, is made up of “people from different gardening zones from all over the country” who have moved to River Bend.

The club has been in existence since 1982, almost as long as the town itself.

“It just started with people asking questions like: ‘How do I plant in this sandy soil? What makes it through the hot summers here? What’s hearty in the winter,’” Pilcher said. “The club’s membership has grown over time.”

The club has done work at local women’s shelters and assisted-living homes, and recently planted a small herb garden near Pollock Street in New Bern.

“We really had no marketing plan at all for the cookbook,” Pilcher said. “We just thought this would be a fun thing to do. Even we were surprised at what it grew into.”

Nikie Mayo can be reached at 252-635-5665 or nmayo@freedomenc.com.