October Book Club

** Registration will open 8/1/24.

Join Ginger and the team for a lively discussion on this month’s food themed book, Kitchen Witch: Food, Folklore & Fairy Tale, by Sarah Robinson

Food and drink will be available for purchase during the event and a complimentary snack from the book will be served.

Book Club is a free event. No ticket is necessary but RSVPs are required.

Visit Old Firehouse Books in Old Town to purchase your book – Book Club books purchased at Old Firehouse the month before or month of book club receive a 20% discount for being a part of the Ginger and Baker Book Club!

More about Kitchen Witch, by Sarah Robinson

Kitchen Witch is an invitation to see the magic in every corner of your kitchen. With the Kitchen Witch as our guide, we’ll explore food, nature, magic, and transformation. We’ll discover what the name of Kitchen Witch could mean to us in modern interpretations of ancient practices. May this book of stories and ideas show that there’s magic in the mundane, witchcraft within your walls and the Goddess really is in the details.
Within this book you’ll find no recipes, but something cooked up just for you; you’ll find stories – stories of magic, healing, and hearth, of feasts and fasts and fairy tales. Of poisoned apples, bewitching gingerbread, and seeing the future in a teacup…

• Discover the fantastic folklore and healing properties of everyday foods: fruits, vegetables, honey, bread and nuts.
• Delight in food customs and rituals from ancient Babylon, Egypt, Greece and Rome.
• Meet cunning folk, herbalists, ale-wives, beer goddesses and the many faces of the Kitchen Witch through the ages.
• Journey through food for every seasonal festival on the Wheel of the Year.
• Enjoy fairy and folk tales of witches and saints in Scandinavia, floating apples and snapdragon in England, potato-wolves in Germany, tatty bogles and angels who drink whisky in Scotland, and a rather surprising prevalence of pancakes…

In Sarah’s signature style of weaving together the magical, this exciting new book will touch on a myriad of modalities in a journey lined with folklore, fairytale and much, much food!

If you are looking to dive into next month’s delicious read, in November we will be reading, Apple: A Global History, by Erika Jack

Gravenstein. Coe’s Golden Drop. Mendocino Cox. The names sound like something from the imagination of Tolkien or perhaps the ingredients in a dubious magical potion rather than what they are—varieties of apples. But as befits their enchanting names, apples have transfixed and beguiled humans for thousands of years.

Apple: A Global History explores the cultural and culinary importance of a fruit born in the mountains of Kazakhstan that has since traversed the globe to become a favorite almost everywhere. From the Garden of Eden and Homer’s Odyssey to Johnny Appleseed, William Tell, and even Apple Computer, Erika Janik shows how apples have become a universal source of sustenance, health, and symbolism from ancient times to the present day.

In Slow Noodles, Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodia refugee who lost everything and everyone—her house, her country, her parents, her siblings, her friends—everything but the memories of her mother’s kitchen, the tastes and aromas of the foods her mother made before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart in the 1970s, killing millions of her compatriots. Nguon’s irrepressible spirit and determination come through in this emotional and poignant but also lyrical and magical memoir that includes over 20 recipes for Khmer dishes like chicken lime soup, banh sung noodles, pâté de foie, curries, spring rolls, and stir-fries. For Nguon, recreating these dishes becomes an act of resistance, of reclaiming her place in the world, of upholding the values the Khmer Rouge sought to destroy, and of honoring the memory of her beloved mother.

From her idyllic early years in Battambang to hiding as a young girl in Phnom Penh as the country purges ethnic Vietnamese like Nguon and her family, from her escape to Saigon to the deaths of mother and sister there, from the poverty and devastation she experiences in a war-ravaged Vietnam to her decision to flee the country. We follow Chantha on a harrowing river crossing into Thailand—part of the exodus that gave rise to the name “boat people”—and her decades in a refugee camp there, until finally, denied passage to the West, she returns to a forever changed Cambodia. Nguon survives by cooking in a brothel, serving drinks in a nightclub, making and selling street food, becoming a suture-nurse treating refugees abused by Thai authorities, and weaving silk. Through it all, Nguon relies on her mother’s “slow noodles” approach to healing and to cooking, one that prioritizes time and care over expediency. Haunting and evocative, Slow Noodles is a testament to the power of culinary heritage to spark the rebirth of a young woman’s hopes for a beautiful life.