One of the most fun things, according to me, about being in your 20s and living away from home is experimenting in the kitchen with your flatmates or roommates, coming up with random food combinations, realising that some things are better left to experts and that we don’t have to recreate every single dish we eat in a restaurant, and just cackling as we watch someone burn a roti on the tawa.

That act of coming together and cooking can really bring people closer, and the Madras Cookbook Club is doing exactly that. Built around the tactile act of reading from cookbooks, the club is managed by food enthusiast Akshitha Praveen, to bring back cookbooks into our narratives and lives. Once cherished objects in everybody’s kitchens, dog-eared, annotated, passed down generations, they seemed to have disappeared in the wake of our reel-driven recipe finding where every recipe gets saved by us but nothing gets made.

A collective of home cooks that meet regularly with each gathering centred around a single cookbook. Members choose recipes, interpret them individually, and then come together, often in potluck-style settings, to share food.

There is something almost literary about the way the club approaches cooking. Picking one cookbook a month and examining it recipe after recipe. In resisting the visual immediacy of video tutorials, the club reintroduces an element of uncertainty — of not quite knowing how something will turn out until it does. Praveen states that every month she tells the club to stick to the recipe as much as possible: "If you take a cookbook, and you force yourself to stick to it, as challenging as it is, because you never know you're learning something new."

But beyond the mechanics of cooking, what the Madras Cookbook Club really builds is community. In a city like Chennai, where food is already deeply tied to the cultural fabric of the city, the club becomes a space where strangers can connect through shared acts of making. Members have experimented with cuisines as varied as Parsi and Korean, often using the cookbook as a gateway into unfamiliar cultural terrains and exploring those newer cuisines together.

The club goes beyond simply coming together to cook recipes from a book. They unpack the politics and cultural baggage that each cookbook carries. Praveen speaks about how they’ve noticed certain patterns across these books. She says, “We see that Western cookbooks are often written really well, but many Indian cookbooks are written by outsiders, and you can feel that they lack a certain life. We’ve noticed this is common in country-specific books. It’s also difficult to find books written by people from that country because of the politics attached to food. I hope that one day, the club can bring together all our heirloom recipes to create our own cookbook.”

This is part of a larger shift in urban India, where intimate, experience-driven communities — from supper clubs to reading circles — are beginning to reshape how people gather. And the Madras Cookbook Club is no different, an avenue to come together and find something new together. It asks its members to pause, to read, to cook, and to sit with one another long enough for a meal to become a conversation.

Follow Madras Cookbook Club on Instagram here, and fill this form to join their club.

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