Fact: Bay Areans are a book-loving bunch. Fact: People here are huge food fans.

So is it any wonder, then, that this neck of the woods has a thriving cookbook club culture?

There are differences in how each group operates, but here’s what they all have in common: A desire to share good food and good books about food.

Omnivore Books on Food owner Celia Sack has a theory about the resurgent interest in breaking out the cookbook collection and making meals at home.

“Every time there are major industrial advances, there is a push-back to older ways that are hands-on, and one way to achieve that is through food,” she notes, citing the Industrial Revolution from which the Arts & Crafts movement was born. “Today we have the Internet and smart phones to make virtual connections but spending time with family and friends making food is an easy way to make an actual connection.”

Sack recently launched a cookbook mail order club. Four times a year members receive a new, signed cookbook selected by Sack from the culinary titles that fill her shop. Begun as a gift-giving idea over the holidays, Sack says her list of sign-ups is running about half-and-half between people treating themselves to the latest from, say Madhur Jaffrey or Amanda Hesser, and those sending a gift to someone else. Membership costs $160 a year and can be customized (vegetarians can skip the meat tomes, for example.)

Each of the five cookbook clubs below has its own flavor. You’ll also find advice from a seasoned cookbook club organizer about how to start your own group.

My Calabria, written by Rosetta Costantino (with Janet Fletcher) and photographs by Sara Remington

Cooks’ Book Club — Berkeley

Three fixtures of Berkeley’s chi chi shopping strip on 4th Street — Books Inc., Cafe Rouge, and The Pasta Shop — have joined forces to create a monthly meet up mixing food, wine, and conversation. The club kicks off this Tuesday at 6 p.m. at Cafe Rouge with Rosetta Costantino’s cookbook My Calabria: Rustic Family Cooking From Italy’s Undiscovered South. (Read an earlier BAB post on My Calabria.) Subsequent events will be held on the fourth Tuesday of the month, rotating through the three locations.

Costantino will read and share recipes, including stuffed pizza with chard and dill, salt baked sea bass, and cauliflower salad, all paired with Southern Italian vino. Books will be on sale, dishes and drinks sampled, ingredients made available, and discussion will no doubt follow. The event costs $20; admission prices may vary some for each program, depending on what food and wine is on offer.

Up next for the Cooks’ Book Club: Gordon Edgar, author of Cheesemonger: My Life on the Wedge, on February 22 at The Pasta Shop, followed by dessert diva Alice Medrich, author of the Chewy, Gooey, Crispy, Crunchy, Melt-In-Your-Mouth Cookies on March 22 at Cafe Rouge.

Fresh by Susanne Friedberg is the book of choice for February's Food Lit Club at 18 Reasons

18 Reasons Food Lit Club — San Francisco

Heather Knape decided to convene a Food Lit Club at 18 Reasons just over a year ago when someone at her regular book group suggested she might want to pick some non-food books for the group to read. The life-long food and farm lover, who blogs about feeding her family at eating dirt, realized she needed a different club to dish about all things edible.

Members make a three-month commitment to the club, after which you can decide whether you want to continue or choose to give up your coveted spot to a newcomer.

Books can be bought from Omnivore Books (20 percent of profits go to fund the work of the nonprofit food group 18 Reasons) or you can bring your own. The group gathers on the third Sunday of the month from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at 18 Reasons. It’s a B.Y.O. nibbles kind of deal, typically a rotating snack roster or potluck affair.

Each quarter the group reads something old, something new, and something local, so authors can come too. This month the group discussed Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin. February’s pick is Fresh by Susanne Friedberg, followed in March by An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher by Anne Zimmerman, who will put in an appearance. Previous picks include Cheesemonger, The Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms by Nicolette Hahn Niman and Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg.

Knape moderates the meet ups and sends out discussion questions in advance.

Kristine Kidd's book Weeknight Fresh + Fast is the featured cookbook in February at Williams-Sonoma

Williams-Sonoma Cookbook Club — Los Gatos, Monterey, Palo Alto, Pleasanton, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Walnut Creek

The high-end kitchen store Williams-Sonoma’s cookbook club offers cooking classes by in-house chefs showcasing recipes in a cookbook featured each month, often one of their own titles.

The classes cost $75, and include cooking tips and techniques, a three-course tasting menu, and the cookbook. Reservations are required and space is limited; class times vary by store location.

Last month the store featured Mad Hungry: Feeding Men and Boys by Lucinda Scala Quinn, next up is the Williams-Sonoma Weeknight Fresh + Fast by Kristine Kidd, the former food editor of Bon Appetit, followed in March by Williams-Sonoma Good Food to Share by Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan, founder of the popular cooking site The Kitchn.

At 101 Cookbooks Heidi Swanson's library allows food lovers from around the world to connect over cookbooks

101 Cooks books Library — Anywhere and Everywhere

You don’t even have to leave home to connect with other cookbook lovers. Heidi Swanson’s home-grown food blog 101 Cookbooks recently launched 101 Cookbooks Library, where readers can connect in cyberspace with fellow food aficionados to review cookbooks, highlight their favorite dishes, and offer recipe tweaks based on their own kitchen experience.

A couple of standout reviewers have emerged on Swanson’s site, which draws an enthusiastic, healthy cooking crowd with culinary smarts. It’s early days, but Swanson says cookbooks published long ago could experience a revival with a new generation of cooks through her forum, which attracts participants from as far away as Australia and Amsterdam. “I love seeing the interaction between members,” says Swanson. “You see friendships emerging and people helping each other, often from opposite ends of the globe.”

Wine Country chef Cindy Pawlcyn's Big Small Plates was picked by other culinary professionals for discussion by the Napa Cook/Book Club

Cook/Book Club — Napa

Started five years ago by Napa Valley Register food columnist Betty Teller, the Cook/Book Club has a pretty impressive professional pedigree, with just a few civilians in the mix. We’re talking cookbook author Janet Fletcher, pastry chef Annie Baker, chefs, foragers, Slow Food folks, wine guys — even a registered dietician who works with The Biggest Loser TV show. The group meets every two months to dine and dish. Everyone picks a recipe from the featured cookbook to make and during the dinner each person describes what they made, and offer their thoughts on the recipe and the book in general. The conversation flows. One hard and fast rule: No recipe tweaking. Tough for veteran chefs.

Local authors whose books have been featured by group members have even joined the festivities, including Joyce Goldstein (Italian Slow and Savory), Flo Braker (Baking for All Occasions), Joey Altman (Without Reservations), and Cindy Pawlcyn (Big Small Plates). “As the group has evolved –and no one has dropped out — this has become a truly great dinner party with phenomenal food and excellent company, that has its basis as a book club,” explains Teller. “We have our theoretical discussion questions which we largely ignore.”

Teller’s group isn’t taking on any new members. She encourages people to start their own.

Her advice for beginning cookbook club organizers:
• Invite a mix of people who don’t all know each other well to keep things interesting.
• Include singles and marrieds but think long and hard about couples, which can change group dynamics.
• Find people equally interested in cooking, and if you’re going to cook too, with fairly similar culinary skills.
• Seek out folks with similar edible interests — whether omnivores, vegetarians, vegans, gluten-free.
• Consider size: About 15 is a good number, so if people miss a meeting there’s still a critical mass.
• Give it time to grow. It can take a few meetings for things to gel and people to commit to coming.
• Keep track of who hosts, what books are chosen, and create a calendar for the year for planning purposes.

A terrible song has been going through my head for the past few days. I have absolutely no idea how it got there. I have some theories, but nothing concrete. I've been humming it at work and singing it in the shower, but it won't go away.

So I thought the best way to get rid of it would be to share it with everyone I know.

It's called "The Tapioca," from the 1967 film Thoroughly Modern Millie, starring Julie Andrews, Mary Tyler Moore, and Carol Channing.

Andrews plays a simple country girl from Montana, who seeks to live a thoroughly modern, Jazz Age life in the Big City and ultimately marry her boss. If you can swallow Miss Andrews as a Montana girl, you can swallow just about anything. Except possibly Carol Channing, who was unjustly beaten out of a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Muzzy, the trombone playing, xylophone-dancing Jazz Baby Southampton matron, by Estelle Parsons who had a bit part in some little film called Bonnie and Clyde.

Robbed, I say. Just robbed.

When Millie first meets Jimmy, the fresh-as-paint (spoiler alert) man she will eventually marry, even though he is not her boss, he decides to liven things up at the "Friendship Dance" he has just crashed by creating a new dance step. For inspiration, he asks Millie what she has most recently consumed for dinner. Franks? Sauerkraut? No, and no. When she utters the distinctly American phrase, "I had tapioca for pudding," he knows he has a hit on his hands.

Just watch and learn:

So now you know. Just thank your lucky stars I have spared you any of Miss Channing's numbers.

I will however, leave you with this, simply because it will help to explain why this film seems to upset so many of my friends:

I haven't decided if making tapioca has helped to relieve my psyche of these scenes or permanently scarred it. I do, however, know that it is, as Miss Andrew's says, "Dee-lish."

And it is infinitely easier to swallow than anything in this film. Except, perhaps, Beatrice Lillie. She adds just the right dash of soy sauce to make it just-about-palatable. Watch the movie, if you dare, and you will understand.

Enjoy.

Tapioca Pudding

Raspberries are entirely optional.

Serves 4 to 6. In my household, however, this only served one. In two sittings, mind you.

This is not my recipe. It is Heidi Swanson's, from 101 Cookbooks. I've made a lot of recipes from her website-- every one a winner. They are simple-but-interesting, well-documented, and better photographed that most. And they have a certain earnestness about them I like, which this tapioca recipe exemplifies.

I had the idea of cooking all of her recipes within the span of one year and blogging about it, but that just seemed silly. Who would be stupid enough to do something like that?

Ingredients:

3 cups organic milk, divided

1/3 cup small pearl tapioca

2 extra-large egg yolks, lightly beaten

1/4 teaspoon fine-grain sea salt

1/3 cup sugar

1 vanilla bean, split along the length (or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract)

Preparation:

1. Pour 3/4 cup of the milk into a medium-sized, thick-bottomed pot, like a dutch oven, or what have you. Add tapioca and soak for 60 minutes or up to over night.

2. Whisk in the egg yolks, salt, sugar, and the remaining milk. Scrape the vanilla bean along its length with a knife and add that bean "paste" along with the bean itself to the pot (if using vanilla extract instead, stir it in at the very end, when the pudding is completely cooked). I like to pin the bean to the bottom of a wooden spoon as I am stirring to extract as much of the flavor as possible.

3. Slowly bring the mixture just barely to a boil, stirring all along-- this should take about 15 minutes. Reduce the heat and let the mixture fall to a simmer-- you keep it here until the tapioca is fully cooked, another 20 minutes or so. At this point, however, it might be wise to heed Jimmy's advice to not let the temperature drop too many degrees, or you'll wind up with what is called the Frozen Tapioca Freeze. Doubtful, it's true, but anything is possible when we suspend our disbelief long enough to believe anything that happens in a movie musical.

4. When the pudding is ready, the tapioca beads will swell up and become translucent and custard will thicken dramatically. Taste to adjust flavoring, adding salt or a little (more, if using) vanilla extract, if desired.

Best when served fresh and still-warm, but you won't find me complaining as I wander to the fridge at 1 am to load a cold spoonful or two into my mouth.

Otsu

Lately, I've been obsessed with this buckwheat soba noodle recipe I spotted on one of my favorite healthy food blogs, 101 Cookbooks. The recipe is originally from Pomelo, a fresh little restaurant serving "global cuisine" in Outer Noe Valley and the Inner Sunset, and let me tell you, it is a keeper. I just cannot seem to tire of it. It's healthy and light, yet substantial enough to make up a full meal. Plus, it's a breeze to whip up...and the flavors! There's a wonderful balance to this dish.

Heat, tang, salt, and sweet

The honey, soy sauce, and rice vinegar in the dressing gives it a great sweet, salty, tang. The lemon juice adds a touch of bright acidity, and the sesame oil, a mellow nuttiness. Then there's the cayenne and ginger, imparting the perfect amount of warmth that caresses the back of your throat as you savor it all. (I do bring down the cayenne from ¾ teaspoon to ½ teaspoon for a more subtle heat.)

Cool greens: scallion, cilantro, cucumber

After the heat comes the cool crisp greens. I cut my cucumber slices as thin as I can, and mix them with chopped cilantro and scallions.

I love this recipe because it requires barely any cooking. Use of the stove is limited to boiling water for the noodles (be sure to keep them al dente for a nice springy chew), and pan frying the tofu. While pan frying tofu is essentially a simple concept, it can prove to be tricky due to tofu's delicate consistency.

A few tips on the tofu:
1. Use oil. While the recipe calls for cooking the tofu in a "dry" nonstick skillet, mine stuck to my nonstick pan and came out a mess when I didn't use any oil. I suggest playing it safe and coating the bottom of your pan with vegetable or olive oil.
2. Pat it dry. Using paper towels, pat dry your tofu as much as possible. This will minimize splatter and the tofu will brown more evenly.
3. Cornstarch. For extra crisp, dust a little cornstarch on all sides.
4. Be patient. Once the tofu hits the pan, don't move it around. You will see that as it cooks, it will firm up. Only then should you try lifting it up to test the level of goldenness on the bottom. If you rush it, your tofu will fall apart.

Once the tofu is cooked, I prefer cutting it up into 1-inch squares, or lengthwise like matchsticks (much better than leaving it in giant hunks like I did in my first go-around pictured above).

Soba noodles dressed

Once everything is done, a quick toss and you have yourself the perfect summer meal. I paired it with this Steamed Sea Bass with Ginger and Scallion and the combo was fantastic.