How a Cambridge home cook built a 1,000-member recipe club around local ingredients

Recipes are a dime a dozen these days, either online with maximum optimization, behind a paywall, or in a $40 cookbook. But rarely do they center around your own community, involve discussions with your neighbors, or utilize the produce available at your Cambridge grocery store.

Cambridge Recipe Club, founded by Cantabrigian and longtime home chef Andrew Little, aims to localize and strip down recipe media. You won’t get one whenever you please, you’ll get recipes that focus largely on what food is available in Massachusetts, and when you have a question, a person who possibly lives a few blocks away will answer your email. It’s also always free.

Little has respect for the recipe industry and the ways in which creators try to make money for their work. He’s not trying to compete with them. To him, starting this club was about community more than anything.

“For me, cooking is all about sharing,” Little said. “If I have this passion for sharing recipes, maybe I can help a neighbor feel more confident in the kitchen and feel more connected to their area.” 

Little is from Lexington, moved away for a few years, but recently came back to Cambridge in search of community. The recipe club felt like an avenue for that, too, as well as a way for this home cook — who runs a catering business but also works in tech — to practice his recipe-writing skills.

His first recipe was sent to a few dozen people on a Friday in September, a country mustard chicken that utilized the last of the cherry tomatoes of summer and the beginning of autumn’s rosemary.

To grow the audience, he did some online promotion on Reddit, but Little mostly stuck to algorithm-less ways to find his community: printing out leaflets with QR codes and sticking them to Cambridge light poles and in businesses. 

The club now has over 1,000 members, who stuck with him even in winter, when there’s less seasonal ingredients to play with and the recipes were mostly soups and stews. 

These members, who aren’t just from Cambridge but mostly live around Greater Boston, get a weekly newsletter in their inbox on Friday. The recipe is written by Little, proofed by his partner, and cooked with a few things in mind. 

Little said he’s cognizant of space constraints in Boston area kitchens. He tries to work with recipes that require fewer ingredients and use everyday kitchen gadgets. 

He also tries to cook with ingredients that can be found around Cambridge. His spring recipes this year, for example, may lean heavily on peas or seasonal herbs for salads. 

“One thing I try to do with the club as much as possible is share resources,” Little said. “I put together a winter produce calendar that showed what we could expect in the winter season.”

Little also tries to do a pretty even mix of vegetarian and carnivorous recipes, while keeping the cook time typically quick and the kitchen skill requirements at novice. 

The first six months have been mostly him sharing his recipes, receiving positive feedback from readers, and sending suggestions for those who need to work around ingredients they can’t or won’t use.

“Somebody said to me, ‘I love that you love cilantro, but to me it tastes like soap. Can you recommend an alternative?’ Little said. “Yes, I do love cilantro, but I think mint would be a great substitute here.” 

But he wants this little club to grow, in membership numbers and also potentially beyond the inbox. 

Starting this month, Little shared his first community recipe, one that’s sent to him from a member of the Cambridge Recipe Club. He’ll work with members to tweak the recipe as needed, Little will of course cook it and photograph it for the newsletter, and the member gets to share their story about the dish. 

The first community recipe also happens to be a pastry chef, Kasey Geremia of Woods Hill Pier 4, who shared her chocolate olive oil cake with whipped mascarpone frosting and left her personal email address for any members to reach out so they could share recipes. 

He’s also connected with chefs in Cambridge who are willing to share recipes with the recipe club, including Season to Taste’s Robert Harris, who lent out his perfect-for-Sunday braised beef brisket. 

“Andrew cold emailed me, and the project looked really cool,” Harris said over email. “I love sharing and finding new recipes, so I was happy to contribute.”

The future of the club could look like more collaboration and communication between members, maybe through a Slack channel or actual meet-ups similar to cookbook clubs. 

Home cooks can join even if they don’t live in Cambridge, Little said, and can sign up for his newsletter, which uses MailerLite, here.

Katelyn Umholtz

Food and Restaurant Reporter

Katelyn Umholtz covers food and restaurants for Boston.com. Katelyn is also the author of The Dish, a weekly food newsletter.

Sign up for The Dish

Stay up to date on the latest food and drink news from Boston.com.