For over 10 years, a group of Auckland women have been meeting to catch up and cook dinner for each other from dish, once a month without fail.
Hannah Sellars, Jaime Perera, Jayne Mercier, Maresa Cosgrove and Jo Yearsley formed the dish Club in November 2011, in a very different stage of their lives. But in the 10 years they’ve been together, the dish Club women have shared their lives, in all their gloriously messy variety, over delicious home-cooked food.
“In our time together, our group has had eight babies, one grandchild, one dog, one marriage and no divorces, four new houses, five family weekends away, five major birthdays – four fortieths and a thirtieth – and a family event every year involving our partners and kids,” reveals the group’s unofficial leader, Jo.
Over succulent Mini Prawn Tostadas – Olivia Galletly’s recipe from Issue #102 – and generous margaritas, dish Editor Sarah Tuck and I heard the history of the dish Club and were so moved by the connection the women had formed over food, we felt it deserved a wider audience.
Bright beginnings
The dish Club was the brainchild of Jo, a keen home cook. As Jayne puts it, “She was definitely the connector for all of us.” Initially, Jo was good friends with Maresa and Hannah separately. She and Maresa, who knew each other through work, used to attend the Epicurean Workshop, the cooking school run by original dish Editor Catherine Bell and our enduring Food Editor, Claire Aldous. “That’s probably where we got interested in cooking, and really expanded our skills,” Jo remembers. “We both used to do dinner parties for each other and our partners, and I was also doing dinner parties with Hannah and her partner – and suddenly I just thought, why not bring them all together?”
Once the group had been established, they decided six was the perfect number and set about recruiting some other members. Jo asked Jayne, another keen cook she knew, which Jayne remembers as a very formal request. “She said something like, ‘I’ve got something very important to ask you, and it concerns Mark [Jayne’s husband] too’,” Jayne laughs. “I was thinking, oh no, what’s
