The digital copy of the first edition of the Community Cookbook is being offered to the community for free. If you like the cookbook and would like to support future efforts to build community around food access in Southern Illinois, you can make a donation on this page and download your pdf here: 

You will be prompted to add in contact info, but no payment is necessary for the download.

Food is a storyteller and this cookbook is meant to tell ours. Not ours as in the story of the Collaborative Kitchen but of all of us. This cookbook is a snapshot of the contributors and their histories. Recipes are passed down, tweaked, expanded upon and sometimes happy accidents. The foods that we return to and the ways we alter our recipes are influenced by our own histories, our available resources and the mingling of our tastes with the tastes around us. 

Being in community with each other means impacting each other and allowing ourselves to be impacted much in the way that our recipes evolve, changing as we change; picking up new flavors and techniques and holding the histories of where or from whom we’ve learned from.