One Part Cuisine, One Part Community, Mix, Repeat

The Great Tulsa Cookbook Swap
Mother Road Market
Tulsa
June 13, 2024

When I entered the Mother Road Market patio at 6 p.m. on a sweltering early summer evening for Magic City Books’ Great Tulsa Cookbook Swap, the book-packed tables and clusters of hungry readers-slash-chefs lining the west side of the bustling food hall almost felt like a mirage. A guitarist sang soft classics near the entryway, just higher in the mix than the low hum of the crowd. Beads of sweat glistened on my fellow swappers’ foreheads. It wasn’t just me.

The doors actually opened at 5:30 so early birds could drop off their offerings and the crew could have something to work with as they set up. Event personnel, including at least one local librarian, tidied the lines of cookbooks, which were propped by bookends so the spines sat facing up rather than out. The official rules: Bring up to 10 books to trade for as many as you offer. At the welcome table, though, the guidance was more flexible: Take about as many as you brought. The staff explained that any leftover books would be donated to Youth Services of Tulsa’s transitional living program, so nothing would go to waste.

If you’ve been to one of Magic City’s adult book fairs (I haven’t, but my colleague Z. B. Reeves recapped last September’s event, which saw 1,400 attendees), you might have been overwhelmed by the buzz, the masses. If so, this type of book event might be more for you. The staff seemed calmed by the turnout; it wasn’t chaos, but each book table was completely lined with folks skimming, fanning pages (thank god for that airflow) and sharing some of the more charming contenders (e.g., old spiral-bound, self-published volumes; slightly out-of-fashion low-fat and ’70s “how to be a good host” titles).

Two things Magic City founder Jeff Martin has down: sniffing out what crowds will love and leveraging partnerships with other local entities. This different take on a local book event was born out of talks with the powers that be at Mother Road Market, according to Jenna Akuma, director of the nonprofit Tulsa Literary Coalition, which owns Magic City. Bookstore + food hall = cookbooks, naturally. I certainly found myself getting hungry scanning cast iron cookware cookbooks, Mediterranean recipes, and hot sauce compendiums, and by about 6:30 I spotted many of the attendees sitting down to sandwiches from Kitchen 66’s Takeover Cafe, bowls from Pure Food and Juice, hot chicken from Chicken and the Wolf. Instead of the old scroll-and-eat, most of them flipped through the pages of their new treasures.

Preparing for the event, I found that choosing books to part with wasn’t the easiest task. Most of my cookbooks came to me as gifts, and many hold a special place in my heart even though I rarely crack them open anymore. This seemed to be a common sentiment that night. Despite the fact that everyone I talked to admitted to using online recipes nine times out of 10, our old cookbooks hold our sweat, tears, sauce splatters. Often they’re either attached to the person who bestowed the gift upon us or the time in our lives when we were more loyal to their pages — or both.

I think those of us who came to this swap want to get back to being cookbook people. As my editor, who was also in attendance, said, the experience of cooking with an online recipe just is not pleasant on the whole. Particularly on your phone: the scrolling, the timing out and necessity of the passcode, the sticky fingers on the screen. My hunch is that, zooming out a bit, we also just want to get away from that blue light any chance we can. Which is why creative approaches to book events are important — and, seemingly, highly welcome — in our city and beyond.

Fortunately, our local bookstores are serving in this regard. Between Magic City’s fairs and swaps, Fulton Street’s reading parties (a little to the side, but they have an upcoming spelling bee, which my sixth-grade self wishes I’d signed up for: June 26!), and Whitty Books’ various book clubs and markets, we’re constantly being invited to experience books and bookstores in new ways.

An admission: I took four books but brought three. It was only at the last minute that I decided to take the hot sauce book, after the crowd died down. Technically, though, it was sanctioned. And I promise to actually use the damn things — and to be more of a giver, less of a taker, at the next swap.