Book club menu: A Quilting Party Supper for Sarah and Adelaide Yates

(with menus for Apple Cake and Bourbon Punch)

In THE FOURSOME, one of the first gatherings Chang and Eng host is a quilting party at their new house in Wilkes County, North Carolina. They invite local women to help make a quilt for their enormous custom bed—a practical pretext, of course, but also a courtship strategy. The scene is full of food, gossip, curiosity, flirtation, and barely concealed judgment.

The quilting party (which actually happened in real life) was a useful way to conjure the social texture of the world Sarah and Adelaide lived in: women gathered around a shared domestic task, food circulating in the background, curiosity humming under the surface, and the Bunker brothers trying hard to present themselves as gracious hosts.

For a book club menu, I’d suggest a mid-19th-century North Carolina-inspired supper: simple, seasonal, and farm-based, with foods that would have been familiar to the Yates women. In the quilting-party scene, there is cornbread, sourdough, butter, cheese, punch, lemonade, and a buffet of pork, beef, and lamb. Elsewhere in the novel, apples, peaches, pickled okra, carrots, tea, biscuits, preserves, and apple cake all appear as part of the domestic world Sarah and Adelaide inhabit.

Menu

Cornbread with honey butter

Buttermilk biscuits with preserves or apple butter

Sharp cheese with sliced apples and peaches

Pickled okra and carrots

Country ham or roasted pork, served on small biscuits or alongside the cornbread

A simple tomato and lettuce salad

Sallie’s Apple Cake

Drinks

Bourbon Punch

Lemonade

Sweet iced tea

Sallie’s Apple Cake

Apples recur through the domestic life of the novel: stewed, fried, baked into cakes and pies, pressed into juice, mashed into sauce. Apple cake is also something Sallie brings to Adelaide later in life, after the sisters have found their way to a complicated, durable peace.

Ingredients:

2 cups peeled, chopped apples

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup melted butter or neutral oil

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

Optional: 1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Directions:

Heat oven to 350°F. Grease an 8- or 9-inch cake pan.

In one bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt.

In another bowl, mix sugar, melted butter or oil, eggs, and vanilla.

Stir dry ingredients into wet ingredients until just combined, then fold in apples and nuts.

Spread the batter in the prepared pan and bake for 35–45 minutes, until a tester inserted in the

center comes out clean.

Serve plain, with whipped cream, or with a little warm cream poured over.

Bunker Bourbon Punch

In the quilting-party scene, Chang and Eng serve bourbon punch and lemonade while the women sew a Wild Goose Chase quilt. The party is part social occasion, part declaration of intent — and the punch helps keep the room lively.

10–12 small servings

Ingredients:

2 cups bourbon

1 cup strong black tea, cooled

¾ cup fresh lemon juice

½ cup honey simple syrup* or regular simple syrup

2 cups apple cider

2 cups cold sparkling water or ginger ale

1 orange, thinly sliced

1 lemon, thinly sliced

Optional: a few sprigs of mint

Ice

Directions:

In a large pitcher or punch bowl, combine bourbon, cooled tea, lemon juice, honey syrup, and

apple cider. Chill until ready to serve. Just before serving, add sparkling water or ginger ale and

plenty of ice. Garnish with orange and lemon slices, and mint if using.

For a lighter punch, use 1 1/2 cups bourbon or add an extra cup of sparkling water.

Mocktail: Leave out the bourbon; increase tea and cider by 1 cup each.

*To make honey simple syrup:

Combine 1/2 cup honey with 1/2 cup hot water and stir until dissolved. Let cool.