As the sun went down on a Thursday night, a small but enthusiastic group gathered at the Bill Memorial Library in Groton to discuss the intricacies of cooking for a book club. For this club, however, the books at the center of each meeting are cookbooks.

The Cookbook Book Club is one of the latest reading groups to meet at the library. Instead of everyone reading the same book and discussing it, members pick recipes from a specific cookbook or cuisine, make them at home and bring them into the library to share. The inaugural meeting centered around “Book Club Cook Book,” a compilation of recipes inspired by book club selections.

Representing “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson, Crickett Burgos brought Swedish meatballs to the meeting using a recipe she had tried once before.

“One thing I initially thought would be a time saver would be to use frozen, chopped up onions, but that really added too much water, and then I had to add more breadcrumbs,” she said. The book club batch included fresh onions, which produced a firmer but more onion-flavored meatball.

“I think that maybe I like the first batch better,” she admitted.

Sandy Austin of Niantic ended up switching her recipe entirely, bringing a mango and jicama salad from “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel García Márquez instead of wild mushrooms on toast from Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina.”

“I made a sample, just a small batch to put on bread to make crostinis,” she said. “It turned out to be this gray glob, and I thought, ‘All that work… and no one is going to want to eat these!’”

The group was the inaugural meeting of the library’s Cookbook Book Club, created as a collaboration between library staff and the Friends of the Bill Memorial Library. Members had to visit the library during the month of September to pick up a recipe from the “Book Club Cookbook” and bring it to the Oct. 13 meeting. Ann Doyle of Groton, who is a member of the Friends, said she had recently reread Anita Diamant’s “The Red Tent” and chose to bring in a fig and goat cheese spread to eat with pita bread.

Library director Wendy Connal brought in tzatziki from Jeffrey Eugenides’ “Middlesex.” She said the idea for the cookbook book club came out of a conversation during a Friends meeting. She went to cooking school and loves cookbooks, so she jumped on the idea to start the group.

While more than 20 people picked recipes from the book, only seven attended the meeting, with a few more dropping off dishes ahead of time. Library assistant Kate Bengtson, who made turkey empanadas from Isabel Allende’s “Daughter of Fortune” and brought her husband Louis to the meeting, said she was a little surprised by the turnout. Nevertheless, she was excited to join the group because it’s less awkward to join than an established book group.

“I feel like food is the universal bringer-together, so it’s much easier to talk to someone over good food as opposed to about a book that maybe someone loved or maybe someone hated,” she said.

Burgos, who recently moved to the area from Virginia, said she joined the group to meet new people in the area after meeting Doyle while sorting books at the library.

Colleen McGrath, another recent newcomer to Groton, said she also joined to meet people with common interests. She used to run her own catering company, and she brought Spanish tortilla bites with potato and chorizo from Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s “The Shadow of the Wind.”

The attendees spent the meeting sampling the dishes and swapping cooking tips, from when to start potatoes so they are cooked when everything else is done to bringing frozen mango to the beach as a sweet treat on a hot day. They also discussed ideas for future meetings, such as using their own cookbooks or picking unusual ingredients and figuring out what they can make with them.

The next meeting of the cookbook book club will be a cookie swap-themed meeting held Dec. 8. A variety of cookie cookbooks will be available at the library, 240 Monument St. in Groton.

a.hutchinson@theday.com