Check It Out: Cooking Classes at the Boston Public Library
Photos by Adam DeTour
As if on cue, snow begins falling on Nubian Square as Boston Public Library chef-in-residence Kayla Tabb teaches her “$20 Holiday Dinner” class. A handful of women have shown up at the Shaw-Roxbury branch on a blustery Saturday morning to learn how to prepare an affordable vegetarian holiday dinner with ingredients available at Dollar Tree and Market Basket.
The class is one of many offered through the Boston Public Library Nutrition Lab, which serves as the library’s hub for nutrition literacy and provides cooking courses, demonstrations and hands-on learning opportunities free of charge.
The menu Chef Tabb is demonstrating this day includes lasagna rollups made with cannellini beans and spinach, garlic herb biscuits, green beans and thumbprint cookies filled with cranberry sauce. She offers nutrition tips, too, like how substituting beans for ricotta in the lasagna boosts nutrients and fiber, and how using prepared pesto adds flavor while saving money on pantry items.
The attendees gathered in the library kitchen come from all around the Boston area—one has even driven up from Brockton. They take in the information, eagerly lend a hand in prepping the dishes, and ask questions. Many are repeat visitors.
While the group sits together to sample the final dishes, their lively conversation ranges from favorite chefs to homemade tofu to knife sharpening. It’s clear most are here for more than nutrition and money-saving recipe tips.
They’re fans of food, learning—and Chef Tabb, the 29-year-old chef who began her one-year tenure in April 2025.
As chef-in-residence, Tabb creates and teaches several hands-on cooking classes and other programs each month created specifically for the library community. Some, like the affordable holiday dinner class and an upcoming talk on the new food pyramid, are standalone courses. Others are part of a year-long focus on the food of indigenous populations of the region.
The job is unique, and seems almost custom-built for the MIT anthropology graduate–turned–pastry chef. Tabb says when she read the job description she thought, “That’s crazy. Are they talking about me?”
Tabb describes herself as someone who is casually teaching all the time. She points to the online cooking classes for friends that she organized during the pandemic as one example. She also notes that her academic background in anthropology leads her to connect with people and recognize a need to address cultural relevancy.
Importantly for Tabb, the chef-in-residence position brings all her interests to bear on the subject of food.
“I started cooking the minute that I could reach countertops. I was, like, maybe 5 or 6 years old when my grandma got me my first chef’s coat,” Tabb says.
By the time she was 13, the California native had started her own bakery business called Little Lady Kakes to finance a summer web design class. From a family with a strong STEM background—her father is a software engineer—Tabb was good at math and science. “We used to do math on the bathroom mirrors with dry erase markers,” she says.
But food was always the first love of the future chef. “When I said I wanted to go to culinary school, my parents were, like, ‘That’s fun, but we want you to get a big girl degree,’” she says.
Pursuing that “big girl” degree took Tabb to MIT, where she first majored in biochemical engineering thinking it might be her pathway to a career in food. After spending time in labs, she realized she preferred working with people and wanted to do something where she was making an immediate impact. Eventually Tabb made the switch to medical anthropology where research took her into communities studying things like the health effects of living in a food desert.
Chef Kayla Tabb
After graduating from MIT and joining the corporate world as a remote worker during the pandemic, Tabb began working part-time as a baker at Vinal Bakery in Somerville and The Lexington in Cambridge.
“I loved seeing all of the pastries baked up in the morning and people excited to come in and buy them. But I could not see myself doing that forever,” she says.
After finally attending culinary school—she’s a graduate of Boston University’s Pastry Arts program—Tabb spent time working as a recipe developer for a plant-based meal kit delivery company.
“It got me perfectly ready for this job,” she says.
As Stephanie Chace, nutrition literacy coordinator for Boston Public Library, tells it, the library’s goal for addressing nutrition literacy goes further than teaching about healthy fats, protein and carbs.
“When we think about nutrition, we also talk about community and having a space where people can exchange ideas and food memories. That’s really important to the Nutrition Lab,” Chace says. Like Tabb, Chace also has an academic degree in anthropology.
She notes that libraries approach food and nutrition literacy in many ways, including focusing on hunger and food insecurity or directing patrons to appropriate services. When the Boston Public Library sought to create a nutrition-focused program at the Shaw-Roxbury branch in 2021, they found inspiration for something more ambitious in a successful model at the Free Library of Philadelphia. BPL wanted to use cooking to help further the library’s larger mission of building literacy, providing spaces and programs for patrons, offering instruction and addressing cultural heritage.
Part of that effort meant constructing the gleaming new demonstration kitchen for classes of up to 12 people at Shaw-Roxbury. It also meant bringing on Chace as a full-time coordinator, creating a nutrition curriculum and eventually hiring the first chef-in-residence.
One of Chace’s early efforts was developing a spice bank. Each year, the library collects donations of unopened spices for families who use food banks. Improving access to spices helps food bank patrons uphold family and cultural food traditions and discover new flavors.
“We absolutely focus on the biological aspects of nutrition, but especially as anthropologists, we’re thinking about things from the point of view of cultural relevancy. Because of that our scope is a lot broader than what people expect from the word nutrition. It can be anything that you use to nourish your body, and that can be food, tea, herbs. That can be company, too,” Tabb adds.
As with the holiday dinner class where she provided a cost comparison of buying the ingredients at several local stores, Tabb regularly makes sure she’s addressing community needs.
“I will adjust recipes to make sure they are accessible for people in the community and that they can get these ingredients from local grocery stores. I’ll often tell people ‘I went to Tropical for this. I went to Vincente’s for this,’” Tabb says.
According to Chace, each chef-in-residence begins their tenure with listening sessions where members of the community come together to share what they’re interested in learning. That helps the director and chef plan a curriculum. In the past that’s included bringing in an herbalist for a class on healing your gut with natural remedies, discussing maternal nutrition and navigating diabetes.
One of the highlights of Tabb’s year was a three-part indigenous shellfish cooking class created with Corey Hendricks of Duck Island Shellfish Co.. Hendricks is a third-generation shellfish farmer and member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. The two met when Tabb attended the Mashpee Wampanoag annual Powwow to research indigenous food. After spending time together at Hendricks’ farm, they developed the series of courses for Native American Heritage month in November. Tabb created recipes for the classes and Hendricks spoke about his experience as an indigenous shellfish farmer and his family’s deep connection to the environment.
“It’s their neighborhood and they have the knowledge to do this practice in a way that’s harmonious with the environment as well. So, when I think about food, I’m also thinking about the environment and sustainability,” Tabb says.
“I think what’s probably been the most rewarding part is being able to include people in these conversations and in these classes that haven’t necessarily been included before,” Tabb says.
The search for the next chef-in-residence begins in spring of 2026. The new chef will likely find an even greater emphasis on community with next year’s proposed theme being “How We Gather.” As Chace notes, for many people dining in 2026 means grabbing takeout and eating it alone. The library provides a perfect “third place” where people can come together to learn about the importance of sharing food and gathering with others to combat loneliness and isolation.
As Tabb approaches the final months of her residency, she’s looking ahead to new prospects of her own including the possibility of graduate school or starting her own food media company to create opportunities for more diverse voices and stories to be heard.
But first, she has work to complete.
“Sometimes I consider myself, like, the city’s chef. I want to create recipes specifically for Boston and for our patrons. This has been nothing like I expected. It’s been so much better, so much better. I was talking to my partner about this and I was, like, ‘Yeah, I think the residency absolutely changed my life,’” Tabb says.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
The Boston Public Library (BPL) is accepting applications for its Third Chef-in-Residence (CIR), a program generously funded by private philanthropic support from the PDB Foundation through the Boston Public Library Fund. This 12-month residency will be centered at the BPL’s Nutrition Lab at the Shaw-Roxbury Branch Library in Nubian Square and will begin in June 2026.
APPLICATIONS DUE MARCH 27, 2026: APPLY HERE
This story appeared in the Spring 2026 issue.
