It’s not every day you find a group of teens gathered around a table at a library, fashioning thin slices of salami into roses and creating charcuterie boards fit for elegant dinner parties—unless you’re at Carroll County (Md.) Public Library (CCPL).
Inspired by the library’s popular how-to charcuterie events for adults, staffers Amanda Krumrine and Nancy Farace have hosted two teen snack-board classes to engage young patrons. In these classes, teens learn how to make the boards by laser-cutting wood in the makerspace at CCPL’s Exploration Commons location and later assembling the meats, cheeses, and other bites into appealing arrangements.
Exploration Commons has a fully licensed teaching kitchen and makerspace. Krumrine, the makerspace supervisor, runs the first part of the two-part program, helping teens create their wooden boards as part of STEAM instruction. She then hands them off to Farace, the teaching kitchen supervisor, who instructs teens on presenting the food on their boards to maximum effect.
“We really try to take advantage of the fact that we have both spaces here and our staffers work together well,” Farace says. “We get people who maybe traditionally wouldn’t come into the kitchen or into the makerspace to see how they can cross over and what the possibilities are.”
Farace says on the kitchen side of things, she teaches spatial design concepts, garnishing, and other fun assembly projects like the salami rose, where teens create a flower-like arrangement by folding thin slices of salami or pepperoni around the rim of a glass, adding overlapping “petals” until the glass is full, then flipping it over, and presto!
“I always consider it a compliment when they come back and take the class again,” Farace says. “They’ll send us messages, or we’ll see them in another class, saying, ‘I made a board for my grandfather’s birthday using what we learned in class’ or ‘I used my board to do XYZ.’”
Krumrine and Farace hosted programs for teens in April 2023 and 2024. They would like to add another teen class to the schedule; in the meantime, they welcome patrons ages 16 and up to the adult charcuterie classes.
Comfort food
The salami rose was also popular in the teen charcuterie classes held at Geneva (Ill.) Public Library (GPL), according to teen services librarian Kylie Peters.
Peters says she is always looking at social media trends for inspiration for teen programming. That’s where she saw a lot of charcuterie board content and recruited a local chef—and a library patron—to buy all the supplies and teach the class. She was also inspired by the library’s successful adult charcuterie program.
“It was perfect because there’s no cooking and you don’t need a lot of supplies. It works really well with the younger audience to do something hands-on,” Peters says. “Our adults like cooking demos. They like to watch a chef cook something and talk about how to cook it, but I don’t feel that that would work with the teens. They want to be doing something hands-on.”
GPL has hosted two teen charcuterie events, one in December 2022 and one in June 2023, which was themed around the Fourth of July. It offered separate programming to allow elementary and middle schoolers to engrave their serving boards using a laser cutter.
It was perfect because there’s no cooking and you don’t need a lot of supplies. —Kylie Peters, teen services librarian, Geneva (Ill.) Public Library
Peters says that while charcuterie boards may have a fancy or pretentious reputation, she thinks they are accessible to a wide audience, and the food on the boards is familiar to most teens.
She recalls, during one class, a kid exclaimed, “You can eat jam with cheese?” Another teen in the group said, “Yes, fancy people do that—now you’re fancy!” Peters observes that for this child, who had never thought to pair cheese with jam, it was a revelation. “We told him, ‘It’s a bit bougie, but you can definitely do it. There are no barriers to trying new things.’”
For other libraries considering hosting a charcuterie board program, Peters advises having three staff members participate—one person leading, one monitoring, and another cleaning.
Shark week
This past July, Sandusky (Ohio) Library (SL) hosted a “shark-cuterie” program that aligned with the library’s animal-themed week during summer reading, Children’s Services Manager Emily Kimball says. To fit the shark-week theme, Kimball ordered blue paper plates to represent the ocean, and the kids cut “shark chomps” into the side. They arranged foods including gummy sharks, candy bracelets with shark charms, Swedish Fish, Goldfish crackers, whale crackers, mermaid- and shark-themed fruit snacks, and octopus-shaped candy.
SL’s goal was to elevate its youth food programming, Kimball says. The library serves snacks after school and in the summer during lunchtime, “so we have kids that already equate us with ‘If I’m hungry, this is where I’m going to go, because you’re going to supply me with food I need,’” she explains. “But how can we make it fun, and how can we get them interested in making the food or the presentation of the food? That’s a whole new ball game for us.”
While the program was geared toward 12-to-16-year-olds, most of the 25 participants were younger, with some as young as 8.
Kimball says the library spent less than $50 for this class, shopping mostly at Oriental Trading and a local Dollar Tree store for supplies. She says the class was one of the highest-attended programs of the summer. Its popularity prompted her to think about other food programs to hold for teens.
“Typically, we come home, we have a snack, we just toss it on the plate or in a bowl,” Kimball says. “So getting teens to think, ‘I can make this pretty and I can eat it,’ is our main objective. Our goal is always to enrich lives and get our teens to think outside of their box.”
