“We are really just a small group of intelligent women with a shared history and an interest in cooking,” said Mary Ellen Randall, 69, who has been a member for about 15 years.

Her husband is a retired surgeon and pilot who golfs. She serves on several charitable boards and some purely social ones. She plays a mean game of tennis. Which is not to say she is a member of the Wichita elite, but it is hard to tell. A hallmark of Wichita society is to never act as if you are Wichita society.

Cooking club members are usually retired. Their children are mostly grown. As a result, the youngest member is in her early 50s. But this is not a frivolous group, said Mary Aikins, 89, who specialized in aerobatic flying and worked as a pilot examiner for the Federal Aviation Administration. She has moved on to honorary status and now lives in an assisted-living center, where several other members live. “We are not about needlepoint and bird-watching,” she said.

In the early years, the club sponsored essay contests in which young women were encouraged to ponder questions like, “Can systematical and economical housekeeping be carried on in conjunction with keeping up your intellectual pursuits?” Members knitted sweaters for soldiers in World War I and rolled bandages during World War II. Lunches then reflected food rationing, with honey instead of sugar on the baked apples, and tea substituting for coffee.

The lunches were educational as well. Members who traveled to New York at the turn of the century came back and demonstrated omelets, which were all the rage. There were debates over whether commercial baking powder, new on the market, would hurt their buckwheat cakes. It did not. A salesman showed off his beaten biscuit machine in 1917. In 1934, Mrs. Hex instructed members on how to bone a duck.