Murrysville cooking instructor publishes cookbook
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Patty Irrgang of Murrysville has worked as an independent fashion designer and as a space manager in the University of Pittsburgh’s academic provost office.
She also has spent nearly a half-century providing the food while tailgating at Pitt football games. During that time, she built up quite a recipe repertoire.
So after she retired from Pitt, Irrgang, 66, didn’t have to look far to find a new way to spend her days.
“I immediately began thinking about a cooking school,” she said. “When people have come over to our house for dinner, a lot of times they’ll ask for a recipe, but a lot have also asked me to show them how to make it.”
For the past six years, Irrgang has operated the Common Goodness Cooking School out of her home in Murrysville’s Heather Highlands neighborhood.
She recently self-published her first cookbook, “It’s All About Tailgating!”
And while she’s excited to see how it is received, Irrgang admitted she wouldn’t have come up with the idea on her own.
“I’m not the greatest at marketing myself,” she said. “But one of our friends who is always at our tailgates suggested I put together a cookbook of my tailgating recipes.”
From smoked chicken thighs to apple crisp to a Pittsburgh-style breakfast sandwich with steak and eggs, the cookbook contains not only recipes but stories from Irrgang’s life, both culinary and personal.
“I had a very dysfunctional family growing up, but my four sisters and I hung together,” she said. “And as we did, we cooked and baked together a lot.”
During her time at Pitt, Irrgang performed a small but crucial service for the football team, where her husband, James, spent time as a student athletic trainer.
“Pitt’s uniforms would sometimes come in with the nameplates misspelled,” she said. “The team’s equipment manager knew I sewed — I literally had my sewing machine right in my dorm room — and he’d bring them over to have me fix them.”
Irrgang hosts up to four Common Goodness Cooking School classes weekly.
“The most popular request I get is for Italian cooking lessons,” she said. “I can relate to every age group that comes in.”
When a cooking class involves children, Irrgang has a list of food science experiments to help keep things lively.
“I’ll use vinegar and baking soda to simulate how cakes and cookie doughs rise,” she said. “I did once and one of the kids in the class couldn’t get over it. He kept saying, ‘That’s just the coolest thing I ever saw,’ ” she said.
“It’s All About Tailgating!” was published with the help of BirrBatt Printing in Trafford.
It’s available to order through Irrgang’s website, CommonGoodnessCookingSchool.com, where requests for cooking classes are accepted. It also is available at Pitt’s University Store as well as Maggie & Stella’s Cards & Gifts, both along Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood.
From cooking with her sisters to hosting dinners for her husband’s work clients, to developing and fine-tuning her carrot cake recipe, Irrgang said, “food has always been a big part of our lives.”
For more, see CommonGoodnessCookingSchool.com.