Sharing Recipes, Connecting Community

As Director of Student Activities, Shari Rossman appreciates that students are strongly connected with their home foods, and draws on her own experiences to encourage, teach, and enable students to share these connections. “As a global community, food is certainly a touch point,” Shari says. “Students are eager to share recipes and dishes from home. We used to host one international night each year; that has evolved into five nights. Many affinity groups want to have their own dedicated night and showcase food from their homes and cultures.”

Students also enjoy doing the cooking themselves. Shari helps them plan, source, and purchase ingredients, and create their dishes. She teaches them kitchen skills; how to properly use knives, practice kitchen safety, and clean up properly. Students serve large volumes of food to their peers, and thus learn to respect the work of the dining room staff; they experience how challenging it is to cook and serve for a large number of people.

“Food is a very real way to share culture,” Shari explains. “Students often begin by wanting to enjoy their familiar foods, but then become proud to share these foods with their classmates and peers.”

Food can also be part of a larger learning experience. Working in collaboration with the English Department, Shari will visit classes discussing Argentinian literature, talk about the Jewish and Moorish diaspora, then make Argentinian empanadas with olives, sultanas, and other ingredients originally from Morocco and Spain. And the learning goes both ways.

“I continue to learn from our students; we compare recipes,” Shari says. “I learned to love the piquant and sweet flavor palette of Moroccan food with students from Afghanistan, and I’ve learned to distinguish Latin cooking; each country has its own way of doing things. Students often learn to cook from their mothers or grandmothers, and we’ll compare recipes and find ways to source the ingredients needed.”

“Food is also, as Tom Hoopes [Head of Religions Department] once said to me, another way of saying ‘I love you’ to a teenager.” Shari also makes time to feed kids fun, comfort foods like macaroni and cheese, French fries, s’mores, ice cream sundaes, and hot chocolate. The boys’ basketball team came to the kitchen one recent Saturday night and made cookies for all of the students.

“But even with comfort food, we have to do it the right way,” Shari says. “Waffles are popular, but we don’t make waffles from a mix, we’re whipping egg whites and mixing flour, and the kids are covered with it–and they love it.”