Honors seminar incorporates cooking, chemistry and camaraderie

For one class, the more cooks in the kitchen the better.

That class is the science of cooking, a new honors seminar that not only teaches 15 students how to cook, but also what chemical reactions take place behind the cooking process.

Jake Kerby, the course instructor, said he’s always enjoyed cooking as a hobby. An associate professor of biology, Kerby said cooking can be a lot like a chemistry lab.

“There’s some creativity there, but often it’s just being able to at some level follow directions and understand the concepts behind what’s going on,” he said. “And at its very essence, the food is biology and the cooking is chemistry.”

Students are required to read two books for the course: “The Science of Cooking,” which is essentially a practical guide for the home cook, and “On Food and Cooking,” which covers more about the actual science behind cooking, Kerby said.

There are two main projects that are required for the class.

The first, “Thanksgiving challenge,” requires students to take an old, family recipe and improve it using the concepts they’ve learned in class.

“That’s the idea, trying to make them sort of be creative and apply these concepts in a real scenario,” Kerby said.

Senior Sydney Duncan is improvising her family’s taco-ritas recipe, which she said are basically enchiladas but with cream of chicken soup and cheddar cheese soup.

Duncan said she’s enjoyed the science of cooking, which is her last honors seminar.

“It’s a really fun class,” she said.

The second project consists of serving three different dinners to USD faculty. Student groups will be taking turns creating their own dishes for honors administration, deans of the College of Arts and Sciences and ending with President James Abbott and his guests on Dec. 7.

Duncan will be making ribs for the honors administration meal, she said.

A few of the many dishes students have made so far this semester include bread from scratch, creme brulee and hamburgers made from meat they ground themselves. Kerby said each student group is responsible for making a different component of the meal, whether it be an appetizer or dessert.

Kerby said activities like washing dishes and setting the table result in a sense of camaraderie among students not normally found in most classes.

“It’s a really excellent class in terms of integrating knowledge and having people sort of implement things and fail at times and it seems to be a very sort of fast-moving class so it’s nice,” he said. “And I think it also has nice elements where there’s a lot of community.”

Once everything is complete, Kerby and his students eat dinner together in the basement of United Church of Christ, where they do their cooking every Monday night.

After that, students give presentations on their reading material and discuss the dishes they made.

Junior Crystal Wharton said she feels lucky to have gotten into the seminar, which filled up quickly. Since she’s a junior, she was originally on the class waitlist, but was able to get in after someone dropped it.

Wharton is especially excited to learn how to cook homemade meals because she grew up eating a lot of microwave dishes, she said.

“I’m really interested in learning how to cook well,” she said.

One of Wharton’s favorite dishes to make was apple pie, which she’s made for herself at home since learning how to do it in class.

“I’m learning a lot about a lot of different foods,” she said.

Kerby said the class is full of the regular “antics” and mistakes that come with a normal kitchen, which he likes much better than the scripted nature of modern Food Network cooking shows.

“I think that’s the fun of the course as well,” Kerby said.