During the 1950s, my father, Robert operated his business, Brink’s Luncheon Meats, in Indianapolis. The wieners, smoked sausage,
braunschweiger, and baloney he produced were delicious and without equal. My family ate some sort of sausage at least three times each week and I thought everyone ate like that.
As soon as I was tall enough to reach the top of a table and pack wieners into boxes, I worked for my dad. When the sausage plant was located behind our house, I worked before and after grade school.
I saved my earnings for college, and my parents had a plan: They would pay my room and board and I would pay my tuition. It worked, but when I paid my last-semester tuition, my savings account was bone dry.
Six months after I graduated, my dad died of lung cancer.
I have been a vegetarian for many years, but I cannot pass a meat counter without thinking of my dad and how his hot dogs got me through Wabash.
—David Brink ’62
In January 2000 when I was senior manager in the statistics division of the IRS, I flew to post-apartheid South Africa.
I taught the Department of Finance in Pretoria how to develop tax data to improve financial analysis and management.
I remember vividly the abundance of international cuisine in that city. I ate Thai food for the first time; it was delicious.
Whenever I have Thai food I think of the long days in Pretoria trying to help the fledgling republic get its finances in order.
—Tom Petska ’70
The smell of olive oil, potatoes and onions being cooked together takes me back to my semester abroad in Madrid. I roomed with three other students in a place where an older señor cooked various meals for us. He created a tortilla Española that tormented us on weekend evenings. We would come back late and have to smell the perfectly cooked tortillas cooling on top of the fridge. Many times we were slapped on the wrist for diving into the pizza-sized, caramelized beauties in the middle of the night and adding a drizzle of olive oil over crusty bread. It was always worth the punishment.
These days I often make some form of potatoes, eggs, and onions for my girls, and I occasionally make a master tortilla Española. It’s fun to see this tradition passed down, as my youngest daughter has begun experimenting with those same ingredients.
—Mike Brandt ’90
When I first arrived in Montreal in 1973 I lived a few blocks from the St.-Viateur Bagel shop. Montreal bagels are smaller, sweeter, boiled and then baked, and have larger holes than their New York counterparts. Their traditional toppings are sesame or poppy seed (my favorite) and the best one is eaten right after you buy it, still warm, just out of the wood-fired brick oven.
For me they are a distinctive taste of Montreal and take me back to my first years in the city.
—Richard Elson ’69
I am taken back to my days in Crawfordsville whenever I go to a restaurant that serves pancakes. The smell brings me back to the Stack and Snack and the many midnight runs during my time there on campus.
—Glen Porter ’75
During my days in law school I shared a run-down house just off campus with five other law students. The kitchen where we cooked was next to my basement room, so whatever was for dinner lingered with me all evening.
One guy in our group had little cooking talent and less imagination, so on his night to cook, we inevitably ate Hamburger Helper—usually the Mac and Cheese variety.
That stuff has an odor that will penetrate plate glass.
Our usual practice was to listen to NPR over dinner, and to this day, hearing the theme song for All Things Considered triggers an olfactory response of cheap pasta, burger, and cheese!
—Steve Fox ’67
I feel a small pang of guilt whenever I eat goat.
My first experience with the meat was as a 16-year-old at a small mission hospital in Haiti, where my father was volunteering. We worked long days and dinner was always welcome, despite the menu being exotic for a Midwestern kid.
Hunger being the best sauce, I thought the goat was delicious.
The next day I asked my younger sisters where they thought “Billy,” the goat they had played with each morning, had gone. They searched most of that day as my brother and I planned the big reveal.
—Kurt Knochel ’84
I am currently making my first batch of homebrew beer. Cooking and smelling the wort took me back to my senior year abroad in Aberdeen, Scotland. We made beer in the dorm with very crude methods.
In a few weeks, my current batch will be ready, but I doubt it will be as memorable as that first batch.
—David Kitcoff ’76
When conducting research in remote villages in India in the 1970s, locating “safe” food and drinking water was dicey, so I was extremely careful.
Perhaps, too cautious.
When I was staying in a temple where my meals were a breakfast of toast and coffee and a supper of kitchari, I ate so sparingly I lost weight. A young sadhu (monk) remarked, “I now know why Americans are so wealthy: They don’t eat!”
In another place I explained to my hosts that, to make the food safe, I preferred it boiled in water and stove hot. For supper that evening they ate a wonderful curry, which would have been very safe, and on my placemat was a pot of boiling water with a leg of chicken,
a piece of goat, and a piece of lamb—tough and unflavored.
To this day, I don’t know if they were being solicitous of my well-being, or making fun of my strange eating habits. Perhaps both.
These days when I visit India I stay in the homes of friends and enjoy Indian food of all kinds. A common saying in India is, “Three people are to be treated as gods: your parent, your teacher (guru), and the guest in your house.”
—Raymond Williams H’68
When I was a kid in the early 1970s there were four boys in my family and my dad made about $20k a year. To stretch a buck and encourage family meals, Mom would buy a big, cheap round steak. She would marinate it and then slice it into tiny, thin strips. She would plug in a fondue pot, fill it half up with vegetable oil, and place it in the middle of the kitchen table. We would use fondue forks and deep fry those little slices of meat with mashed potatoes.
It took time to cook the steak, of course, but we all did it ourselves—from Steve’s barely cooked rare to my crispy well-done. Suddenly
six of us had been at the table for 75 minutes and one $1.98 round steak fed the crew.
—Jim Amidon ’87
We were as poor as church mice at Wabash. During our junior or senior year my roommate and I would go to the store and buy three pounds of soon-to-be rancid hamburger for a buck. We would then cook it up with some beans, calling it chili, and eat on this for a week.
—Don Race ’66
During my years at Wabash, there was a huge oversupply of dried split peas. Extra split peas were available to institutions, and my Sigma Chi fraternity house was the recipient of lots of them.
We were served split pea soup until we tired of it.
It took years before I was able to enjoy split pea soup again. Now I am very fond of it.
—Paul Honan ’43
Every Sunday at Wabash, my best friend Sean Hilde-brand and I would share a large $5 Little Caesar’s pepperoni pizza and an order of Italian cheesy bread. It got to the point that we’d just say “pizza pizza” and make a run to Little Caesar’s.
Whenever I see that restaurant I think about those times, and to this day when Sean and I get together we have to go old school and get
some pizza pizza!
—Andy Walsh ’14
After spending my freshman year at Martindale Hall and eating meals prepared and served in the Sparks Center, I moved to 507 Russell Avenue with three classmates, Tom “Moe” Modrowski ’78, Randy Miller ’76 and Steve “Hog” VanMeter ’76.
Without a doubt the ultimate food experience was an elaborate—at least for us—dinner of roast turkey, gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes and corn on the cob. A 15-pound turkey was procured for those events through our participation in a Kroger marketing promotion. I diligently followed Betty Crocker’s recipe for roast turkey and dressing. Moe was surprisingly adept at preparing mashed potatoes.
To this day the smell of roasting turkey and dressing inevitably transports me back in time to the brown duplex on Russell Avenue.
—Paul Schepers ’78
In the mid 1960s at the Kappa Sigma house, the availability of eggs, milk, and bread in the kitchen frequently led to late night or early morning French toast, with several members believing themselves to have the best recipe. Today French toast evokes memories of the conversations and cooking while being “supervised” by a group of brothers, coupled with the companionship, and break from studies.
—Rick Helm ’67
When I entered Wabash in the Fall of 1956, I had never heard of, much less tasted, pizza. So imagine the thrill of being introduced to the
taste of Mama Nunzio’s in downtown Crawfordsville. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven!
When my classmates celebrated our 50th reunion in 2010, several of us traveled down to Greencastle, where Mama’s son has relocated the restaurant, and we renewed our love affair with the taste delight of Nunzio’s pizza, hot and greasy.
—Dick Kite ’60
A sip of chocolate milk takes me back to my freshman year at Wabash and the Kappa Sigma house. We had a milk cooler—the Cow—which dispensed nearly unlimited chocolate and white milk. It was great, but I gained 20 pounds.
—Thomas Barley ’77
I was a dinner cook at Sparks in 1964 and 1965, working for Saga Food Service under Paul Kleis and Jay Mundhenk. Both good guys, they taught me how to cook, as well as helping me work my way through college.
—Rich Geiger ’65
In 1980 the food provider at the Sparks Center introduced a soda machine featuring the Faygo brand. “Free” soda pop was as
significant of a development as the destruction of the Berlin Wall. The grape flavor quickly became the preferred drink of all dorm residents. We were living large.
After a week or two someone asked if anyone else was having “digestive issues.” He went on to say he believed his internal organs had been inhabited by aliens— he was producing a fluorescent green by-product. He thought the U.S. Navy might be interested.
The chemistry and biology majors quickly traced the cause to the Faygo Grape, whose color attributes apparently survive the digestive process. We’d all been secretly worried that we were suffering from something serious. We were cured!
To this day I can’t see a Faygo Grape without remembering the relief of 30 or 40 guys at the Sparks Center who were all afflicted by
the dreaded fluorescent green Faygo disease.
—Name withheld upon request
Every time I smell Tabasco sauce I am reminded of Chapel Sing in the Fall of 2001.
This was back in the days of the arm-locked pledge classes vying for that coveted center of the steps by any means possible. By the end of the competition I had ingested a great deal of Tabasco and had even more covering my body.
Then my Phi Psi pledge brothers and I found out that we had won. That was the first Chapel Sing Phi Psi had won in around 10 years. My pledge brothers and I were elated.
I can still smell the vinegary bite and taste the slight heat. I can still see my pledge brothers with smiles through their running face paint and with Tabasco on top of their shaved heads. I smell it and get the adrenaline rush of competition. I smell it and feel pride and nostalgia.
While I cannot bring myself to eat it anymore, when I smell Tabasco I smell Wabash.
—A. J. Lyman ’05
In the fall of 1953 I was a Delt pledge and allowed to go to the kitchen about 10 p.m. for a snack during a study break. One evening I was
in there when a senior, Don Mitchell, was preparing spaghetti, upon which he sprinkled Kraft Parmesan Cheese (in a green can). I had never encountered it before.
“Eewww!” I said. “How can you stand that?!”
“Hey, Lehman, you don’t like that?” the senior replied. “Well, here. You carry this can with you around campus at all times.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. “It stinks!”
Whereupon the senior handed me a second green can from the kitchen and told me to carry both cans.
To get rid of the stuff, I sprinkled the cheese like Hansel and Gretel all over campus as I walked to class.
I avoided all Parmesan cheese until I realized, 30 years later, that natural parmesan cheese is not so odoriferous.
Now I will eat Caesar salad.
—Evan Lehman ’57
Whenever I see Smucker’s Strawberry Preserves I immediately picture the kitchen in the basement of the Kappa Sigma house in 1961.
It is 10:30 at night and the kitchen is filled with the brothers who have come down to get a snack during the 30-minute study break. On a shelf in the pantry is the biggest jar of preserves I have ever seen. Bread is on the shelf right above it.
I recall anticipation growing as I waited and waited for the toast to pop up. And I vividly recall the rich red color and the big chunks of strawberries that soon covered my toast.
Toast and Smucker’s Strawberry Preserves in the Kappa Sig kitchen became a nightly tradition. I have never weighed as much as I did at the end of that first year in that house.
—Kent Merrill ’64
Members of my family have spent tens of thousands of dollars on their kitchens, but every December we go into the basement of my aunt’s house in Whiting, IN, to work around a table and stove older than any one of us to create 100 pounds of potato sausage, drink beer, tell stories, and embrace the spirit of the Christmas holiday.
—Joe Pieters ’89
My mother was the College nurse in Kingery Hall and she grew up directly across from the old TKE house on Grant Avenue. Each Sunday when I was a boy we would return to that home for family meals, which always included mashed potatoes.
I can remember my grandmother peeling, cutting, boiling, and finally mashing the potatoes—all by hand!! A beautiful rhythm was heard throughout the house as she worked, the masher hitting the sides of the stew pot on every rotation, a sound I can still hear today. She used Milnot to make the potatoes rich and creamy, adding other ingredients to taste until they were “just right.”
Never measured, simply poured. As I grew older, she taught me how to make the potatoes.
Today, whenever there is a Hudson family meal, mashed potatoes are always on the menu.
I still peel, cut, and boil just like “Granny” used to but must admit I use a mixer when it is time to mash!
—Doug Hudson ’79
For me, a cinnamon roll isn’t even worth looking at unless it’s homemade. My childhood made sure of that.
Growing up, I cherished everything about cinnamon rolls—the smell of them cooking, the quality time I spent making and eating them with my father, and even the way my young, chubby little arm gave out while helping to stir the thick dough.
Whenever my dad whipped up a batch, an uncle of mine would make the trek across town to have a fresh, warm roll with us. It could be 3 a.m., and he would be there.
I knew there was something special about my dad’s cinnamon rolls even then, but it wasn’t until I grew up and started making them for friends, and seeing their reactions, that I realized I was a cinnamon roll snob.
Maybe I’m biased, but I think that’s the best kind of snob to be.
—Roger Market ’09
I love fried chicken!
I first learned the basic mechanics of the frying process from my grandmother, “Mother-dear.” I grew up with my seven siblings, both parents, grandmother and a host of extended/ adopted family members. “Mother-dear” believed in God and that family should be together for dinner.
She taught me the frying process, but I’m a scientist at heart. I had to experiment. Through years of trial and error and quite a few burnt
skillets, I’ve mastered a personal recipe that gives me the perfect golden look every time.
I had the pleasure of hosting a soul food dinner at the FIJI house while I was at Wabash.
I am comforted each time I fill that ol’ cast iron skillet with oil. It helps me remember just how far I’ve come in life and how much more I have to go.
—Diamond Reese ’11
I recall the vivid experience of tasting a slice of dry, gamy, musky antelope [antilocapra americana] haunch in the Sparks Center. A gift of a sharp-shooting alumnus that evoked memories of wide western prairies full of sagebrush under pure skies with snowcapped mountains in the far distance.
Delicious.
A liberal arts experience that tasted nothing like chicken.
—Peter Toft ’71
One of my earliest memories: as a six-year-old boy being babysat by my grandmother, I would awaken to coal dust from her stove and hot pancakes in her cast-iron skillet (sometimes a little blackened).
—Mike Irons ’67
For every summer or Christmas break during my childhood, I would visit my Nana and Papa’s (Bill MacDougall ’51) for a week. At least once each trip, I could count on my grandfather making the greatest cookies in the world.
My grandfather would place raspberry jam between two pieces of MacDougall family shortbread cookies, each roughly the size of a 50-cent piece, before squeezing them together like an Oreo. Then he would place a healthy helping of icing on top.
Once cooled in the refrigerator, the cookies were fair game, with the stipulation that you could only have two a day. Yeah, that never stopped me.
During my junior year at Wabash I studied abroad at the University of St. Andrews, in the same town where my great-grandparents were
born and raised. Soon after I arrived I stopped by a local bakery named MacArthur & Sons, where my great- grandmother had worked
nearly 100 years ago before immigrating the U.S. When I walked in the door, the first thing I saw in the front display were those cookies.
I stopped by that bakery once or twice a week until I returned home, which would probably explain why I came home a little heftier than when I left.
—Ian MacDougall ’14