Fall 2006

Flavors of the World

Email Story

When Wooster’s international students gather to cook together in their residence halls’ small kitchens, they are hungry for more than food that tastes like home. They seek the camaraderie of bumping elbows with fellow cooks, the fellowship of a shared meal, and the joy of giving and receiving the gift of food.

Although they cook throughout the year, there is added motivation during the summer, when the College’s food service is closed. Approximately one-half of the 90 international students who attend Wooster lived on campus for at least part of this past summer. On a steamy evening last July, junior Kamesha Barton joined friends Akhil Banthia ’08, from Kolkata, India, and Rasmi Ekka ’08, from Jamshedpur, India, to prepare a feast of egg rolls, Jamaican jerk chicken, beans and rice, and potato curry.

When Kamesha arrived at Wooster as a first-year student, she had no interest in preparing meals. For too long, she had been the family’s main cook at their home in Portland, Jamaica. She was, she says, fed up with kitchen work. But she began to miss the cooking and the food. Besides, this was different; it was for friends, not siblings.

Kamesha arrives at the small kitchen in Stevenson Hall, armed with pots, pans, chicken, rice, beans, and lots of spices. Students store most ingredients and utensils in their own rooms, so meal preparation always includes transportation logistics. There are no cookbooks or recipe cards in sight.

“You watch what others do,” Kamesha says, “and you go by taste.” The person she has watched all of her life is her mother, a college dining hall supervisor. In almost no time, Kamesha has rolled the chicken in spices and chopped the scallions for her beans and rice. She has chosen to fix chicken that can be baked, freeing up the kitchen’s one stove top for the other two cooks.

The meal takes more than two hours to make, and hungry friends with good noses have begun stopping in, to see what’s cooking. The three friends agree that international students are happier about slow-cooked food than their American counterparts, who, they say, are more likely to pop a box into a microwave.

Guests sample the feast, piling plates high. The eggs in the Indian egg roll, or kathi, are delicately flavored with lemon and slightly crunchy onion. The rice and beans are soft and sweetly fragrant. The addition of coconut milk while the rice was cooking makes the dish a perfect accompaniment to the pungent, golden potatoes and fiery red chicken.

The wait has been worth it.