A professor’s opinion: Recipes

What’s your favorite family recipe?

Scot Bertram, Journalism: “We have a Christmas cookie recipe called fudgy fruitcake drops. My mom made them when I was growing up, and I make them now, and don’t tell her, but I make them better. I haven’t found the recipe anywhere. The cookies are largely made of grape jelly, which is better than it sounds, chocolate chips, raisins, walnuts, flour, cocoa, all sorts of ingredients. They’re bumpy, you only cook them for eight minutes because you’re just setting it, there’s not much rising in the oven. They’re kind of chewy.”

Kelly Scott Franklin, English: “Most people think they’ve had real chocolate chip cookies, but my wife got this recipe from someone who had the most deluxe chocolate chip cookie recipe. It has ground coffee, ground walnuts, and lemon juice in it. It has these unusual ingredients, and it’s another category of chocolate chip cookies. All other chocolate chip cookies pale in comparison to the greatness of this truly unique chocolate chip cookie.” 

Brent Cline, English: “Bouillabaisse: mussels, shrimp, fish, and scallops in a tomato-saffron broth. This is the one all the kids love, too.”

Mark Nussbaum, Chemistry: “My wife makes homemade bread all the time, so it’s been years and years and years since we’ve ever bought a loaf of bread at the grocery store. She has two different recipes that she makes all the time because she likes one kind better, and I like the other kind better. Her love language is food, so if somebody needs some love, she’ll give them a loaf of bread and some homemade strawberry jam. Those are some of my favorite things she makes. She makes rolls as well and all sorts of good stuff. She’s the queen of breads, I’d say.”

Nathan Schlueter, Philosophy: “My kids’ favorite is smoked salmon on the grill, but my personal favorite is the shrimp broil we do every summer: a massive quantity of corn on the cob, sausage, shrimp, crawfish, potatoes, jalapenos, spread out over a large wooden board on pedestals which we stand around and eat with cold beer and finish off with a cold jump into the pool.” 

Miles Smith IV, History: “My mom would make this dish called chicken eleganté, it’s a spinach and sour cream center, and then you hammer out the chicken and fold it over itself and bake it like that. It’s just amazing.”