Spicing Up the Terp Teaching Kitchen

UW professor cooks up fresh lessons for Big Ten course in UMD visit.

By Karen Shih ’09 | Maryland Today

The fragrant sizzle of onions in a hot wok, the chop-chop-chop of knives on a cutting board, the colorful assortment of ingredient labels in another language—for a second there I thought I was back in my mom’s kitchen (and my rumbling stomach agreed).

But instead I was in the teaching kitchen at the University of Maryland’s updated and expanded Campus Pantry, which opened in this location in summer 2021. The person cooking was Associate Professor Charles Kim from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was preparing quintessential Korean dishes, kimchi fried rice and kimchi pancakes, for his class, “Korean Food Cultures: Past & Present,” which is usually taught online as part of the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s course-sharing consortium. The course uses food as a lens into how ordinary people have experienced the turbulence of modern Korea’s history, from Japanese colonialism to the Korean War to present day.

“Food is a great way to drive the impact of those events home,” Kim said. “Being able to have [the students] taste it today, they can more directly experience it.”

The alliance offers students an opportunity to learn from faculty members across the conference on topics not taught at their university. Kim’s class, offered through UMD’s Korean Program, has students from UMD, UW and the University of Illinois. He visited Maryland to meet his students in person at the start of the semester, and was excited to see that the Campus Pantry includes a demonstration kitchen he could use. The U-shaped space has a full-size refrigerator, four-burner stove and oven, and most importantly, a huge counter that faces rows of high-top metal tables, where students can use individual burners to practice while they watch the instructor.

Read the full story in Maryland Today. 

Photo by Stephanie S. Cordle.