Bread, Butter, and Deerfield: Head Baker William Shea

Mr. Shea came to Deerfield three years ago on the heels of longtime Head Baker Steve Parsons. Inheriting 40-year-old recipes and a highly passionate community, Shea described, he learned to strike a balance between his own baker’s vision and student, faculty, and staff opinions. He meets regularly with the Food Committee, a group of students responsible for providing feedback on the meals and desserts. Often, he receives positive feedback. “But even negative feedback I’m perfectly happy with, because we want to keep improving things and make it so that people are happy,” he said. Laughing, he described how faculty members would come up to him after a meal and tell him they didn’t care for that evening’s dessert. “They just have a lot of opinions about things, and I just have to take the good with the bad,” he added. But the next day, he’d often receive positive feedback from the same individual about a different dessert.

Behind the scenes, Mr. Shea, the Food Service team, and the Food Committee gather often to talk about menu changes and community feedback. “We know what we make quality-wise usually meets the mark. If we messed up a recipe, we know that didn’t work out that well,” Mr. McCarthy said. As Mr. McCarthy put it, there’s an expectation around a certain meal or dessert. Changing that expectation often results in immediate feedback and reluctance to deviate from Deerfield tradition. Some students and faculty members, he described, follow the five-week menu rotation schedule and know exactly when a certain meal is coming. “I’m blown away sometimes by the amount of attention people pay to what we do every day in our menu cycle,” he said.

For the bakers, Mr. Shea said it’s about making each baked good and dessert the best they can. “Same thing with the Food Committee,” Mr. Shea said. “They might say, ‘We’re tired of berry crisp,’... cheese and shepherd’s pie—have become simpler, walk-through dinners.” Mr. Woodward credited this to the broader student attitude around meal diversity. Recently, he’s seen the student body lean to more “international flavors...over New England home style,” he said.

Still, the oldest dessert recipes—such as the baked Alaska and apple crisp—date back to the ’80s. Mr. McCarthy said, “We try to stay as contemporary and as up to date as we can, at the same time keeping the traditional things that people expect here.” Both he and Mr. Shea described striking a balance between Academy tradition, current community opinions, and their own ideas.

Now, students have started to prefer cookies and other grab-and-go desserts. “I think it’s part of a larger trend where people prefer to just have something they can pick up at the end of the meal,” Mr. Woodward said. He said it seems as though students want a dessert they can “leave the dining hall with, rather than what I would consider a nicer homemade dessert.” But Mr. Woodward clarified: it’s not that students have stopped liking certain sit-down desserts; they simply choose another option. “Probably the same percentage of students as 10 years ago will say that they like apple crisp today, but I think fewer of them will eat it because of the time factor,” he said, adding that “they don’t want to spend the time on dessert.”

For Mr. Shea, this means fewer cakes and crisps and more bars and cookies—and a need to adapt to the student body changing in attitude. While learning to use the new ovens and baking equipment in the temporary Dining Hall, Mr. Shea and his team are adapting to feedback and preference. Mr. Woodward, Mr. McCarthy, and Mr. Shea all touched on the feedback integral to the role of a popular and effective baker. As they said, they have learned to both prioritize the community opinions and take their varying, up-and-down nature with a grain of salt—or, perhaps, a grain of sugar. But it’s good to have that feedback. And it’s, ‘How can we make a berry crisp a little bit better?’”

Mr. Shea’s arrival to Deerfield came in the midst of a student body-wide shift in meal and dessert preferences. “When I first came here in 1998, we were more of a meat-and-potatoes type of school,” Mr. McCarthy said, but in recent years, the school has expanded options and types of meals. Assistant Director of Food Services Brad Woodward, who is responsible for the menu selection, described the changes he has made over the years. He explained that previous sit-down meal staples—such as the macaroni and cheese and shepherd’s pie—have become simpler, walk-through dinners.