Fredericka Wilson '99: cookbook editor

Fredericka Wilson hopes her cookbook will help pay off her student loans and finance her participation in an international ministry program for young adults after she graduates next May.


Fredericka Wilson has an empty refrigerator. "And if you had asked me last week, I only had grapefruit juice inside," she says with a chuckle that frequently punctuates her conversation.

Her refrigerator may be bare, but Wilson has a full plate these days promoting her just-published cookbook, "Freddie's Cooking with Family and Friends." It's a project she started about a year ago as a way to help pay off student loans (she graduates next May with a degree in public policy and health and society) and to help finance her participation in an international ministry program for young adults after she graduates.

Last winter, a woman came to the church Wilson attends - New Covenant Worship Center on Westminster Street in Providence - with a cookbook full of recipes submitted by others. "'This is cool,' I thought, so I found some cookbook publishers on the Internet and asked them to send me information," Wilson says.

With a credit card to bankroll the project, Wilson began soliciting favorite recipes from family, friends and co-workers at University Food Services. The 171 recipes include chicken peanut stew from Bryant Currie, an assistant director in Food Services; a fish pie called perok from Katharine Woodhouse-Beyer of anthropology, who got the recipe while doing fieldwork in Alaska; a "rustic" lasagna recipe from Sandra O'Malley, an administrative assistant in Food Services; and "Best Ever Roast Beef" from Maycona Booker of Taylor, Mich., who happens to be Wilson's sister. (Is it truly the best ever? "Well, my sister says it is," responds Wilson, chuckling.) Wilson didn't test every recipe, but those she did sample she pronounced "awesome."

The cookbook took shape over spring break last year. Wilson compiled, edited and organized, then shipped the collection to the publisher.

These days, with 325 spiral-bound cookbooks to sell, "I feel like a walking ad board ... I tell everyone that my cookbook's in the [Brown] bookstore," says Wilson. Family and friends scattered across the country also are distributing it.

So what's next? "I read somewhere on the Internet that I should do a follow-up cookbook, so the next one will probably be themed," she says, and ideally it would be hardcover. "I could go on Home Shopping Network and sell the two as a set!" - Tracie Sweeney

Do you know someone at Brown who has an interesting hobby or avocation? Call the George Street Journal at 863-2476 or send e-mail to Tracie Sweeney, editor.