Emma De Nooy stands in front of Rough Draft. Courtesy | Emma De Nooy

Step aside Socrates and Aristotle fans, there’s a new philosopher on the Hillsdale scene: senior Emma De Nooy.

“I actually thought about dropping out at the beginning of this semester to go cook for somebody,” De Nooy said. “I didn’t because I’m a senior, so I might as well finish.”

De Nooy is completing her major in rhetoric and public address with a minor in dance, but her real passions lie in the kitchen.

Her husband, Micah Miller, thinks her approach to cooking, baking, and all things food essentially makes her a philosopher. Instead of debating people in a town square, De Nooy brings homemade goods to classes, experiments with ingredients she doesn’t even like, and now works as a baker for Rough Draft.

“She does what a philosopher should, which is love something dearly just for its own sake,” De Nooy’s husband Micah Miller said. “She very sincerely adores it.”

But this is a relatively newfound passion for De Nooy. She didn’t grow up helping out in the kitchen, mostly because she was one of seven children.

“My mom just didn’t have the time, so I would watch videos and read cookbooks,” De Nooy said. “I had an internship here one summer, and I had to start cooking for myself. I started cooking and realized how much I had picked up on from those years.”

What began as a necessity soon evolved into a core part of her identity as she began experimenting with all kinds of recipes for various events.

“Across the time we’ve been together, which is now about two and a half years, it’s become evident that food is a factor of identity for Emma,” Miller said. “A lot of who she is is centered on it, even though it started off as a hobby.”

De Nooy loves sharing her baking so much she even baked for her own wedding last summer: brown butter Earl Grey shortbread cookies topped with edible flowers.

“When I was interviewing for Rough Draft, I said in my letter that I had no professional experience,” De Nooy said. “But I baked a bunch of these really fancy cookies for my wedding, and I thought that was a testament to my skill. I thought my cookies were good enough for my own wedding, so they’re probably pretty good.”

Marty Hubbard, owner of Rough Draft, applauds De Nooy’s baking abilities.

“Emma has really brought a fresh perspective to our menu,” Hubbard said. “Her creativity in the kitchen is remarkable.”

Though more people are now learning about her skill through the goods at Rough Draft, she’s best known for her scones. Every year for the Cravats and Bluestockings club — a group that celebrates the Regency period — De Nooy makes more than 150 scones for the Regency Ball celebration. When people started asking for her recipe and complimenting her work, De Nooy realized she had struck scone gold.

“I’ll get an idea, like recently I was in the middle of class and I thought ‘I should make a maple bacon scone,’ and if I’ve thought of this, I know probably 10 other people have thought about it,” De Nooy said. “I’ll look up as many recipes as I can for the same idea, and then I will pick aspects from each I think will work. That’s what I did with my scones, I tweaked them until I had my own recipe.”

Students who pass through Kendall Hall at any point during the later half of the week might stumble into De Nooy as she grips a tupperware container full of treats to share with her honors thesis class.

“I think it adds a certain amount of camaraderie to our meetings,” said senior Hannah Pautz, a member of De Nooy’s honors thesis class. “That probably would have grown regardless since there are so few of us. However, adding a treat at the beginning as an ice breaker definitely sped up the process. It starts all of us out in such a good mood, it sucks out some of the nerves of the impending peer review.”

De Nooy also spends time learning recipes and styles of cooking she doesn’t even like.

“I made chicken schnitzel for my husband the other day, and I hated it,” De Nooy said. “But it was a new recipe that utilizes a new technique I’ve never tried before. I had to do it. I plan to learn everything I can about food.”

For De Nooy, post-graduation plans are up in the air, but she plans to continue exploring her wildest culinary fantasies, both in her personal and professional life. She may be only a couple years into her cooking journey, but her future holds many new opportunities – and many new baked goods – because to her, there’s no other option.

“Everyone loves food, and that’s valid,” De Nooy said. “I bake and I cook because I love food for itself. Writers, artists, people who play sports all talk about their ‘thing’ and they say that they lose themselves in it. I never got that feeling until I started working with food. With anything you truly, deeply love, there’s an unspeakable magic about it.”