But the house has a name and a significant history on campus. Cowles House, 1 Abbot Road, is the house of the MSU president.

House Manager Peter Lechler said the building’s size and the extensive landscaping make it easy to miss.

“It’s out of sight, out of mind,” Lechler said. “Even though we are right smack in the middle of the old section, the landscaping and the way the house is built, you don’t really see it if you aren’t looking for it.”

The truth is the often unseen and unnoticed Cowles House usually buzzes with activity. Though President Lou Anna K. Simon does not reside in the house, the staff there is always preparing and planning for a reception or a formal dinner. With about 120 events planned each year at the house, ranging anywhere from two to 400 guests, somebody is always doing something at Cowles House.

Cooking at Cowles House

Rachel Lewis’ afternoon shift at the house had just begun Sept. 29 as she began to toss sugar on top of mini cups of creme brulee, preparing them for a reception that evening for university distinguished professors.

Wearing the uniform-required chef’s hat, Lewis continued to work quietly and intently on the task at hand, torching the tiny desserts, effectively caramelizing the sugar.

At 3 p.m. only two hours remained until the beginning of the reception — which meant Lewis, her coworker and the chef had an hour and a half to meet deadline. Chef Patrick Merz announced they were a person short, and the deadline crunch was tangible as the smell of sweet, warm sugar filled the kitchen.

It’s a feeling that Lewis, in her third year as a culinary assistant at the house, calls “controlled chaos.”

“Sometimes you’ll come in and there’s just stuff flying and everything going and burners on and buzzers going off,” the family community services and psychology junior said. “But I personally don’t feel chaos.”

That’s evident in the hours before the reception — despite the impending deadline, there was still time for a few jokes.

When asked how she resists the delectably fancy foods that she prepares, Lewis said sometimes she has to do quality control checks.

“Sometimes you cut stuff and it doesn’t look presentable,” she joked. “So you just have to eat it.”

In truth, it’s an attitude Lewis has to have — the standards of food at Cowles House are high and the goal is to never repeat a menu. The guest list often includes the president and other university administrators and their guests.

In the kitchen, taped onto a cupboard, are two sheets of paper. They have the names and mug shots of many university administrators and another sheet with the names and photos of the MSU Board of Trustees.

But serving meals to the upper echelon of MSU doesn’t stress out Merz and his assistants.

“At the end you get to see their reactions to what you’ve created and that’s the biggest payoff for me,” Merz said. “Stress-wise, you know, it comes and goes like with any other job.”

Once, however, Lewis had an incident while preparing a meal for the Trustees — or as she calls them, the B.O.T. She had just learned to make grill marks on meat — a skill she was pretty excited to acquire.

“I had burned my first tray of course, because it was my first time doing it, and I had the second tray and it was really good,” she said. “I was like ‘Oh, this is perfect.’ And I was bringing it inside and I dropped it.”

That happens on rare occasions, though, she said. Most mistakes are simply a result of not hearing a timer and a dish burning.

Lechler said a large part of the Cowles House experience is to make every reception special, because it’s not every day a guest gets to visit the president’s house. The menu is a large part of such an experience.

Some items on the university distinguished professors reception menu included pan-seared New Zealand lamb loin with pomegranate rosemary sauce on Moroccan couscous as well as mini beef Wellingtons with mushroom duxelle and bordelaise sauce.

Merz said his freedom to cook what he wants is one of the best parts of his job, though constantly creating new menus can be challenging.

“I try to do that so the students get exposed to different foods, different cultures,” he said. “Basically with everything that’s out there now, the Internet and everything else, it’s an open world market. So I try to dig into all different groups, and you can never really run out of ideas.”

When Lewis applied for the job in August 2006, she had little cooking experience, laughing that one of her skills at the time included boiling water. However, she admits to being a “Food Network junkie.” Learning to cook new things has become a favorite part of her job.

She’s made duck liver paté and red velvet cake from scratch. She’s had the opportunity to use exotic ingredients such as a jicama or watercress.

“Stuff that you see people use on the Food Network that you’re like right, and in my life I’d ever use that,” she said.

It’s the constant learning process that keeps Lewis coming back to Cowles House each school year.

“I stay here because it’s experience that you can do one thing, but you can transfer it into a lot of things,” she said. “I don’t want to do business or hospitality, but it’s still learning skills that I can use.”

Remaining history

Built originally as a farm house on Faculty Row in 1857, Cowles House is in part the oldest building on campus. Portions of the original structure remain intact, the library and entrance foyer being the oldest section of the home.

“It’s really very much a part of our history,” Simon said. “We’ve used it to be the university’s home, not simply the home of the Simons, and I think that’s important in building team MSU.”

When Simon became president in 2005, she and her husband, Roy Simon, chose not to move into Cowles House because they already had a home in East Lansing.

“Coming from inside the community, we already had a personal residence in the area and it just made sense to stay there,” she said, adding that they have access to the house in the event that they wanted to use a computer quickly or change their clothes.

One fact the staff knows is that when Simon comes to the house, they should get her favorite MSU green insulated cup and fill it with Simon’s drink of choice — Diet Caffeine Free Coke.

Simon prefers the MSU-green cup for a simple reason: “You can keep drinks cold without your hand getting cold,” Simon said.

The house is filled with many interesting pieces — from the 18th century replica furniture in the sitting room to the graduate student art pieces hanging on the walls. Perhaps the most notable feature, however, is the about 40-foot-tall American beech tree in the middle of the enclosed porch.

“That is really our fun piece that we have,” Lechler said, adding that the porch was enclosed in the late 1990s and someone at the time suggested saving the tree, being that MSU is an agriculture college.

The house, which has been home to presidents and a governor, also has functioned as a hospital and a residence hall. It’s Michigan historic site number 572.

The original bricks were made from clay from the Red Cedar River and the home is now 12,000 square feet with 23 rooms. It’s current function is to host receptions and meals for the different colleges and departments at the university, as well as guests of the president.

“Cowles House has had many lives throughout the last 150 years,” Lechler said.