Other Colleges Have Frat Houses. This One Has a Cookie House.

NORTHFIELD, Minn. -- As midnight approached on a Monday in late March, the new oven in the Carleton College cookie house was showing some strain.

It was running about 20 degrees too cool, a bit of intel that each successive cook had passed along since early afternoon. A baker had mistimed some of her butter cookies. Another engaged in an experiment she referred to as “Choose Your Own Adventure Scones,” including a strawberry-cardamom escapade that literally fell flat.

Seraphina Shutt worked her pie dough as two fellow students rattled off a detailed recap of a recent “From,” a promlike party put on by the school’s six Ultimate Frisbee teams. She tried to tune it all out as her crust refused to come together. “Your pie can smell fear,” she said.

Carleton’s cookie house is not a frat house (Carleton doesn’t have any), a dorm, a dining hall or a student union. But it is a place where anyone from the campus, at nearly any hour, will find a pantry stocked with the ingredients for making chocolate-chip cookies. People can bring other provisions and bake whatever they want, but cookies are the thing that prospective Carleton applicants often hear of before they learn anything else about this small liberal-arts school, just over 40 miles south of Minneapolis in Northfield, Minnesota.

Students and locals have been descending on the modest, twin-gabled house at 110 Union St. since 1947, when it began serving a weekly Sunday brunch. The cookies -- and there are sweets in the kitchen much more often than not -- arrived later.

Last year, the college, which has a little more than 2,000 students, finished a renovation that expanded the kitchen and added tile backsplashes overlaid with photos of undergraduates cooking there through the years. It also upgraded the house’s guest room. There, for a modest donation, guests with some connection to the college can stay overnight, as I did recently.

But the cookie house is mainly for the students, including those seeking a quiet place to study or a musical rehearsal space. And it’s a home for the hungry, where you never know when a junior from San Antonio named Maya Allen will be baking her grandmother’s pumpkin bread in a Café du Monde coffee can.

The place is officially known as the Dacie Moses House, and its story begins with Candace Kelley Moses -- Dacie, or Dace, for short. Moses and her husband moved into the house in 1922. She worked for the school, first for the treasurer’s office and then in the library, retiring in 1969 at age 86.

For decades, she ran a kind of all-comers salon on her own time. At one point, an undergraduate a cappella group, the Singing Knights, began practicing there. She baked for them, and they were so enamored that they named their 1967 album “Dace and Knights.”

Moses also served the Sunday brunch. All kinds of Carls, as the students call themselves, would come, from first-year undergraduates to much older alumni.

“She was an old woman trying to make pancakes and eggs for everyone,” said Julia Uleberg Swanson, who worked for the college for 34 years. “She did not have money. She had bills all over town.”

To reduce Moses’ workload, students started helping with chores and settled into a baking routine: bran muffins and juice, beer muffins and coffee.

When Moses died in 1981, she left her home to the college’s alumni association; her husband and son were deceased. In her will was a “request” that students be able to use it “in substantially the same manner as it was used during my lifetime.”

Day-to-day management was taken over by a small group of students and someone older to oversee them. (For years, that was Uleberg Swanson.) The college and donors pitched in on ingredients, wages and upkeep, which now cost about $70,000 per year.

Cookies became the snack that drop-ins would most hope to find, and still do: chocolate chip, perfect chocolate chip, oatmeal chocolate chip, spiced double chocolate, butter, cowboy, biscotti and more.

But the cookie house contains multitudes, and when Shutt arrived on campus last fall, she added some of her own treats to the mix. She grew up in rural Vale, North Carolina, where her mother was a high-school food and consumer science teacher. Her grandfather taught her how to make roux and béchamel. She learned fractions from recipes.

She bakes her buttermilk biscuits in a cast-iron skillet. “I’ve changed my original recipe to one with pretty loose instructions,” she said. “It’s more like a guideline situation.”

But on that late night last month, she took few liberties with her great-grandmother’s shredded apple pie. Having solved the dough problem, she moved on to the apples. The shredding happened on a box grater, but she didn’t peel the fruit.

“I was on the apple festival planning board in high school,” she said, as if to fend off an arched eyebrow.

At half-past midnight, the pie was cooling on a side counter, with a label listing its allergens. In the morning, students popped in for a breakfast slice on the way to classes.

Before the pie seekers came through, Luis Oviedo and Sean Zheng were hard at work. The two undergraduates are this year’s house residents, sharing a basement room, while their supervisor, Holly Kelchner, lives upstairs.

The pair are paid to cook for and host the Sunday brunches, tend to the overnight guests and keep the house tidy. They also help oversee seven other student workers who clean when things are dirty and bake when there is nothing to eat.

Morning meals are their specialty. Oviedo hails from Texas, the land of the breakfast taco. He is a flour tortilla man, and believes they are not made well by anyone supplying any store anywhere near Northfield.

“They taste like the package to me,” he said. So he makes his own, using his grandmother’s recipe, but subbing out the vegetable shortening she uses with butter, as a growing number of cooks do. As he rolled out a dozen, his work partner shook a sauté pan and moved peppers around with chopsticks.

It is difficult to know what Moses would make of all these improvements, but there are house rules that would likely please her. High on the list is this: You can eat your fill of what you make with ingredients from the house, but you must leave what’s left for others who might stop by later.

It’s harder for strangers on the admissions tour to do that now. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were on patrol nearby this year, and the college tightened security “for the protection of our neighbors,” according to a sign on the house’s door.

But the spirit behind the leave-your-leftovers rule is centered in the house’s history. Moses, according to those who knew her, would let students sleep on her porch in the summer, and dispensed life advice to anyone who asked. She kept scores of alumni letters of love and gratitude, which now sit in boxes in the college’s library along with other cookie-house lore.

Moses also imposed another house rule: no discussion of politics or religion. But with her passing, people couldn’t help themselves from grasping at the sacred. Soon after her death, a Carleton trustee expressed his hope that the home would become “a place of ministry” in her absence.

Uleberg Swanson, the former cookie-house manager, is the daughter of a Lutheran minister. Kelchner, who assumed that role last year and bakes a luscious apple pie, is enrolled in a Unitarian Universalist seminary.

“I see my work in the house as the most humbling way to put my training to use,” she said. “Radical hospitality is ministry to its core.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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