As they do every year, this Thanksgiving, many Poly Prep faculty members will return to their positions as chefs and sous-chefs within their families, creating dishes inspired by their family history and culture to share at the dinner table. The experiences of these faculty members and their desire to share their recipes with the Poly community syncs with the findings of an October 2025 survey done by Jennie-O, one of America’s largest turkey-producing brands, which found that 53% of Americans believe the joy of Thanksgiving recipes is sharing them with others.
François Monroc, a Middle and Upper School French teacher, grew up in the suburbs of Paris, France, where preparing for big Thanksgiving meals was not included within his culture. Now, his favorite Thanksgiving dish, sweet potato pie, has become a staple at his holiday table, and everyone’s favorite food. “There were a couple of times where someone brought [the pie] to the table and almost dropped it. In reaction, everybody was like ‘is the sweet potato pie, okay?’ and did not even ask the person if they were okay,” recalled Monroc.
Although Monroc said he is the “helper” and not the “baker,” which is his wife’s forté, the process of making pie has become one of his favorite parts of Thanksgiving. Monroc also shared that he enjoys the subtle sweetness of the home-made pies he bakes with his wife, which are hard to replicate at “big stores” that “tend to be quite heavy on the sugar.” When Monroc and his wife shop for ingredients, the only ready-made ingredient they purchase is frozen pie crust, with the remainder of the recipe being made from scratch.
Lee Marcus, a Middle and Upper School English faculty member, enjoys being the chef of his family, and is always the first person to cook when invited to someone’s house. Marcus draws on traditional recipes from his family, which are compiled in a family recipe book. On Thanksgiving, Marcus typically makes a wide variety of dishes, and every year, he swaps out the side dishes he cooks. This year, he’s planning on making something with fresh carrots from the farmer’s market. A particularly special dish Marcus makes is his mother’s corn bread. Growing up, Marcus frequently had big Thanksgiving meals with his family where all his relatives contributed a dish to the table. Afterwards, he and his cousins would hold secret meetings to decide on the best dish and “year after year, the cornbread always won.” Marcus added that since his mother was not a great cook, “the fact that she was the winning dish of Thanksgiving was a huge deal for me.”
Like Marcus, other Poly faculty members also use their Thanksgiving dishes to honor their family backgrounds, but for some, Thanksgiving is also a way to blend their different cultures into a distinctly American celebration. As Serious Eats notes, immigrant and first-generation American families often incorporate flavors from their countries of origin with traditional holiday dishes. For Middle School English Faculty Member Arnelle Williams, those flavors come from Guyana, where her family is from. In Williams’ family, Thanksgiving is a big deal, and making really good food is a lot of pressure. Some dishes Williams particularly enjoys are the traditional Guyanese dishes: Cook-up Rice and Oxtail. Cook-up rice is a mixture of rice and black-eyed peas, along with other spices. Oxtail is a well known ingredient in Guyana’s national dish, Pepper Pot, which is normally eaten on Christmas morning with bread and slow cooked for hours in a cassareep sauce. According to Metemgee, a recipe website for authentic Guyanese and Caribbean food, cassareep is derived from the root of cassava plant, which is commonly grown in South America and further boiled down to make a thick syrup which is a “long and tedious” process with “low yield.” Williams describes the Oxtail her father prepares as “sweet, savory, delicious, tender and finger-licking good with meat that comes off the bone.” Her father, a “natural chef,” got the recipe from his mother in Guyana, and made Oxtail throughout Williams’ childhood. “One of my fondest memories is being in the kitchen with my father and just watching him,” shared Willaims
Along with other members of the Poly faculty community, Monroc, Marcus and Williams ultimately each draw on their unique backgrounds to create special Thanksgiving dinners for their friends and families.
