Everyone who has stepped foot into The Cheese Shop in Colonial Williamsburg is most likely familiar with their Original House Dressing, the “secret ingredient that has kept our regulars coming back year after year” according to The Cheese Shop’s website. Alumna of the College Dr. Karen Broaddus ’78 was rumored to be the creator of this dressing through experimentation while she worked at The Cheese Shop during her time as an undergraduate.
When asked about her time at the College, Broaddus had a story to tell about her unique introduction to the college during her first semester.
The summer before her freshman year, she spent her time traveling in Pakistan and Afghanistan with her close friend and her family. It was an eye-opening experience for her to travel and come back to the College. She remembers how her peers were going through sorority recruitment and how she felt a sense of independence from her time abroad that her peers had not yet gained.
“I had this really eye opening experience living in Kabul, traveling across the Khyber Pass and going to Peshawar or Islamabad,” Broaddus said. “We traveled through India too. Then when I came to William and Mary, it was an adjustment. Everybody was in rush. There were a lot of people saying ‘I’ve never been away from my parents for a week.’ So the biggest adjustment was that first semester after I had a lot of independence for the summer.”
Despite the adjustment period, Broaddus says that she quickly found a great group of friends, specifically people belonging to the English and theatre departments. During her sophomore year, she began to work at The Cheese Shop, where she spent a bulk of her summers and a few days a week during the academic year. There she met wonderful people whom she worked with, two of which became her roommates later on in college.
Graduating in 1978, Broaddus and her friends found it difficult to secure a job once they completed their undergraduate degrees. Broaddus waited tables before working as a librarian in Outer Banks, North Carolina. She then transferred to work for the National Park Service, specifically at the Wright Brothers Memorial in Kitty Hawk. After the park closed down, she came back to Williamsburg and helped open the Trellis Bar and Grill with many of the people she worked with while at The Cheese Shop.
With her bachelor’s in English and a minor in anthropology from the College, Broaddus eventually went on to attend the University of Virginia where she received her doctorate in reading education, English education and clinical psychology. After teaching for five years as a graduate student at UVA, she then taught as a lecturer for a year. She is noted for helping run the McGuffey Reading Services Center.
She then went on to teach at the University of Tulsa and then James Madison University. During her time teaching at the university level, she was primarily working with students who wanted to teach English or those who needed to know how to teach skills like writing, reading or physics. She additionally taught graduate courses in how to be a reading teacher and/or specialist.
After teaching at the university level, she decided to go back to teaching full-time. She currently teaches English at the Woodberry Forest School, a private, all-boys boarding school. She has gone on to see multiple students she taught attend the College.
Concerning the rumor of The Cheese Shop’s original House Dressing, Broaddus had indeed worked for approximately two and a half years at the Cheese Shop during her undergraduate studies.
“Even though we were sophomores and juniors in college, they expected us to know about all sorts of different cheeses and wines,” Broaddus said. “That was a wonderful thing about Tom and Mary Ellen Power. They taught us and they wanted us to be part of the wine club. It was just an incredible learning experience. I actually lived with a couple of the other girls one summer who worked there and one was an Italian cook. I love to cook and I learned a lot more about cooking there, and a lot about food.”
“Even though we were sophomores and juniors in college, they expected us to know about all sorts of different cheeses and wines,” Broaddus said. “That was a wonderful thing about Tom and Mary Ellen Power. They taught us and they wanted us to be part of the wine club. It was just an incredible learning experience. I actually lived with a couple of the other girls one summer who worked there and one was an Italian cook. I love to cook and I learned a lot more about cooking there, and a lot about food.”
The employees were taught all sorts of information and were also encouraged to expand their involvement at The Cheese Shop, including joining the Wine Club that was held there.
During her undergraduate time working at the Cheese Shop, the restaurant began expanding their menu and products. They started selling sandwiches, a current staple of the well-known restaurant, when previously they exclusively sold wine, cheese and bread. They also began experimenting with their House Dressing recipe, which was completed before Broaddus graduated from William and Mary.
According to Broaddus, she is not the original inventor of the House Dressing, and instead, she says the inventor of the dressing would be about six various employees of the Cheese Shop who were experimenting with flavors and components during one of their shifts.
“It really was just an experiment. I mean, throwing things together. It was fun. It didn’t happen in one day and it might for all I knew, it might be a little bit different now,” Broaddus said.
“It really was just an experiment. I mean, throwing things together. It was fun. It didn’t happen in one day and it might for all I knew, it might be a little bit different now,” Broaddus said.