Introducing "Your Mama's Kitchen"

0:00Hey there, I'm Michelle Obama, and I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for being a part of the light podcast. It wouldn't be the same without you. And if you enjoyed my show, I have a feeling you're going to love this brand new Audible original podcast from higher ground. It's called Your Mama's Kitchen, and it's hosted by my dear, dear friend, Michelle Norris. For as long as I've known Michelle, she's been an absolute master in the kitchen. I have so many wonderful memories of her gathering our group of girlfriends around the table for unforgettable conversations that always leave us feeling nourished and inspired and warm.

0:45And don't even get me started on Michelle's chili. It's out of this world. And in this podcast, she's going to be sharing another one of her specialties, a good conversation. Each week, Michelle is going to talk to authors, actors, musicians, the most interesting people on the planet. And she's going to start each conversation with one simple request. Tell me about your mama's kitchen. And I just love this question because so much of American life starts in the kitchen. It's where we are nourished physically and spiritually. Some of my own best childhood memories involve food, friends and family gathering in the kitchen, making our favorite dishes, talking, laughing, sharing stories along the way.

1:38Making and sharing big meals was how we showed we cared, how we made sure we could make time to sit down and actually talk and laugh, and sometimes even shed a tear or two. For so many of us, food is love, meals are home, and your mama's kitchen is at the core of it all. So I couldn't be more thrilled about this podcast. And to kick it off, the first episode features me. I had so much fun reminiscing with Michelle about my own mama's kitchen back on Euclid Avenue. I just can't wait for you to hear this conversation. So stay tuned. And if you like what you hear, subscribe to Your Mama's Kitchen.

2:27You can find it right now anywhere you get podcasts.

2:40This teeny tiny little room was where we did everything. We grew up there. We became teenagers, adults in that small space. But it felt big to us because that's what kitchens do. You know, they can be small and big at the same time because we packed a lot into that house, into that kitchen.

3:06Welcome to Your Mama's Kitchen, a podcast where we explore how the food and culinary traditions of our youth shape who we become as adults. I'm Michelle Norris, and I am so glad you're here. It's great to be back in front of a microphone. That simple question, tell me about your mama's kitchen, opens up all kinds of delicious memories. Of course, because of the food, but also because the kitchen is usually the heartbeat of the household. So many important things happen there. The debates, the experiments, the arguments, the homework, the card games, the unpaid bills that sometimes stacked up on the kitchen table.

3:44It's the place where we spent time with the people we love the most. And all those meals and all those memories simmer inside us forever. All of it shapes who we become in interesting and sometimes surprising ways.

4:05Hey there. Hey. Thanks for coming into the studio. From one Michelle to the other. We have Michelle squared here. Thanks for having me, babe. I bet you recognize that voice. My very first guest on Your Mama's Kitchen hardly needs an introduction, but let's go ahead and do it anyway. Michelle LaVon Robinson Obama will forever be our forever first lady. As the first Black woman to live in the White House, as the spouse of America's first Black president, She's also a mother, a lawyer, an author, a sister and a daughter, a fashion icon. In fact, an outright icon in part because she's a woman who knows how to speak her mind.

4:43With that simple opening prompt, tell me about your mama's kitchen, she was on board. She understood the power of that question because she's talked about the importance of building a supportive kitchen table of trusted family and friends all throughout her life.

5:03I'm so glad that she's with us on the show because it gives our listeners a chance to learn more about Michelle Obama's origin story and all the lessons she learned in her mama's kitchen. And as you'll hear, boy, was that a special place. It was a place filled with love and lifelong values of integrity, honesty, hard work. And when Michelle Obama wants a taste of home, we'll learn about the recipe that she craves. It's a Southern dish and it's delicious. And I'm guessing that you're going to want to try it in your own kitchen. So stay with us for the recipes, for the kitchen wisdom, and for a whole lot of laughter.

5:44I am so glad that we get to do this. I know. So when I had the idea for this podcast, your dear friend, I shared the idea with you because I trust you so much. It was validating. Because it's a great idea. Everything starts at the kitchen table. Right there. Right there. It's the heart of every home, the center of everyone's life. That kitchen table, I wrote about it in The Light We Carry, developing that kitchen table. So I was right there with you. And I'm glad you're right there with me right now. Right here with me in this moment. So tell me about your mama's kitchen on Euclid Avenue. What did that kitchen look like?

6:22Close your eyes and take me back there. Oh, 7436 South Euclid spent all of my life in that kitchen. And just to describe the house, because it was a two-family house. We lived upstairs, the Robinsons, and our landlords were my great-aunt Robbie and Uncle Terry. So... They were right downstairs. They were right downstairs. And I don't think initially the house was built to be a two-family home because it was so small. I think the upstairs was supposed to be the upstairs. So the kitchen is not really a kitchen. It's sort of a makeshift kitchen. That's how small the apartment was. So to get up to our apartment, there was a side door and a very narrow staircase that led directly up to a small hallway.

7:12And right to the left was the kitchen, which was probably a bedroom at the time. And it had been converted. That had been converted. So it was tiny, just a small sink, a formica sink, that hard weight, you know. Resin. Resin. Right, exactly. Exactly. Little ridges on the side, just a small little section where you could put the dish rack. Yes. To let the water... No dishwasher. Oh, no, no, no dishwasher. You and Craig were the dishwasher. We were the dishwashers. There wasn't a lot of cabinet space because this was a bedroom. So there was the sink. I think there was a shelf over the sink where mom would put odds and ends, like Mercurio comb.

7:53You remember that medicine that you put on? Oh, yes. That weird red medicine. That they put on everything. Exactly. You know, it's sort of like Tussin. It had a little dropper. It was like, it's the dropper. I loved it. It's sort of like a version of Tussin, right? You put it on every injury. So that was sort of like a little medicine shelf. So there was that shelf and just a sink. Then there was a little doorway, which probably was the closet of the bedroom that was turned into like a pantry. The refrigerator was in the closet because there was literally no room for it in the kitchen, which is how small this room was.

8:28So it was a jack-layed kitchen, you know. But they made it work. It made it work, right. Did you eat in the kitchen or eat in the dining room? Oh, there was no dining room. Oh, a dining room? What was that? We had no dining room. You had the kitchen. There was one table. It was probably a borrowed or used dining room table with four or five chairs around it. My mother put that plastic picnic tablecloth that you just wipe off. And it was yellow, yellow checkered. But that was there my entire life. So that tablecloth had a life of its own. Like you knew where the cigarette burns were that left the hole in one place.

9:14You could map out our childhood. the time you spilled Easter egg dye on that one spot, that blue ink wouldn't come out of it. That tablecloth was like - If that tablecloth could talk. Right. The map of our lives. And what would sit on the tablecloth was a napkin holder with paper napkins, a salt and pepper shaker, and it was on like a mat. There was a clock on the wall and the framing of the entry door told a story because we'd measure ourselves along that. Oh, you had little marks on the door. Little markers of how tall we got. The ledge, my father used it as Craig started to become better at basketball to get him to jump higher.

9:59He would place coins or pennies on the ledge and he could get the coin if he could jump high. Oh, there was a phone, one of those princess phones you hung on the wall. With the long curly Q cord. Curly Q cord. And the bathroom was right off of the kitchen. And the only way you could get privacy in my house was to take the phone. If you were on the phone as a teenager, take the phone and stretch that cord into the bathroom and close the door. So, I mean, this teeny tiny little room was where we did everything. I mean, the thing I marvel at is how small our home was. And how much we packed into the teeny tiny spaces that housed four people.

10:42We grew up there. We became teenagers, adults. My brother became 6 '3", then 6 '4", and 6 '5", in that small space. But it felt big to us because that's what kitchens do. They can be small and big at the same time. We were poor. When I described it, I was like, dang, we were poor. But poor wasn't a word that you would have applied to yourself. Never. We were always very fortunate, we believed. fortunate, blessed is what we were. And we were because we packed a lot into that house, into that kitchen. So tell me about the kind of table that your mother deliberately created, you know, partially with the food, but also with the other things that happened at that table, because a whole lot of business happens at the kitchen table.

11:34Oh, that's a good question. The table my mother created was a table of, I would say, high efficiency because so much happened at that little table. That was like the central operating system's place in the house. You baked bread, made pie crust. You did bills. You did your homework at that table. You filled out the trading stamps. Do you remember when you had - Oh, yes. S &H. S &H trading stamps. S &H, though. Right. When you had collected them all, that became the central place where you would lick the stamps, put them in the books, and figure out what you could buy with them. I have not thought about that in so long.

12:19Those books with those little grids. Yeah. You know, we dyed Easter eggs there. It was a place of efficiency because my mom didn't have a lot of space to do her mom work, to pay bills. All of that had to happen at that one table. And when I think about the fact that she got so much done, homework, overseeing things, laughter, visits happened at the kitchen table. So when people came to visit, that's where they would gather. Because she's cooking. And if you had an uncle and cousins, everybody wanted to be there with her while she was frying chicken or getting something ready. So I don't care how many people were there.

12:55We were all sitting around that kitchen table so we could be a part of the conversation. I played jacks on that floor. My girlfriends from grammar school who walked home and had lunch at my house, we would have anywhere from seven to eight little girls there during lunch hour to eat our little bag lunches and then to play jacks on the floor. But the entire day, it felt like, was spent in that room. In the kitchen. So if we could go back in time and someone marched into your family refrigerator and threw open the doors, what story would that refrigerator tell? Oh, it would probably tell the story of a working class family.

13:37And our stuff lasted a long time. You could open the refrigerator, but you couldn't just get what you wanted. You couldn't afford to just eat all of anything. You'd have a bag of Oreo cookies for like a month. Yeah, because you get two or three at a time. Two or three. I remember the time. This is when I thought my mother was magical. I was asking for a pre-dinner snack, which was rare. And I was begging her. I was like, I'm starving. Dinner's going to take forever. Can I just get an Oreo? And she said, okay, you can get one Oreo. She was in the living room, unusually. So I went back into the kitchen.

14:14I was like, she's not looking. I'm going to get two Oreos. So I ate one and then I came up with a one. And I sat there and I ate my one. And she said, I thought I told you to only get one. I was like, how did you know? She said, because you have two Oreo breath. I was like, whoa. She had eyes in the back of her head. She's a witch. She probably heard you in the package. She probably, you know, I probably took longer than I thought. And she just knew also no child is going to take one. What child takes just one Oreo? I did. I did from then on.

15:01There's another thing that often happened in kitchens like ours when we were little, and that's hair. Saturday night for so many little black girls was the night we got our hair done. Our mothers would sit us down at the kitchen sink to wash our hair, condition it, and comb it out. And because black girls have a head full of curly, kinky, fuzzy, coily, reach-for-the-sky hair, that meant the whole ordeal could take hours when our hair was braided and plaited and straightened or curled. There was a whole lot of fidgeting, ooh, a whole lot of fidgeting, and often a few tears. Now, we sure looked cute when it was all done, but ooh, what we had to go through at the kitchen sink, It was a ritual that frankly brings up all kinds of complex memories for a whole lot of brown women of a certain age.

15:48Was your mother a kitchen beautician? Oh, she was. She was. And it was so painful. We just, there was sort of the battle with hair. Were you tenderheaded? I had so much hair. It was just a lot of it. And it took hours to comb through it. And, you know, and then it just was not a comfortable place for Micah Sink. So I would lay on one edge of it and your head would be hitting the back of it and you'd have a towel. Just talking about it, I can feel that thing on the back of my neck. Oh, God, it would just hurt and you couldn't squirm. And you were just, you know, it took forever because it was just sink water, right?

16:27It wasn't some gushing hair spray. You didn't have a high pressure spray gun. It wasn't high pressure. So it would take forever to get the hair wet enough to get the soap in there. and it was a well of balsam that stung your eyes. Oh, man, hairdoing day was just, my father would leave the room, Craig, nobody wanted to be back there with the two of us while I was fighting and crying and mad, and she was mad. And then they had the hot comb. The hot comb on the stove. You know, people may be listening to this and wondering, what is a hot comb? So a hot comb was a wooden-handled metal comb that you would heat up, usually by fire and it would straighten.

17:07You'd put it on. With a little grease. And the combination of the hair grease and the warmth would be like you would literally be ironing your hair out straight, which is the pain of trying to follow somebody else's notion of beauty because our hair is beautifully curly and magical in that way. But, you know, if you raised in America... You were trying to tame it. You were trying to tame it and turn it into something that it wasn't, which required huge amounts of heat and grease to make it happen. And you would be pulling on every strand of hair to get it as straight as possible so that it would blow in the wind and fluff about.

17:47And that took hours. My mother quickly sent me to the neighbor lady who had the beautician shop in her basement. She was across the alley from us. And the minute my mother found out that, oh, Miss Phillips, that Miss Phillips did hair, I think I was five years old. She sent me across the alley with a little wad of money and said, let Miss Phillips do it. So I started going to the hairdresser when I was five, six years old, just to stop that battle between me and my mother. But yes, the kitchen was my first beauty salon. We also had in our neighborhood a basement beautician that we used to go to.

18:28And she could do in maybe hour 45 minutes, but would take like three hours, you know, for my mom. We were all grateful for Miss Phillips. Tell me what dinner was like, like an average Tuesday night dinner in the Robinson household. Dinner was, dinner was an expectation. I want to say that because when I hear about people who don't eat dinner together, I can't envision that. I can't envision. When people are too busy to all sit down together. For everybody, one person eats at one time. Some people stand up eating. Oh, you would never be allowed to stand up and eat. You had to sit at the table. And our little poor table, but there was a process.

19:09There was a ritual of dinner time. Same time every night? About same time. The only time we changed stuff up because my father worked shifts, right? So if he was in a shift where we might have to eat a little earlier to eat with him, otherwise we didn't eat with him, but we had dinner at the same time. and we all four of us sat together. We'd say our prayer, God is great, God is good. Or, you know, sometimes the prayer would change, but we would always bow our heads and say a prayer. My mom never considered herself a good cook because she grew up in a big family with lots of sisters and everybody had a set of chores.

19:47She was always the cleaner. She had other sisters who cooked, but she could cook. But she was a Betty Crocker cookbook cook. Okay, tell me what that means. I remember that big red and white Betty Crocker cookbook. She cooked from recipes and she was less, throw a little bit here, dash of there. She operated off of recipes and I think her ideas of meals came from there. So meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Meatloaf, roast beef with rice and gravy, spaghetti and meatballs. When she felt fun and free and Italian, you know, that was our notion of traveling the world when we had spaghetti and meatballs, right?

20:26With that Parmesan that you would shake? Oh, yeah, the shaken Parmesan. Was that Parmesan? I don't know if it was Parmesan. I don't know if it was Parmesan dust. We're not going to denigrate any particular corporate entity, but it did have an interesting consistency. Now that we've had real Parmesan, you know that that's not what Parmesan is like at all. Oh, you also had some kind of Tabasco sauce because my dad liked hot sauce. Did your dad cook? Did Frasier Robinson cook? Occasionally. He cooked like a lot of men. because my husband is the same way. He can cook, but how many times does he cook?

21:00Not much, but yes, my father - Mr. Obama cooks. Oh, yeah, yes. Shoot, anybody who can read and has sense and taste buds can cook, okay? Follow a recipe, you can cook. So for all the men out there who swear they can't cook, if you can read, you can cook. And they usually cook when fire is involved. Right, right. Some grilling something up or something. But Barack had recipes, and my father did too. He made this wonderful peppered steak because he also, because he went to the army, I think for a period of time, he learned how to cook some things in the army. He made a really beautiful apple pie, homemade apple pie.

21:38And I don't know why that was his thing. You're a pie person to this day. I am a pie person. And my dad made this wonderful deep dish pie. He would make his own crust. But he didn't cook often because he was the primary breadwinner and he was a shift worker. But when he cooked, it was special. And we all gathered around to watch Dad peel the apples and make his little, you know, concoction to make the apple sweet. It was a very special thing when Dad cooked. When I would visit Chicago, I noticed among my aunts and uncles that lived in Chicago that there was almost like an underground culinary economy.

22:19They wouldn't call it a culinary. It's a word that they would not use. But there was a sort of kitchen economy where people were doing things out of their kitchen as currency almost. Because maybe they couldn't pay someone, but they could send over a pie or send over a cake. You would say thank you with something from the kitchen. Did you ever see that in your own neighborhood? You know, yes. But what I remember with every meal, it seemed like there was this big leftover tradition, takeaway tradition, because you had to cook enough, but then everybody had to get a plate, right, afterwards. And getting the plate just seemed like it was such a big deal.

22:59It was, right? No, no, not that plate. Get your plate. And did you get a plate? Yeah. And you'd get in trouble if you didn't get a plate. because, well, how am I going to... We have too many ribs. Did everybody get a plate? And then the aluminum foil would come out, right? Yes. And the paper plate. Big sheets of aluminum foil. And there would be the chow line to make your leftover plate. But it was such a big deal that I think people felt like, I cooked all this food and we can't waste it. And it was also a sign of respect. It was definitely a sign of respect because if you didn't take somebody's potato salad And some aunts, you didn't want their, you know, their takeaway.

23:37We have one Aunt Carolyn, may she rest in peace, but all my cousins, if they hear this, will understand. Whenever she cooked, we were very disappointed. Oh, no. Because Aunt Carolyn, who never had kids, my mom's oldest sister, and she lived with my grandfather, which was even more annoying because my grandfather was an amazing cook. Southside? Southside was known to cook throughout the day. You know, if your name is Southside, of course you're a good cook. He was just that. He's a jazz listener. He was the grandfather. The house was filled with music and he was always cooking. Barbecue up some ribs.

24:13But if you stayed and played cards long enough, he might just go in and back and fry some chicken wings and make some milkshakes as like a midnight snack. So that's who Southside was, right? So if you went over to Southside's house and Carolyn had cooked, the kids would just, all the kids would be like, no. We're on a podcast, so people can't see what you did with your head. But you just roll your head. It's like, no, not Carolyn. And your mom would be like, shh, don't say anything. You know, don't be rude. One day we were over there. The cousins, we still talk about this. You know what she made?

24:47Liver and onions. For company? For a family meal. I mean, that's what you make. That's the punishment dinner. That's the dinner that you don't. You walk home from school and you can smell it and it's like liver. Right. Carolyn made liver. So. I actually like liver and onions, but I'm going to add that way. I did not. You were a rare child. But you got to cook it or otherwise like shoe leather. No child in our family like liver. Right. It's not what you went to Southside's house for. So, yes, we never took her leftovers and you would be insulted not to take home. Who's going to take home liver and onions?

25:27We'd be like, mom, do not get leftovers because we are not eating this again. So our currency was shared food, right? And that is an act of love. Let me take a plate. Yes, indeed. And there was always a little plate for somebody who couldn't come, too elderly, too infirm. Absolutely. So make sure to send a plate home to Miss Gasset. Yeah, we couldn't loan people money, you know? Food is love. Food is love. Acts of kindness because you couldn't afford anything else. So yes, that was our neighborhood, our family. It was all about the food, for sure. Stay with us for more of my conversation with Michelle Obama.