Hidden Kitchen Mama
A pregnant Christina Salas-Porras Cardoza with her mother at the beach.
Kitchens and mothers. The food they cooked or didn't. The stories they told or couldn't. In honor of Mother's Day, The Kitchen Sisters linger in the kitchen -- the room in the house that counts the most, that smells the best, where families gather and children are fed, where all good parties begin and end. The room where the best stories are told.
Story Notes: Calls and Recipes
We've received loads of calls and stories over the past year about your mothers, grandmothers, mother-in-laws, and aunties. We've gathered a small collection for you to listen to. Here's one of the stories that haunts us the most:
"Hi, I am Margie Carr and I have a story about my grandmother. Even though it's been nearly 25 years since our last visit, for me, Sunday afternoon still means sitting down for a huge meal at my grandmother's house. The meals always started at 3 o'clock. Of course, Grandma never sat with us, not even at Christmas or Thanksgiving. She was always hard at work chastising us for spilling our Coke's or finishing the hash browns which were fried in lard and so greasy good they would just slide down your throat.
"These meals that Grandma made were not particularly nutritious. For example, we never had salad and the fruits and vegetables always came from a can. As a kid, what I always looked forward to were the desserts. Especially her strawberry shortcake and rosette cookies. Every holiday we could count on pumpkin pie, apple strudel and povititsa, a Croatian nut bread made with English walnuts.
"Only once did I get to see her make povititsa and that was because it usually happened at 4 in the morning. But I can remember watching her roll them and pull the dough with her hands, stretching it out so it would cover the entire area of the kitchen table. It was as thin as paper before she covered it with nuts and rolled it into the loaf pan.
"Grandma didn't waste time doting on herself or us. There was no gooey or phony affection either. Her energy was spent on maintaining her house and garden. Even as a kid in the 1970s, I knew she was one of a dying breed. She was a second-generation immigrant from Croatia and she knew the value of a dollar. She saved any piece of tin foil that came her way. The strings from the newspapers were rolled into a large ball and stored away in her kitchen for any one of a myriad of jobs. She also sewed all of her own clothes made from feed sack material that she got from her job in Kansas City's garment district. These colorful prints, which were visible all over her house in the form of curtains, tablecloths, bedspreads, aprons and napkins came to epitomize my grandmother as much as her cooking did.
"And perhaps because Grandma was such a 'no-nonsense' woman, I don't think she approved of her son's choice of a wife. Mom had an aristocratic air and even though I wasn't present at those early meals, I don't think those two found too much to talk about. Grandma's attitude towards Mom was probably not helped by the fact that my mother insisted to Dad that they move away from his working-class roots into an upper middle-class suburb of Kansas City after they were married. Grandma didn't have much patience for Mom's refined manners or mood swings and I'm sure that Mom's mental illness, which baffled the medical establishment at the time, was totally mystifying to Grandma. My mom's manic depression, which eventually ended my parents' marriage, was also the reason that Dad won custody of all of us.
"I don't have too many memories of Mom attending to our needs as children and I never felt that she fulfilled that role, at least in the traditional sense of how a mother's presence is felt in a house. But, once she was gone, any illusion of normality for us was over. Our world was a mess. We were six children living in a house without a mother and our dad was working full time. The day was pretty much pandemonium. We were a disheveled bunch living in a dirty, noisy, chaotic house. We clearly didn't belong in the neighborhood where we were living and the neighbors' attitude alternated between pity and disgust. But those Sunday afternoon meals sitting around Grandma's dining room table provided the sense of family stability and routine that we lacked the other six days of the week. For those meals were not so much about the food -- although the leftovers that usually lasted till Wednesday were a godsend for Dad. But those meals were Grandma's way of caring for her son and her grandchildren and both loving and fulfilling a duty she felt to us. We as kids were provided not only with nourishment but also tradition and strength. By giving us those Sunday afternoons, Grandma gave my dad and us her endurance, her steadiness and herself. In a real sense, they served as the glue that held our family together during those years of my childhood."
'Mostly True'
While we were working on this story, we were immersed in Molly O'Neill's striking new book, Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food and Baseball. Molly's mother leaps off the page and so does her father. And of course, a kitchen is at the heart of it all.
Music Credits
1. "It's A Blessing", Maria Muldaur sings with Bonnie Raitt, from I'm a Woman, 30 Years of Maria Muldaur (Rhino Records)
2. "Blue Drag" from Gaucho, Recorded Live at the Django Festival, San Francisco (Vgo Recordings)
3. "Bound for Canaan" (Sieber & Davis) from Music by Ry Cooder (Warner Bros.)
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Produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva) with Laura Folger, Kate Volkman and Maria Walcutt. Mixed by Jim McKee of Earwax Productions, San Francisco.
Frances McDormand, Ellen Sebastian Chang, Peggy Knickerbocker, Cristina Salas-Porras Cardoza, Marion Cunningham, Nick Spitzer & the Staff of American Routes in New Orleans, Deborah Luster, Sunny Meriwether & KEDM in Monroe, Louisiana, Billy Sartin, Teresa Wicks, Jeff Hartling, Margie Carr, Vicki Woollard, Vicky Bippart, Marsha Abbey, Gretchen Peters, Douglas Weed, Melissa Robbins, Cindi King, Ellen McDonnel and Cindy Carpien. And for the musical inspiration, Danny Silver, Chris Strachwitz, Arhoolie Records.
And to all our mothers: Patricia Folger, Alice Nelson, Frances Nelson, Dorothy Silva, Ginnie Volkman, Ana Salas-Porras, Judy McKee, Barbara Allison and Pam Sobieski.
JOHN YDSTIE, host:
Our Hidden Kitchen series returns this morning, just in time for Mother's Day, with Hidden Kitchen Mama, produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. ELLEN SEBASTIAN CHANG: I called her mama because, well, she's my mama. I didn't find out that my mother was white until I was ten years old and that my black mama was, in fact, my grandmother.
I am Ellen Sebastian Chang. I grew up in a small farm town called Pasco in eastern Washington. It was a lot of transplanted people from Louisiana, Mississippi. It's where the Hanford Nuclear Power Plant was built. My grandmother sometimes would say, Go get my wig, we're going to go down to the atomic market. I'm gonna get some greens and some ham hocks, and she was a great cook and she had a big laugh.
I remember playing with the neighbor children. They said, Rose ain't even your mama, your mama's white. And I said, Mama, they say you're not my real mama, and she said, I am your mama and I will always be your mama, but I'm not your mother. I didn't bring you into this world. She showed me a picture of this white woman and she said this is your mother.
I fly to San Francisco and meet my mother. I'm with more white people than I've ever been with in my life. And at the end of the hall I can see these two hippie women, and one's in a pair of jeans. She had cowboy boots on. That was my mom, with the John Lennon wire-frame glasses. And now what'll I do? My mom says, Well, let's get some food. Let's go to Safeway.
This is a huge market. I'd never seen such a big grocery store. So I came upon this thing and I picked it up and I said, What is this? Oh, it's an artichoke. Would you like to get that? And I just remember her cutting off the bottom of the artichoke and putting it in the water to boil it and she puts this thing on the table and it's still really tough.
So here's what you do. She said, You pull the leaf back and you dip it in the lemon and then you scrape your teeth on it. She shows me how to scoop the hairs out of the heart. I said, Wow! I said, You do all that work! It's just kind of a big mess and you're throwing away more than you eat, and I think if my mama was sitting there she would say, This is how you came into the world. It was just a tough situation and you just have to peel back and peel back all this stuff and it's just a big mess. And yet, at the heart of it, it is really tender.
Ms. PEGGY KNICKERBOCKER (Food Writer): I'm Peggy Knickerbocker. I'm a food writer from San Francisco and the daughter of a very good cook.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. KNICKERBOCKER: My mother was an only child. She was a very beautiful woman. Both of her parents got married after their former spouses had shot themselves, and I think she was a tortured soul. She was very smart. She was one of those people that was of a generation where she didn't work, you know, she was frustrated.
We had a beautiful kitchen that was green and white, and black and white tile floor. She puttered there after dinner, straightening things out, alphabetizing the spices. The kitchen was her domain and it was her secret space and it was a place she could unapologetically drink. Just about everything she cooked had alcohol in it. She made Welsh Rarebit, which is that melted cheese thing that had beer in it, so she'd swig on the beer as she was stirring it into the pot.
She loved to make desserts with hard sauce because we could have the bourbon there; Coq au Vin or Boeuf Bouguignon. She made this other thing called wine jello, gelatin and lemon juice and Marsala, and whenever I'd come home from school, there'd be little nips, little spoonfuls taken out of it.
The kitchen was her refuge and it was really where I felt most comfortable with her, because she was happiest there.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. CHRISTINA SALAS-PORRAS: My mother's name was Josephina Salas-Porras Acevedo(ph), but everyone called her Pepina(ph). My mother's family were French-Mexican and she always used to tell us, you came from kings and queens.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. SALAS-PORRAS: My name's Christina Salas-Porras from El Paso, Texas. I'm the youngest of six kids. My mom, I don't think she really loved cooking. It wasn't so much about the food; it was about eating together. We had a big kitchen, Mexican tiles, and it opened to the garden.
Every day, around sunset, she'd pour herself (foreign spoken) tequila, a little light blue, beautiful, thin glass the size of a thimble. And she'd squeeze a big lime in there. And she wasn't a drinker, that was just her one little thing. It made her slow down, connect with us, and okay, everybody, stop, let's all take account of where we are.
My mom was very loved. There was hundreds of people at her funeral, and we passed out little glasses and served tequila to everyone at the cemetery, and we let off some white doves, and we toasted her, and mariachis were playing, the doves were flying around. It was the right way to say goodbye to her.
(Soundbite of music)
Mr. NICK SPITZER (Host, American Roots Radio Show) My mother stayed awake a lot of hours of the day. I rarely ever saw her asleep. Her hidden kitchen was in the middle of the night. I'm Nick Spitzer and I'm the host of American Roots.
I live now in New Orleans, a long way from New England, where I grew up. The kitchen was the place where she would take care of the family's bills. She'd always be clipping some newspapers and planning the meals for the week, make all the bag lunches. It was where all the medicine was kept and where she would sit and read Joy of Cooking, just as surely as she would sit and read the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
The only time I ever invaded that sphere was because she was afraid of mice, so she used to wake me up to come empty mouse traps that she would hear clack in the house in the middle of the night. In the afternoon after school she'd give us tea and pound cakes. She also always had massive place settings, a main fork, a salad fork, a dessert fork. Good manners and treating people well was a centering force for her.
She had an expression that she used with us of kids, which was twixt cup and lip civilization hangs in the balance.
YDSTIE: Hidden Kitchens is produced by the Kitchen Sisters and Jay Allison and mixed by Jim McKee. You can find recipes for wine jello, Welsh Rarebit and other dishes, as well a stories from the Hidden Kitchen's hotline, at npr.org.
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm John Ydstie.
MONTAGNE: And I'm Renee Montagne. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.
