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DAVIA NELSON: I'm Davia Nelson.
This is Nikki SIlva.
And we're The Kitchen Sisters.
We do a series of stories on NPR's Morning Edition.
Maybe some of you know it.
We just wrote a book about Hidden Kitchens.
And we thought we'd just start, today, with a little
reading from the book, and then playing some of the
stories and talking about them.
NIKKI SILVA: A lot of Kitchen Sisters
stories are born in taxicabs.
Hidden Kitchens was conceived in the back of a yellow.
Davia lives in San Francisco and hates to drive.
She started noticing that every time she got into a
yellow cab, the driver was from Brazil.
And not just from Brazil, but from the same
town in Brazil, Goiania.
Inevitably, these cab-ride conversation turn
to music and food.
That's when the story of Janete emerged.
A woman from their same hometown, who comes everyday,
after dark, to the abandoned, industrial street outside the
cab company, and sets up a makeshift, rolling, night
kitchen-- hot salgadinhos, bollinhos, pao de quejo.
She cooks the food at home.
Then by dawn, Janete and her blue tent are
packed up and gone.
DAVIA NELSON: Certain stories have Kitchen Sisters written
all over them.
This sounded like one.
One night, around midnight, we decided to go in search of the
secret cab yard kitchen.
A driver had given us a sketchy map, and told us to
park in the cab lot, and walk to Janete's
outpost from there.
Just look like you know where you're going, he said,
assuring us no one would notice we didn't work for the
cab company.
It seemed pretty obvious to us.
Neither of us is from Goiania.
And no other cabbies in sight were wearing headphones and
packing 10 lbs of recording equipment.
We walked through the fleet of parked cabs, past the
gravehard-shift mechanic, working on a taxi up on the
racks, past the checkout point, and out onto a street
in the middle of nowhere.
There, under a streetlight, in a small booth tarp, four
drivers were huddled over big plates of food, eating in
Portuguese.
Brazilian music spilled out of a parked cab.
Janete shy and smiling presided-- a
Hidden Kitchen vision.
NIKKI SILVA: If Janete was making rice and beans on the
street at midnight, gathering her community like a campfire,
who else was out there, cooking on some other corner?
What other tiny kitchen economies, clandestine
cooking, and secret kitchen rituals were waiting to be
discovered?
We began noticing things.
A woman, surreptitiously selling tamales out of a baby
carriage in downtown Santa Cruz, an after-hours
restaurant tucked away in a car wash in LA, Vietnamese
manicurists gathered for a Christmas eve feast, with po
and fish and spring rolls, in a neighborhood nail salon in
San Francisco.
Once we started looking, we found unexpected, improvised,
tiny kitchen cultures in places, and at times of day,
we never thought to look before.
Our journey began.
DAVIA NELSON: Well, once we began that journey, we
decided, well, let's open up a phone line on NPR.
It's not just going to be us looking for these hidden
kitchens, it's going to be people all around the country.
And we asked the nation to tell us, who were the kitchen
pioneers and visionaries in their lives?
Who was cooking on their street corners?
What hidden kitchens we should know about.
And we thought we'd play a little something that just
opened up a huge window for us, and led to some hidden
kitchens we never would have imagined.
NIKKI SILVA: We imagined, in the planning of this project,
that we had figured out every possible kind of hidden
kitchen that somebody could think of.
But this one sort of took us by surprise.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
-An unexpected kitchen, the George Foreman grill.
-Message 23 was received at 1:10 PM today.
-Yes.
I'm Margaret Engel, coauthor of Food Find.
The George Foreman grill has been an amazing success story
of the kitchen appliance.
But what I think, many people don't realize, is that
immigrants and low-income people, the people who
struggle to even get food on the table, because they don't
have an official kitchen, and who are using George Foreman
grills, and it's a much bigger wave than a hotplate.
That is, to me, the epitome of the hidden kitchen.
-Wow, what a wonderful story.
I'd never considered it at all.
I am George Foreman, two-time heavyweight champion of the
world, former Olympic champion,
and king of the grills.
Growing up in Houston, Texas, my whole life was spent trying
to get enough to eat.
Having seven kids-- my mother did-- and there just was never
enough food for me.
Always dreamed about--
not a car, not a beautiful home, but enough to eat.
[SINGING]
-My name Piggly-Wiggly, I've got groceries on my shelf.
-My name is Jeffrey Newton, Chicago.
I'm a great cook.
Now a trick that I had learned from my grandmother, but I
just hadn't had a kitchen.
I'm living in a shelter, at this particular time.
But I've been homeless all my life.
I lived under where I could drive, where the expressway
goes through and there's about 30-40
refrigerator boxes down there.
That's going to be your home.
I would get a George Foreman grill.
That's the grill that I had for a while
[? where I could ?] me and a fellow by the name of Smokey.
But you just get you a long extension cord.
Well, they've got a lot of electrical plugs on the poles
down there, and just hook up.
We used to making hamburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches.
We used to take an iron, and do that too-- press down, you
know, the bread and the cheese.
-My name is Pat Sherman, and I'm the Program Coordinator of
the Walk-in Center at Glide, San Francisco.
When I was in these type of rooms, I could [? just see, ?]
I can cook in my room.
Well, legally I couldn't.
I'd get me a big bowl, put me some ice in it, and, voila,
that became my refrigerator--
microwaves, toaster ovens, hidden under the
bed or in the closet.
The George Foreman grill, that's the newest thing.
Don't set off the smoke detectors.
And since they come in colors, you know, it just looks like
you're getting real fancy in your room, decorating.
It looks like you have a nice tabletop to the visible eye,
but you know it's your kitchen.
-It's a special TV offer from the king of the grill, George
Foreman. -My lean, mean, fat-reducing, grilling
machine--
-I grew up in Houston, Texas, in the Fifth Ward area.
Everyday at lunch, during the summer days, you hear the
parents call the kids in, they would just tell me, OK, go
home, and eat you lunch.
And these people knew I had no food at home.
And I'd peep through the window at the the kids eating,
and the parents would peel the crust off the bread.
And I would just sit there, and just hope they would just
throw it out the window for me.
Going to school, you go through the lunch line--
$0.26.
I couldn't afford that.
And I'd sit at the table, and it was so embarrassing.
So what I would do, I'd get a greasy bag, blow it up on the
way to school, to make it look like there was
a sandwich in it.
Then I'd get to my classroom, and I said,
boy, I ate my lunch.
And I learned to disguise my not having food.
-When you're homeless, you have to find
out all these things.
It's called trailblazing.
You've got to blaze a trail, you know.
A lot of times we went to the hospital, it was either to
sleep or to use the microwave--
[END AUDIO PLAYBACK]
DAVIA NELSON: I think that's one of the things that just
has struck us so much, through this whole search for hidden
kitchens-- our little quest for kitchens--
is you go to tell a story about food, and really, you're
telling a story about all the issues that face the culture--
immigration, housing, poverty.
Underneath these hidden kitchen stories lurk all the
big issues.
And if we talked about homelessness, or if we talked
about immigration, probably, few people would listen.
But when you, suddenly, put the George Foreman grill in
the mix, it's what we all have in common-- food.
It's that universal language.
We opened up this phone line, and we asked people to tell us
about their hidden kitchens.
And a lot of the messages are in the book.
And so, Ben, why don't you come up and join us?
We're going to ask you guys to read some of the book
with us today, OK?
So be prepared.
It's a test.
BEN: You didn't warn me.
DAVIA NELSON: Surprise.
OK.
NIKKI SILVA: So when we opened up this phone line, we talked
a lot about it.
So what's everybody going to tell us about?
Everybody is going to tell us about their grandmother.
Because it's the first thing you say.
When you ask somebody about their
memories and kitchen and--
So when we went out on the air, we said, OK guys, try not
to tell us stories about your grandmother.
Because we're just going to be flooded with them.
And it's going to melt down the hotline.
And so we really discouraged messages about their
grandmother.
But, of course, everybody called in about their
grandmother anyway.
And we're kind of glad that they did, because we got some
really great ones.
BEN: This one's pretty good.
"Big Grandma, Little Grandma." My name is Douglas Sweed.
I have a story to tell about my two grandmas' kitchens.
There was only one grandma at a time in my family.
They rarely saw each other, didn't
particularly like each other.
I called them little grandma and big grandma-- an accurate
reflection of their physical sizes and the
food on their plates.
They each lived in small, obscure Pennsylvania towns.
Little Grandma ate no seeds, no salt, no sugar, refused to
make sauces, would not serve jamberry pies, berry cobbler,
or berry pancakes.
All meat was boiled or baked.
Coarse, whole wheat bread was served with salt-free oatmeal
for breakfast--
lot's of plain, boiled vegetables, canned, sugar-free
fruit for dessert.
For a little boy, in the 1950s, that was a tough
assignment.
Any meal at Little Grandma's house was a challenge.
The solid, oh-so-plain food, and not much of it.
Big Grandma, by contrast, produced dinners to die for.
Her table was covered with china serving bowls, filled
with chicken gravy, gravy-soaked biscuits, another
with biscuits, two kinds of jam, honey still in the comb,
the chicken in it's own bowl, the milky coleslaw, a plate of
ham, fresh fruit swimming in condensed milk.
Big Grandma loved to to make decorated two-layer
buttercream frosted cakes-- yellow, white, chocolate.
You would have whatever flavor you wanted.
She once made three different cakes for the same day.
She baked pies too and homemade donuts--
fried cakes, she called them.
I loved my grandmas.
Little Grandma was as sad and troubled as
her food was plain.
Big Grandma was as happy and as thoughtful as
her table was loaded.
Both lived into their 80s.
Little Grandma died depressed and a bit demented.
She lingered.
Big Grandma died of high blood pressure and diabetes.
A little artery blew up in her head.
She fell to the floor, dead in mid-sentence.
No surprises for either, I suppose.
They died as they lived, as they cooked, in their nearly
identical kitchens.
[APPLAUSE]
DAVIA NELSON: Well, probably, a lot of you have been hearing
about Willie Nelson recently, being in the news.
Our next project we're doing is called "Hidden Kitchens:
Texas." Because this hotline that we had, probably about
half of the calls-- we got thousands of them-- and half
of the calls were from Texas.
Texas and Louisiana--
those people like their food.
So we just decided that we had to do a special of all Texas
stories, and Willie Nelson is going to narrate them for us.
And so we've been following Willie in his tracks, and we
heard this great quote from him, the other day.
You know he got arrested, right, for some pot?
"It's a good thing I had a bag of weed, instead of spinach.
I'd be
dead by now." [LAUGHTER]
Here's a piece that we'd like to present to you.
We call it "Deep Fried Fuel".
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
-I'm Carl Cornelius, and we're at Carl's Corner Truck Stop at
Carl's Corner, Texas.
It's just a little truck stop going out of Dallas, conceived
out of a dream.
-Hey stranger.
Welcome to Carl's Corner--
-This used to have a swimming pool right in
the middle of it.
It had a hot tub on stage.
Naked girls would stand on their heads and
gargle peanut butter.
They was good times here.
-Red, would you put on Number two, there, for me?
This is a record they wrote about it, "The Dream." Take it
to Number two.
[SINGING]
-They called him a dreamer--
-Willie Nelson called me one time, and said,
what are you doing?
And I said, Willie, I'm shutting down.
And he said, what?
I'm going to shut the truck stop down.
He said, well, Carl, just shut it down.
Just shut that damn thing down.
And the next morning he called me.
He said, don't shut it down.
And he said, Carl, do you want to put one of your lanes in
out there in biodiesel?
And I said, well, do you believe in
the damn stuff, Willie?
And he said, well, yeah.
And I said, well, let's do the whole thing in biodiesel.
[SINGING]
-Carl's Corner, Texas--
-Biodiesel, can be made of soy bean, made of castor bean or
peanut oil, vegetable oil-- anything like that.
Sunflower seeds-- mustard seed is what they're doing out in
California right now.
Isn't that right Willie?
-Yeah.
And also it can be made out of the grease traps in the
restaurants in the [INAUDIBLE] --
-Willie's wife, Annie, put the bug in his head a few years
ago, when she saw biodiesel vehicles on Maui.
Willie's touring bus runs on vegetable oil
and BioWillie now.
My name is Joe Nick Patoski.
I've been writing about Texans for about 35 years.
Biodiesel is fuel made out of stuff you can grow and
vegetable oil.
-Kitchen grease.
Everybody uses a lot of grease.
The whole concept with Rudolf Diesel, back in the early
days, was the one that perfected the diesel engine.
And it ran off of peanut oil.
And then the big boys come along, and everything like
that, so it took over where Rudolf left off.
-Just by touching the end, you think, [INAUDIBLE]
Amazing you can run an 18-wheeler on it.
We take soybean oil that comes out of, mainly, the Midwest,
and then we refine it.
I'm Peter Bell, Earth Biofuels Distribution, cofounder of the
BioWillie brand.
Carl's is really the place where it started.
And we were the first place, anywhere in the country,
selling B-20 to truckers.
Which is 20% biodiesel, 80% diesel fuel.
We might not only be known as Texas Tea, but Texas B--
[SINGING]
-I'm driving a truck on a mountain road, got a hot rod
rig with a fine load, my eyes are filled with diesel smoke,
these hairpin curves ain't no joke.
Diesel smoke, Danger's curve--
-My name's [? Larry Fallot. ?]
I'm out of St. Louis, Missouri.
And we're in Carl's Corner Truck Stop.
I haul chemicals in the tank.
So I haul hazardous material all the time.
Biodiesel burns cleaner, emissions aren't as much,
[? exhaust. ?]
You're chance [INAUDIBLE]
politician sold us out.
Get away from the foreign oil more, and not let the foreign
oil [INAUDIBLE].
[SINGING]
-I am a biodiesel rebel, now that's just what I am.
This is our land
-It should be obvious to everyone, we're running out of
dinosaur wine.
This is *** Friedman.
I'm a compassionate redneck.
I'm 61 years old, which is too young for Medicare, and too
old for women to care.
I have the band, The Texas Jewboys.
And I'm running for governor, here in Texas.
Willie would be my chief of the new Texas Energy
Commission.
Of all the 10 or 12 particles that they've isolated, that
make Houston the number one polluted city in America,
diesel is the worst.
-My name is Chris Powers.
I'm the founder of Houston Biodiesel.
I teach a class on how to make biodiesel safely in your own
home-- you know, the kitchen way.
Because you can make it, in a blender, in your kitchen too.
Now I wouldn't use that blender again for a margarita
or anything.
But if you have a sacrificial blender--
Want the recipe?
One liter of vegetable oil--
-There's all these folks out there doing what's called home
brew.
-Eight grams of potassium hydroxide--
-People go collect this oil from restaurants--
McDonald's, [INAUDIBLE], donut places, and they take it home,
and they filter it with coffee filters.
And they react it with an alcohol, just like we do in a
big refinery--
-There's also the Dr. Pepper method.
[END AUDIO PLAYBACK]
DAVIA NELSON: Let us not forget the Dr. Pepper method.
So you wake up in the morning, we listen to our phone line.
We have no idea who's going to call, and what direction
they're going to send us.
We'd like to invite Robert Morgan, who brought us here,
today, who cooked the book with his incredible team--
[? Lorette ?] and [? Claudia ?]
[? and Mirna ?] and everybody and Amy.
Do we call it the Google Kitchen?
--Google Culinary Team.
As I understand it, they said, send us a recipe or two.
Maybe we'll make something.
We sent them four recipes.
They made them all.
These are all from the book.
First of all, we'd love to thank you so much.
And, perhaps, you'll read from the book with us.
ROBERT MORGAN: Dear Sisters, the Wired Kitchen started in
the early 1990s.
Wired magazine was conceived as part of a media empire.
Remember those days?
And everyone was working long, late hours.
There were very few places to eat in South Park.
So someone was brought in to make dinner.
It eventually grew to three meals a day.
Conceptually, I think of this as a very
high-style soup kitchen.
And although, breakfast is $2.00 and lunch is $4.00, and
we feed about 40 people a day.
And everyone eats here, from the editor in chief to the
newest intern.
Although, not always on a daily basis.
Sometimes you just have to leave the building.
Not here at Google.
[LAUGHTER]
ROBERT MORGAN: The Wired Kitchen is here to let people
feel taken care of on a small level.
This is Philip Ferrato, Chef at Wired Magazine.
NIKKI SILVA: Thank you.
ROBERT MORGAN: You're welcome.
DAVIA NELSON: So what's different about cooking at
Google than the past year?
ROBERT MORGAN: Better food.
Don't you think?
Yes.
Much better food, better quality, organic--
DAVIA NELSON: And what's the hidden kitchen within Google?
The hidden kitchen within the hidden kitchen at Google?
ROBERT MORGAN: We've got about 11 of them now.
[INAUDIBLE]
DAVIA NELSON: [INAUDIBLE]
ROBERT MORGAN: Yes, you do.
You did great.
DAVIA NELSON: So Robert, what's on the table?
ROBERT MORGAN: You've got your moon cookies, we've got the
scripture cake, we have the fudge, and we
have the banana bread.
All [INAUDIBLE] of course.
Unless we get the [INAUDIBLE] got to try this.
Just take a little package home when you leave here too.
Awesome.
NIKKI SILVA: Sure.
The scripture cake came to us from one of our colleagues at
NPR, Vertamae Grovner.
And she says that each ingredient in the recipe
corresponds to a passage in the bible.
For instance, "spices" refers to 1 Kings 10:10, "Never again
came such an abundance of spices as these which the
Queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon." So thanks for
cooking the scripture cake.
ROBERT MORGAN: Thanks, again, for being here.
DAVIA NELSON: Well, we thought we'd get a little closer to
home with this next story.
It's called "The Forager: Hunting and Gathering With
Angelo Garro." And He lives in San Francisco, so let's go
harvest the wild with him for a minute.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
[INAUDIBLE]
-Don't make noise, Bob.
Don't make noise.
Otherwise, the other hunters will be [INAUDIBLE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
-Sometimes it's the kitchen that's hidden, sometimes it's
the food, itself.
Angelo Garro is an artisan blacksmith-- a
forger and a forager.
We followed Angelo as he follows the seasons,
harvesting the wild.
- [INAUDIBLE]
the wild area, the trees, with their [? stet ?] stumps.
They're just hiding.
Pine needle carpets here.
You have to be focused, you know?
We are looking for porcini mushroom.
And where there is a bubble, there is a mushroom.
It could be a porcini, it could be a poisonous one, so
you have to be careful.
-My name is Angelo Garro.
I was born in Sicily, and now I live in San Francisco.
In Sicily, I could tell, by the smell, what time of the
year it was.
Orange season oranges, persimmons,
olives in olive oil--
-Ha, ha, Ha--
I mean, that's a porcini mushroom.
Look at it.
Isn't that beautiful?
[SNIFF]
-Smell.
If we find 10 like this, maybe tonight we can cook it, and
make
crostini mushrooms. [SINGING]
-My place is--
How can I describe my place?
This used to be a blacksmith shop in the 1890s, where all
of the gold digger cowboys used to bring their horses.
I do architectural wrought iron.
I'm forging elements for a balcony.
Listen to this one.
[BANGING IRON]
-It's like a soprano, you know.
Eh, Xavier.
My friend, Xavier, he just went dove hunting.
And tonight I'm cooking wild dove and polenta.
-Angelo goes with the season.
If he has hunted boar, there will be sausage making, and
there will be prosciutto making-- in the middle of
November, turkey hunting.
As you come on a day like today, you don't know what
you're going to see, you don't know what you're going to
smell, what you're going to eat.
He's either working metal or cooking something.
-I put a small little kitchen adjacent to the forge.
While the metal is warming up there, before I build up, I
just come and start a recipe.
I can make you a Sicilian poached egg.
-The forge is like the old country.
It's like a piece of Italy, or old Europe, which is frozen in
time in the middle of San Francisco.
It's just a very mysterious place.
It's an iron steel forge, that has just about everything,
from crab nets to bow and arrows, pictures of friends,
old machinery and tools.
And there's a fig tree in the middle of it, with fruits on
it.
-I have the passion of forage, the passion of
hunting, opera, my work.
I have the passion of cooking, pickling, curing, salami,
sausage, making wine in the fall.
This is my life.
I do this with my friends.
It's to my heart.
-I've seen the most eclectic group of people, coming
through the forge, for dinners and lunches.
Angelo is the center of gravity for people from just
about every class, every job.
It's a pleasure.
I don't think I would drive within five miles of here
without stopping by.
[END AUDIO PLAYBACK]
DAVIA NELSON: You never know how these stories are going to
reverberate.
We put them out on the air, 22 million people hear them, and
the strangest things happen.
After George Foreman's story aired-- and Jeffrey Newton,
the homeless man who cooked on the George Foreman grills--
people from all over America started telling us their
George Foreman grill stories and their stories of hunger
and homelessness.
And we got involved with all these organizations.
After Angelo's piece aired, he received so many proposals
from women, all around the country, wanting to marry him.
So we love that stories that can have that effect of
activating people, or just bringing out
the romantic in them.
This next story--
Robert mentioned the pralines that are there, that are for
you to take home.
And this is one of the messages, that came into the
Hidden Kitchens hotline before Katrina.
And there were thousands of them.
We didn't have a chance to do them all.
Anyway, after Katrina--
well, you'll hear this, and you'll see why we followed up,
and we met Robert King Wilkerson.
And that's led to his story, and to these Freelines being
here today.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
-Message 24 was received at 7:00 AM today.
-My name is Orissa Arend.
I live in New Orleans.
I have a friend who created the most amazing kitchen.
His name is Robert King Wilkerson.
He was in prison at Angola State
Penitentiary for 31 years.
Twenty-nine of those years, he was in solitary confinement.
He was a Black Panther-- started a chapter of the Black
Panther Party with two of his friends.
They sort of became a cause celebre known
as the Angola Three.
Somehow, in solitary confinement, he managed to
create a kitchen.
And he made pralines, which we love, here, in New Orleans.
He's out now.
They'd decided they had made a mistake for locking
him up for so long.
He had a new trial, and he sells his candies that he
calls "Freelines." And they are really, really good.
-I was fascinated with sugar.
I used to watch Mama make candy with pecans and sugar in
New Orleans.
But it wasn't until some years later, when I first went to
prison, I was cooking in the kitchen.
This guy was in the bakery.
He could bake all kinds of pastries and make
all kinds of candies.
I was fascinated with the candy.
What I saw before my eyes, was like a sign
that's being revealed.
My name is Robert King Wilkerson.
We used to get milk practically everyday--
or butter and sugar.
They would put it on your tray whether you
drank coffee or not.
So I'd just get the guys to save the sugar.
Sometimes I was fortunate enough to get pecans.
They've got a lot of pecan trees around Angola.
And they had some officers-- once they taste the candy--
made sure I had pecans.
We would bribe the orderly.
Sometimes we'd get fruit cane or peach cane.
But most of the time, it was Coke cans.
They were easy to get.
Just peel the top.
And then, peel another cane, shrivel it up,
maybe 18 inches long.
And they have toilet paper, roll it up, and turn it into a
[? burm. ?]
I would definitely hear them.
They would come in, conduct a shakedown, and get the pot,
get the cane and everything else.
And then write you up.
Our economy in Georgia's real-- going outside the box a
little bit.
Making candy, and then giving it away, you know.
Especially the guys on death row, because I just wanted
them to have something that they hadn't
had in a long time.
-Good afternoon.
This is [INAUDIBLE]
[? Freelander, ?]
91.7 FM on your radio dial.
And we broadcast daily from the Louisiana State
Penitentiary at Angola.
I'd like to take this opportunity to wish all the
brothers up on death row a very beautiful day.
And I'll tell you what--
-King was released in 2001.
On the very first day he's released he's making candy.
He was sitting there just stirring,
stirring real slowly.
Sugar candy-- "Freelines" is what he called them.
-I call them "Freelines." I mean, I wanted them to rhyme
with pralines.
When I first got out, I went in the French Quarter, and I
went to every candy shop.
And I thought I could do better.
Having what I say, I guess, perfected a candy
while I was in prison.
-He does it for a fundraiser.
When he goes to events-- political organizing events--
a lot of times he'll bring some candy.
And so that's, kind of, been the way he's
made some pocket change.
It's been really important to him.
Because after 30 years in solitary confinement, it's not
that easy to just go out and get a regular job.
My name is Ann Harkness.
I'm an activist and have been King's pecan supplier, pretty
much, since he got out of prison.
Everywhere he goes, he'll just bust out in some candy making.
-My name is Malice Braheme, cofounder of Common Ground
Relief and resident of New Orleans and the
community of Algiers.
King and I was raised together.
His backyard was adjacent to my backyard.
Freelines is something that he's doing to
subsidize his income.
That's the only option that, really, he has
is by making candy.
On his wrapper is not just no logo of candy.
It's free the Angola Three, about his two comrades that
are still incarcerated.
He always looked at that injustice.
His kitchen, will reflect this.
- [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
are submerged in water, 10 to 12 feet deep, at least. It's
full of debris.
It's some of the dirtiest, toxic soup you can imagine.
Reporting in New Orleans, I'm--
-It was a few days before Katrina, I had
made a batch of cane.
That was the last time.
I could have went to the Superdome, but there was no
place to keep a dog.
Kenya, that's the name of my dog.
I got her when she fit in the palm of my hand.
So I elected to hold tight.
There was some people who came by in boats.
We exchanged food.
I gave most of the cane away.
There were dogs screaming who had been locked up in houses.
And my neighbor, next door--
I had to break in her house, but I sealed it back up.
I had to go in there and feed her dogs.
She had two of them, and I had to fight them to feed them.
I had been in the water twice, seeing two birds who's wings
had gotten wet.
I was eaten by so much death and devastation that was going
on around me, I felt it imperative that I save a life.
I think I cried more in those 16 days that I was in the
house, after Katrina, than I did in the 31
years I did in prison.
It not only took so much away from me as an individual, it
replicated this hundreds of thousands of times.
I think candy is a collateral.
My doing what I'm doing, keeping focus on the
injustices that were taking place in Angola, doing so by
cooking, making candy, opening up kitchens, can produce money
to aid them.
So be it.
Maybe that's my calling.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END AUDIO PLAYBACK]
DAVIA NELSON: Well, candy is the collateral.
And we thought--
I don't know, sort of, like the wafer-- we'd pass some
open Freelines around for everybody.
King busted out in some candy making for Google, and Robert
bought these, out of his budget, for everyone to take
and spread.
So here they are.
And talk about reverberation.
So many people heard King's story.
They way he has been supporting himself, since
coming out of prison, is making candy.
He said, I'm going to be a candyman.
And since that piece aired, I think there's about $5,000 or
$6,000 worth of candy orders have come in from listeners
nationwide.
Alonso King, one of the great choreographers in the Bay
area, is making a ballet based on King's story.
Some people are, perhaps, interested in
King's story as a film.
Just to see the power of the kitchen story, the power of
someone just changing their world with just the slightest
gesture, combining pecans and sugar and milk.
And I think that's something we keep noticing about all
these stories.
NIKKI SILVA: After that piece aired, we got a call from the
prison at Angola.
Actually, NPR got the call.
And they said, you know, we heard the Kitchen Sisters
piece about Robert King Wilkerson.
And we love The Kitchen Sisters down here.
We'd like to invite [UNINTELLIGIBLE] to see the
hidden kitchens at the prison.
Because we have this annual rodeo, where the guys-- the
prisoners, actually--
have a rodeo.
And spectators come and watch them ride the bulls, and try
and grab the dollar out between the horns and all this
wacky stuff.
She said, and we'd also like The Kitchen Sisters to see
that there's no possible way that this guy could have made
this candy inside the cell.
I mean, there's absolutely no way.
And so we got off the phone with NPR.
And Davia called Robert up, and said, Robert, the prison
doesn't think you could have done that and
says there's no way.
And you heard his voice, he just kind of chuckled.
And he said, well, I guess that's why they call it the
hidden kitchen.
And so--
DAVIA NELSON: Would you guys have time for one more story?
Yeah.
We just thought we'd come back to Texas, to take us on out.
And this speaks for itself.
What can we say?
Also, if there's any--
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
-My name's David Close.
Barbecue pit manufacturer here in Houston, Texas.
This is what we call bling-bling.
It's a standard mobile pit feeds about,
probably, 600 people--
20-foot trailer, 7 foot wide.
It's got 24-carat gold mags and handles.
I had a friend of mine dip them,
electroplate them in gold.
It has a 2 by 4 foot sliding steak grill on the nose, and a
fish frying burner for deep-frying turkeys in peanut
oil, boiling corn, frying catfish and all.
It's got gas injection, 160,000 BTU
for lazy-man cooking.
On top of the firebox is a one-inch, solid
granite Lazy Susan.
Full pots of coffee at the perfect temperature for
keeping warm.
Ok, so you go around back.
We've got an infrared grill, that cooks at 2,000 degrees
for nuking cowboy steak.
Behind that, you have gold sinks, 24-inch Three LNB
satellite dish.
It's got a DVR recorder.
It holds 100 motion pictures, DVD players, satellite radio,
satellite TV. And this is solar power, as well as
electric power.
So I can run the lights, the TV, radio and all that, off of
the solar power.
The lighting on the trailer will flash to the music.
And we can even rig them where Jack Daniels and Coke comes
out of the faucets.
You don't have to do anything, you don't have to plan
anything, you don't even have to have food.
All I have to do is pull that pit up on a cul de sac, and
get out and light it.
And people will start showing up with food, hay bales.
People will party at the drop of a hat.
The paint job, on the trailer, is a Ferrari [INAUDIBLE]
like burgundy.
Should last about 100 years.
I could have had a Maserati or this barbecue pit.
Now what Texan would have picked the Maserati?
No.
This is forever.
This is always going to be here.
Maybe they'll find it hundreds of years from now, and they'll
wonder what the hell this was, you know?
I won't stop until I make everything in the world into a
barbecue pit.
I want one on the moon.
I've talked to the administrator of NASA.
Ceramic fiber finish with platinum coils inside with
solar panels.
Probably an oxygen-fixed environment inside.
When people land, I want them to see the world's first
up-close, interplanetary grill.
That sings.
I'll give them the rest of the money I make the rest of my
life, if they put on on the moon for me.
That's a scratch on the planet that you were here.
The rest of it's moot.
[END AUDIO PLAYBACK]
DAVIA NELSON: You've got to love Texans.
So any questions?
Anymore hidden--
AUDIENCE: So what's your story?
How did you guys meet?
Just like [INAUDIBLE]
NIKKI SILVA: Well, we were both in Santa Cruz.
This was back in the late '70s.
And I was working at the Santa Cruz City
Museum of Natural History.
And Davia was doing radio.
She was, actually, gathering oral
histories of older people.
And mutual friends kept saying, you guys have got to
meet each other.
You're both doing the same thing, seeking stories.
And we'd go someplace, and one of us had just been there.
So Davia showed up at the museum one day, and we just
sat out on porch and watched--
I don't know if you guys have been to the museum there, but
it has that beautiful view of the ocean.
We just sat there and talked for hours.
And it was the beginning of our collaboration. and then we
did a live radio show on KUSP for several years.
And a friend of ours sent one of our pieces off to to NPR.
That was about '79 or '80, and that began our
relationship with NPR.
And then, in the meantime, we've done other things.
I continue to work in museums. Davia's done a lot of film
work, casting, and wrote a film and produced it.
And then we've come back to radio, and that's what we're
doing now, pretty much, all the time.
DAVIA NELSON: People think that we've been doing cooking
kinds of things, because we call ourselves "The Kitchen
Sisters." But we took our name from two stone masons in Santa
Cruz, Kenneth and Robert Kitchen.
They built by the light of the moon.
They made yogi temples and goat milk bars, along the
chimneys and porches, and all the stonework that
you see in that town.
And we just loved their name.
We were about to interview somebody in our live, weekly
show, who'd written a book about Santa Cruz architecture.
And they kept looking for juicy stories.
And Nikki lives on a commune.
They had just bought the commune, and they had this
funky stove, where we were trying to
cook a salmon dinner.
And it was just falling apart.
And as we were preparing for the radio stories, we just
started calling ourselves "The Kitchen Sisters," as we were
reading about the Kitchen brothers,
wrecking the salmon dinner.
And then, when we got on air, we said, well, tell us about
the Kitchen brothers, not to be confused with "The Kitchen
Sisters," who are here with you today, while
this author was on.
And someone had made bumper stickers that said, free The
Kitchen Sisters, And the name stuck.
It feels like what we hope the radio stories feel like.
You know, that kitchen, the room in the house, that smells
the best. Where parties begin and end, where
the memories are.
So that's our roots.
AUDIENCE: So how do you learn to talk like NPR?
DAVIA NELSON: We never narrate our stories.
So we don't know how to talk like NPR.
Our stories, as you hear them, we're not in them, and we try
and just use the music and the sound and the interviews and
the archival audio to tell them.
NIKKI SILVA: How do you feel about how people talk on NPR?
They, sort of, sound the same?
AUDIENCE: It's just very distinct.
[INAUDIBLE]
If you're listening to the news, you know it's NPR news
just by the sound of it.
It's just [INAUDIBLE] --
DAVIA NELSON: I think they look like little ducks, and
they imprinted off of Susan Stamberg.
She's the mother ship.
And every woman--
you just start hearing Susan's cadences.
But they're slightly shifting as different people have
hosted since her, and Bob Edwards, obviously.
AUDIENCE: How do you find the music to go with your stories?
DAVIA NELSON: You know, in high school, I wanted to be
the first woman supreme court justice or a DJ.
And I just have always been obsessed with music-- just
since little--
and collecting.
And we did a series together.
Laura Folger, also, who's there taking photographs--
we've all been working together--
we started in the '70s. and then we started these big
collaborations. "Lost and Found Sound," "Sonic Memorial
Project"-- now, "Hidden Kitchens."
We had "Lost and Found Sound." And it was about people
possessed by sound and unusual audio artifacts and music that
just changed the world.
So we've just been collecting and collecting, and a ton of
archivists have joined into our group.
And I live near Amoeba Records, and our friend, Chris
Strachwitz-- who has our movie records-- gives to us.
Do you have music we should use?
I mean, that's how we get it.
People hear our stories, and send it.
And I collect, and Nikkie loves music.
We all do.
NIKKI SILVA: But I love this story.
Davia went down to Amoeba Records.
I know everybody gets everything offline these days.
But there's nothing like somebody who really knows what
they're doing.
And Dav knows all the guys down there. and went in, and
described this piece that we were doing, that we were
working on.
It was about Texas ice houses.
She said, we need something--
they're hauling the big ice down from the eastern seaboard
on these barges.
And we need something to go behind this scholar, who's
talking about this.
The guy says, I've got the piece of music.
I've got it.
And she said, well, do you have a couple of pieces, so we
can have a choice?
And he says, no, I've got the piece of music.
And he showed--
DAVIA NELSON: And play--
We used it, because we played that Ice House piece.
And then Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of all people,
called in after the piece aired.
And we put that music--
You can hear Joe Goldmark, who owns Amoeba, is the one who
gave us this beautiful piece, called "Smooth Sailing."
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
-Message 10 was received at 10:30 AM today.
-Hello.
This is Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Your story on ice houses really dug up a part of
history I'd, practically, forgotten.
And it reminded me, that when I was 14, I had a job.
This other camp in the Adirondacks,
Upstate, New York.
On Big Wolf Lake, where my job consisted of, besides chopping
firewood, going into the ice house, and digging out from
the sawdust it was packed in, these huge blocks of ice,
maybe 3 feet long and 2 feet deep, and maybe 2 feet wide.
And getting them loose with an icepick and an axe, and
getting them onto a wheelbarrow and tunneling them
into big, kitchen ice houses.
That was the memory I had forgotten.
Thanks a lot.
Bye.
[END AUDIO PLAYBACK]
DAVIA NELSON: We have a saying around The Kitchen Sisters,
we've always relied on the kindness of archivists.
Once you start asking people for kitchen stories, or for
recordings, people want to work together.
People want to collaborate.
People want to create something positive and
imaginative.
And that's what we keep learning through our work.
Isn't that the point?
It's like all this effort towards war and divisions in
the culture, and, really, our microphone keeps picking up
another story.
We say it's sort of like a stethoscope.
We were doing these hidden kitchen stories during the
last presidential election.
And everyone was saying, oh, America is so divided, and
we're do at each others' throats.
Well we kept seeing all these people who wanted to feed one
another, who wanted to cross the line somehow.
The kitchen stories allowed people to do that.
And those are the stories we're interested in and the
collaborations we like.
NIKKI SILVA: Well, thank you so much everyone.
And please take some food.
DAVIA NELSON: Thank you for--
[APPLAUSE]