TRANSCRIPT:
Audible Originals presents Your Mama's Kitchen, hosted by Michele Norris.
Michelle Obama: This 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 we packed a lot into that house, into that kitchen.
Michele Norris: Welcome 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 Michele 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. It'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.
Michele Norris: Hey, there!
Michelle Obama: Hey!
Michele Norris: Thanks for coming into the studio.
Michelle Obama: From one Michelle to the other.
Michele Norris: We have Michelle squared here.
Michelle Obama: Thanks for having me, babe.
Michele Norris: 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 LaVaughn 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. With 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. I'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.
Michele Norris: I am so glad that we get to do this.
Michelle Obama: I know.
Michele Norris: 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.
Michelle Obama: Cuz it's a great idea.
Michele Norris: Everything starts at the kitchen table.
Michelle Obama: 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.
Michele Norris: 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? Close your eyes and take me back there.
Michelle Obama: 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...
Michele Norris: They were right downstairs.
Michelle Obama: 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. And right to the left was the kitchen, which was probably a bedroom at the time.
Michele Norris: Ah. And it had been converted.
Michelle Obama: That had been converted. So it was tiny, just a small sink, a Formica sink. That hard white, you know.
Michele Norris: Resin.
Michelle Obama: Resin, right, exactly. Little ridges on the side. Just a small little section where you could put the dish rack.
Michele Norris: Yes.
Michelle Obama: To let the water...
Michele Norris: No dishwasher?
Michelle Obama: Oh, no, no, no dishwasher.
Michele Norris: You were the dishwasher. You and Craig were the dishwasher.
Michelle Obama: 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 Mercurochrome. You remember that medicine that you put on scars. The red medicine, so that...
Michele Norris: That they put on everything.
Michelle Obama: Exactly. You know, sort of like 'tussin.
Michele Norris: It had a little dropper.
Michelle Obama: It was like -- the dropper. 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. So it was a jackleg kitchen, you know.
Michele Norris: But they made it work.
Michelle Obama: Made it work, right.
Michele Norris: Did you eat in the kitchen or eat in the dining room?
Michelle Obama: Oh there was no dining room. Oh, a dining room!? What was that? We had no dining room. We had the kitchen. There was one table and it was probably a borrowed or used dining room table with four or five chairs around it. My mother put that plastic picnic table cloth...
Michele Norris: Mm-hmm that you wipe off.
Michelle Obama: That you just wipe off. And it was 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 cigaret burns were that left the whole in one place. You 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.
Michele Norris: If that tablecloth could talk.
Michelle Obama: 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 measure ourselves along that.
Michele Norris: Oh you had little marks on the door.
Michelle Obama: Little markers of how tall we got. The ledge, my father used that as Craig started to become better at basketball, to get him to jump higher, he 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.
Michele Norris: With the long...
Michelle Obama: With the long curlicue, curlicue 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. We grew up there. We became teenagers, adults. My brother became 6'3" then 6'4" then 6'5" 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. We were poor. You know, when I describe it, I was like, dag, we were poor.
Michele Norris: But poor wasn't a word that you would have applied to yourself.
Michelle Obama: Never. We were always very fortunate, we believed. Fortunate, blessed. That's what we were. And we were because we we packed a lot into that house, into that kitchen.
Michele Norris: 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.
Michelle Obama: Oof, that's a 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 the central operating systems place in the house. You bake bread made pie crust, you did bills, you did your homework at that table. You filled out the trading stamps. You remember when you had...
Michele Norris: Oh yes! S&H.
Michelle Obama: S&H trading stamps. Yeah 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.
Michele Norris: Oh my goodness I have not thought about that in so long.
Michelle Obama: Yeah, yeah.
Michele Norris: Those books with those little grids.
Michelle Obama: Yeah.
Michele Norris: Mm-hmm.
Michelle Obama: You know, we did 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.
Michele Norris: So when people came to visit, that's where they would gather.
Michelle Obama: 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, we were all sitting around that kitchen table so we could be a part of the conversation. I played jacks on that floor. Our friend, 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.
Michele Norris: In the kitchen. So if we could go back in time and someone marched into your family refrigerator.
Michelle Obama: Yeah.
Michele Norris: And threw open the doors, what story would that refrigerator tell us?
Michelle Obama: Oh, it would probably tell the story of a working class family. And 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 know, you'd have a bag of Oreo cookies for like a month.
Michele Norris: Yeah, you get two or three at a time.
Michelle Obama: 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. I was like, she's not looking, I'm going to get two Oreos. So I ate one, and then I came up with the 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.
Michele Norris: She had eyes in the back of her head.
Michelle Obama: She's a witch.
Michele Norris: She probably heard you in the package.
Michelle Obama: She probably, you know, I probably took longer than I thought I was, you know, kids think that they're...
Michele Norris: She just knew also, no child is gonna take -- what child takes just one Oreo!?
Michelle Obama: I did, I did from then on.
Michele Norris: There'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, a whole lot of fidgeting, and often a few tears. And we sure look cute when it was all done. But whew. But 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.
Michele Norris: Was your mother a kitchen beautician?
Michelle Obama: Oh, she was. She was. And it was so painful. We just there was sort of the battle with hair.
Michele Norris: Were you tender-headed?
Michelle Obama: I had so much hair. It was just a lot of it. And it took hours to comb through it. And, you know, it just was it was not a comfortable place, the formica 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.
Michele Norris: Just talking about it I can feel that thing in the back of my neck.
Michelle Obama: 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? It wasn't some gushing hair spray.
Michele Norris: Right of a high pressure spray gun.
Michelle Obama: It wasn't high pressure. So would take forever to get the hair wet enough to get the soap in there. And it was the Wella Balsam that stung your eyes. Oh, man. Hair doing day with 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.
Michele Norris: And then they had the hot comb.
Michelle Obama: You know, the hot comb on the stove.
Michele Norris: You know, people maybe listening to this and wondering, what is a hot comb. So hot comb was a wooden-handled...
Michelle Obama: Metal comb that you would heat up usually by fire and it would straighten...
Michele Norris: You'd put it on...
Michelle Obama: 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 were raised in America...
Michele Norris: You were trying to tame it.
Michelle Obama: 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. And 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 if I was five years old, she sent me across the alley with the 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.
Michele Norris: We we also had in our neighborhood a basement beautician that we used to go to. And she could do in maybe hour 45 minutes, would take like...
Michelle Obama: Exactly.
Michele Norris: Three hours, you know, for my mom to do it.
Michelle Obama: We were all grateful for Miss Phillips.
Michele Norris: Tell me what dinner was like, like an average Tuesday night dinner in the Robinson household.
Michelle Obama: 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...
Michele Norris: When people are too busy to all sit down together.
Michelle Obama: Right, where 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. There was a ritual of dinner time.
Michele Norris: Same time every night.
Michelle Obama: 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. She was always the cleaner. She had other sisters who cooked, but she could cook. But she was a Betty Crocker cookbook cook, you know?
Michele Norris: Okay, tell me what that means.
Michelle Obama: That big Betty Crocker...
Michele Norris: Red and white Betty Crocker cookbook, I remember that.
Michelle Obama: She cooked from recipes, and she was less throw a little bit in here, a dash there. She operated off of recipes, and I think her ideas of meals came from there. So...
Michele Norris: Meatloaf and mashed potatoes.
Michelle Obama: Meat loaf, roast beef with rice and gravy, spaghetti and meatballs when she felt fun and free and Italian, you know, that was, that was our notion of traveling the world. When we had spaghetti and meatballs, right?
Michele Norris: With that, with that parmesan?
Michelle Obama: Oh yeah! The shaken parmesan. Was that Parmesan? Or I don't know it was parmesan dust.
Michele Norris: We're not going to denigrate any...
Michelle Obama: We don't wanna know.
Michele Norris: Particular corporate entity but... it did have an interesting consistency now that you've had real parmesan...
Michelle Obama: 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.
Michele Norris: Did your dad cook? Did Fraser Robinson?
Michelle Obama: Occasionally. He cooked like a lot of men. Because my husband's the same way -- he can cook. But how many times does he cook? Not much. But, yes. My father...
Michele Norris: Mr. Obama cooks.
Michelle Obama: Oh, yeah, Yeah. He... yeah, shoot. Anybody who can read and has sense and tastebuds can cook. Okay, follow a recipe, you can cook. So for all the men out there who's where they can't cook. If you can read, you can.
Michele Norris: And they usually cook when fire is involved, they're like grilling some barbecue or something.
Michelle Obama: 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. And I don't know why. That was his thing.
Michele Norris: You're still, you're a pie person to this day.
Michelle Obama: 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 round 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.
Michele Norris: When I would visit Chicago, there was, I noticed among my aunts and uncles that lived in Chicago, that there was almost like an underground culinary economy. They wouldn't call it a culinary... is a word 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?
Michelle Obama: You know? Yes -- but what I remember with every meal is seem like there was this big leftover tradition. Take away 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.
Michele Norris: It was a big deal... oh no not that plate!
Michelle Obama: Did you get a plate?
Michele Norris: Yeah.
Michelle Obama: And if -- you get in trouble if you didn't get a plate. Because, well, how am I going? We have too many ribs. Did everybody get a plate? And then the aluminum foil would come out, right?
Michele Norris: Yes, big sheets of aluminum foil.
Michelle Obama: And the paper plate. You know, and there'd 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.
Michele Norris: And it was also a sign of respect.
Michelle Obama: 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 take away.
Michele Norris: Yeah, yeah.
Michelle Obama: We have one on Carolyn, may she rest in peace. But all my cousins, if they hear this, will understand. Whenever she cooked, we were very disappointed.
Michele Norris: Oh, no.
Michelle Obama: Because Aunt Carolyn, who'd never had kids, my mom's oldest sister, she lived with my grandfather, which was even more annoying because my grandfather was an amazing cook. South Side. South Side was known to cook throughout the day.
Michele Norris: You know, if your name is South Side, of course you're a good cook.
Michelle Obama: He was just that. He's a jazz listener. He was the grandfather with the house was filled with music and he was always cookin'. Barbecue up some ribs. But if you stay and played cards long enough, he might just go in back and fry some chicken wings and make some milkshakes as like a midnight snack. So that's who South Side was, right? So if you went over to South Side's house and Carolyn had cooked? The kids would just all the kids would be like, no!!! No!!
Michele Norris: We're in a podcast so people can't see what you do with your head, but you just...
Michelle Obama: You just roll your head, it's like no, not Carolyn! And your mom would be, shh, Don't say anything, you know, don't be rude. One day we were over there with the cousins. We still talk about this, you know what she made? Liver and onions.
Michele Norris: For for... for company?
Michelle Obama: For a family meal!
Michele Norris: I mean, that's what you make, maybe... you know...
Michelle Obama: That's the punishment dinner!
Michele Norris: Yeah!
Michelle Obama: Right? That's the dinner, that's the dinner that you don't -- walk home from school and you can smell it and it's like liver? Argh! Right? Carolyn made liver, so...
Michele Norris: I actually like liver and onions.
Michelle Obama: You were a rare child.
Michele Norris: Yeah, but you got to cook it otherwise it's like shoe leather.
Michelle Obama: No child in our family like liver, right? It's not what you went to South Side's house for. So, yes, we never took her leftovers. And you would be insulted not to take home -- who was going to take home liver and onions? We'd be like, Mom, do not get leftover because we are not eating this again. So our currency was... Was shared food, right?
Michele Norris: Yeah, yeah. That is, that is an act of love. Let me take a plate.
Michelle Obama: Yes, indeed.
Michele Norris: And there was always a little plate for somebody who couldn't come. Too elderly, you know, too infirm. So make sure to send a plate home to Mrs. Gosset or...
Michelle Obama: Yeah, we couldn't loan people money, you know? You, you give things.
Michele Norris: Food is love.
Michelle Obama: Food is love. Acts of kindness. Cause you couldn't afford anything else. So, yes, that was our neighborhood, our family. It was all about the food, for sure.
Michele Norris: We grew up in an interesting era where there was a collision of cultures. The women's movement was really starting to explode. When we were in junior high and high school.
Michelle Obama: Mm-hmm.
Michele Norris: And I've always wondered what that meant for a generation of women?
Michelle Obama: Hmm.
Michele Norris: Who were conditioned with certain expectations in life. And then suddenly a generation right behind them was coming up and saying, we can be more.
Michelle Obama: Mm-hmm.
Michele Norris: And what wasn't said, but somehow was maybe implied is you should be wanting more, too.
Michelle Obama: Mm-hmm.
Michele Norris: And I wonder if that debate found its way into your household at all. And do you, do you remember that at all?
Michelle Obama: You know, it's interesting because it's sort of yes and no. The no part is because I, like a lot of black households, the women were the matriarch earners. My father's generation, he was the breadwinner in our family. He had a steady city job. My mother stayed home until we went to high school. She was a housewife. But that was unusual because every other woman in my life, aunts, grandmothers, everybody worked. My great grandmother, my mother's grandmother was the primary breadwinner.
Michele Norris: And they were working out of necessity.
Michelle Obama: They worked out of necessity.
Michele Norris: Not because of self-actualization.
Michelle Obama: Right. And also because men couldn't be guaranteed steady work. Unions kept them out of trades jobs. So it was rare that they could earn a regular enough income to support a family. So every woman I knew in my family worked. So there was that kind of, well, what are we fighting for? We're already on the job doing it all. There wasn't a conversation of more. The conversation was how do we make sure our men can get something, right? But generationally, the aunts that I was closest to, who was my father's youngest sister, she was only ten years older than me.
Michele Norris: Mm-hmm.
Michelle Obama: Right? But I was very close to her, and she was one of the first people I knew that went to college. She definitely at the kitchen table, I would see the battles between my aunt and her mother.
Michele Norris: And it was generational.
Michelle Obama: Generational. You know, my aunt, she was of the movement on all different fronts. How you wore your hair. She was the first woman in our family to wear her hair in a big afro. She went to college, she studied African dance, and she brought new ideas. And she was more critical of her mother's way of being, which was more traditional. But my grandmother would go to work and then she would come home and start making dinner.
Michele Norris: Second shift. Taking care of the family.
Michelle Obama: Second shift. My aunt used to bristle at that, bristle at what she probably perceived as a subservient way of being to her father, my grandfather. She would challenge the system in ways she was frustrated by her mother and her sort of backwards ways. She would come to our dinner table where my mother was more of her contemporary, and there would be the discussions about what she was frustrated with in her household versus what she saw for herself.
Michele Norris: Mm-hmm.
Michelle Obama: So I guess that's the long way of saying, yes, those conversations started to happen around the kitchen table, but I didn't have to have those conversations with my mother. You know, being a woman means you do it all.
Michele Norris: Right.
Michelle Obama: You're gonna cook and clean and...
Michele Norris: But that do it all thing is interesting because when we were young, that was still the message.
Michelle Obama: Yes.
Michele Norris: Women should go to the workplace. They should climb the corporate ladder. They should get jobs that were normally reserved for men. And then they should come home and take care of the family, also. It was the sort of you have to have it all and. Do you remember Enjoli?
Michelle Obama: Yes. That perfume?
Michele Norris: That perfume. The ridiculous...
Michelle Obama: Oh yeah cause that's where the song came from. Because I know that, I didn't know the song other than that commercial.
Michele Norris: Was that song made for that commercial or was that actually... I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan and never let them know. Never let him...
Michelle Obama: Forget.
Michele Norris: He's a man.
Michelle Obama: [Singing] Because I'm a woman, by Enjoli. It's stupid.
Michele Norris: I hated that ad. I hated... I've actually played with trying to go back and figure out who's the ad company that created that ad? In my mind, it was a bunch of men who came up with because remember the woman, she was all dressed, all sexy and everything, and taking off her clothes and doing all this. And I thought, that's a bill of goods. They were just trying to hold on to the idea that woman would still cook in the kitchen.
Michelle Obama: And bring home a check.
Michele Norris: While she was also earning and bringing home a check.
Michelle Obama: Well, we you know, we're not beyond those arguments. You know, those challenges with gender roles. We still struggle with when women say, I want to have it all.
Michele Norris: Mm-hmm.
Michelle Obama: It's still the remnants of that. What does having it all mean? Because you can't have it all, nor should that ever be a goal. But I think it's still the fragments of that falsehood that was sold to us.
Michele Norris: Breakfast. Were you a big breakfast family?
Michelle Obama: Me, Michelle, was not. Everybody else was and thought I was crazy.
Michele Norris: Ok, what did you have against breakfast?
Michelle Obama: I was kind of a picky eater. I didn't like any breakfast, anything.
Michele Norris: Ahh! You were a picky eater!
Michelle Obama: And my brother, who ate everything all the time, thought I was crazy. We had big breakfasts because my brother, he's a growing athlete.
Michele Norris: Yeah.
Michelle Obama: So it was everything. Cereal, followed by scrambled or fried eggs, followed by lots of toast and bacon and link sausage. But every now and then we'd get the patty sausage. So breakfast was big. You know, I was at a time my mother tried to force me to eat breakfast, but I was really stubborn. I didn't like bacon. I hated eggs. I only started.
Michele Norris: You didn't liking bacon?!
Michelle Obama: I didn't like bacon, sausage, all of the breakfast food. So what did I eat? Peanut butter and jelly. Every morning until I went to college.
Michele Norris: Really? That was your...
Michelle Obama: That was my go to...
Michele Norris: Was that out of protest? I'm just not going to eat with you all or you really like peanut butter and jelly that much?
Michelle Obama: And then my mom -- I really like peanut butter and jelly. It was sort of a compromise that I made with my mother because I thought, well, it's got peanuts, it's protein, a little bit of oil. Nothing's wrong with bread. If we're having toast, why can't I have it in a sandwich form? And jelly. Everybody was having jelly on their toast. Let me just put it on my peanut butter. She gave up. And I literally ate peanut butter and jelly every morning for most of my life, literally until I was in college. That's when I sort of started liking eggs. So that's what I mean by everybody else in the whole household, on the whole planet. Love breakfast food, except for Michelle Robinson. So I despised breakfast. I, it was just...
Michele Norris: But you like breakfast now?
Michelle Obama: Oh, yeah. I'm big into all of it now. Oh, give me Eggs Benedict. Any eggs any way. But peanut butter and jelly until I was into my twenties.
Michele Norris: Do you still sneak off and have a peanut butter, a PB&J sometimes?
Michelle Obama: You know I think I kind of OD'ed on it. I don't, I don't do it anymore. Now if I sit here and think about it, I think, yeah, that would be nice. But don't keep it around. Because also Malia was allergic to peanuts.
Michele Norris: To peanuts so there was no peanuts in the house.
Michelle Obama: We tested the theory. We didn't believe she was really allergic because the babysitter saw her have the allergic reaction. So my worst parenting move is when I decided on my own that she really wasn't allergic, because I didn't... nobody in our family was allergic to peanuts. Barack and I together forced her to test it out. And she was, she was maybe three? And she was like, No, mom, I really don't think I'm... I'm like, Nah, come on, kid. It's just peanut butter. And we made her try a big spoonful. Luckily, her allergic reaction was digestive.
Michele Norris: So she didn't break out in hives or have an anaphylactic response.
Michelle Obama: She just threw up right on me, which was, thank God. And Barack and I looked at ourselves with our peanut butter going, Oh, well, we shouldn't have done that.
Michele Norris: Just admitted that in front of a microphone.
Michelle Obama: I did, we, you know, we did, we force fed her peanut butter until she threw up and she was like, yeah, I'm allergic.
Michele Norris: All right.
Michelle Obama: So. So from then on we stopped having peanut butter in our house. I haven't had peanut butter in a while.
Michele Norris: One of the best things about this journey that I'm about to go on with all of you in this podcast, Your Mama's Kitchen, is what we are going to hear next. Every week I will ask guests to share a recipe or technique or something special that comes from or is inspired by their mama's kitchen, or the food they grew up with. These recipes will cover a full array of flavors sweet, salty, fatty, healthy, decadent, and everything in between. Because Michelle Obama is so generous, she shared two things that take her down memory lane.
Michelle Obama: So when I go home, if I ask my mom to cook anything, there are a couple of things that taste like home. Her homemade cakes because she used to bake us our birthday cakes each year and...
Michele Norris: And she did that even in the White House!
Michelle Obama: She tried to, but she felt like the ovens weren't right.
Michele Norris: Oh...
Michelle Obama: And there's something different about a homemade cake. Like we lived in the White House -- pastry chefs -- Susie love her, still the best. But there's something about professional cakes that are too dense. They're too solid. They're too perfect. A homemade cake is moist.
Michele Norris: Yeah.
Michelle Obama: And it's looser, right? The, the cake itself. It's just... And it's got a crustiness on top. The imperfection of it is what makes it good.
Michele Norris: Especially around the edge.
Michelle Obama: Yeah. Yeah. That was my mom's cakes. And she did chocolate for me. Of course. I am a devotee to chocolate. Red velvet for my brother. So getting her to do a homemade cake, that's one. And then one dish that feels very much like home, which was a hand-me-down recipe from our South Carolina elders who were great cookers. And my father's mother learned how to cook this dish. And my father loved it so much, my grandmother taught my mother. And it's something called red rice.
Michele Norris: Red rice.
Michelle Obama: Red rice is a rice that is steeped in tomato sauce, not runny, but where the tomato mixture soaks it up, right? So that the white rice becomes red. Then in that you add bacon, a spicy kind of sausage and shrimp. But it's not Creole. It's really just a meat.
Michele Norris: Like a jambalaya.
Michelle Obama: It's not a jambalaya, and it's drier, but it's so flavorful and it tastes great hot or it's a great picnic kind of rice where you can serve it cold or warm and it tastes better over time. The longer it's set in the refrigerator, the better it tastes. So it's the kind of rice when it's in there, you come and get a scoop. Even when it's cold, you don't even want to warm it up. You just go back and eat it. Red rice feels like home and it feels like big home, like way back home, like the southern part of home for us.
Michele Norris: That sounds delicious. Sausage sliced? Or is it...
Michelle Obama: The patty sausage, all of it cut up into bits so you get little chunks of it, different sizes, you know, So it's sort of crumbled by hand. Not cut too finely.
Michele Norris: Not like a, like in a jambalaya, you usually get a disc, like a link sausage.
Michelle Obama: No this is a patty.
Michele Norris: Okay.
Michelle Obama: More of a spicy patty. Now, I'm not sure how much of my mother's recipe is a take on the original, but this is how my mom cooked it.
Michele Norris: Ok.
Michelle Obama: And when I go home, I'm either going to ask her for a cake or red rice.
Michele Norris: Red rice. All right, Now I'm going to figure out how to make this red rice. Next time you come over, I'm going to serve it.
Michelle Obama: Yeah, well, we'll share the recipe.
Michele Norris: Okay.
Michelle Obama: That's home for me.
Michele Norris: We have spent a delicious bit of time talking about your kitchen. How is it influenced you?
Michelle Obama: Oh, wow.
Michele Norris: The Michelle Obama that we know now, the Forever First Lady, how is she influenced by all the things that she saw and experienced in that little old kitchen on Euclid Avenue?
Michelle Obama: Well, all of it happened there because the tools that I have for getting through that keep me upright, that have gotten me through a really interesting life journey that I could have never expected that led me out of the South Side into some of the finest universities that I never thought I could compete in, let alone thrive in. Led me through a career in law, through a career in nonprofits, helped me become the mother that I am and gave me the resilience to stand by the first Black president and try to be an equally impactful First Lady. All of that, it was imparted around that little table with that yellow checkerboard plastic tablecloth, as my mom did dishes on that Formica sink and talked to us little girls as we played jacks on that linoleum floor. The conversations around my household about fairness and honesty and how to be a person in this world, how to treat others, the compassion that all happened around the table, either by spoken word or story, or just watching my father pay the bills every week at that table. The humor that I have, my ability to tell stories and laugh at myself and laugh at the world, it happened at that table, those stories happen there in that little bitty kitchen.
Michele Norris: Yeah.
Michelle Obama: And that's one of the reasons why I tell parents today when they think about how do you raise a whole human being, I remind them that it has nothing to do with stuff. It doesn't have anything to do with the size of the house or the depth of the kitchen counter or whether you have the right kind of stove or oven. We had none of it. We had so little. The stuff wasn't it. It was the quality of the love in the space. And I still believe that that's true. And we have lived in some of the grandest homes that you can see. But when I think about what I want to teach my girls, it reverts back to those messages I got in that little bitty kitchen. That was the power of my parents' love. That consistency. The quality of the interactions. That's what it means to be a parent. That's how you instill something worthwhile for your kids.
Michele Norris: Yeah.
Michelle Obama: That's what my kitchen table, my kitchen was for me.
Michele Norris: I can see how much that means to you, and how much it still lives inside you.
Michelle Obama: For sure.
Michele Norris: I have loved talking to you. I always love talking to you. I've loved talking to you about this in particular. I think there have been a lot of life lessons here today.
Michelle Obama: I think it's an important question. It's such a valuable way to reflect on one's life. This has started at that kitchen table as.
Michele Norris: Kind of a rearview mirror. We're looking backwards.
Michelle Obama: Yeah.
Michele Norris: So we can figure out how to order our steps now.
Michelle Obama: Amen.
Michele Norris: And the kitchen table is an important space in our lives today. Thanks for sitting down with me. I've loved this.
Michelle Obama: Thanks for having me, babe.
Michele Norris: Kitchens really do bring us so much more than just meals. The Robinson family's itty bitty Chicago kitchen is a great example of that. There was plenty of food, but the most important items on the menu weren't the kinds of things that you find at the farmer's market or the grocery store. Unconditional love, honesty, loyalty, integrity, and the kind of laughter you feel deep down in your soul. We all know a little bit more about how Michelle Obama turned out to be such a special person, now that we learned about life inside her mom's kitchen. And best of all, we all get to share a little bit of Marian Robinson's brand of home cooked love. You'll find a link to a recipe for the red rice Michelle Obama craves when she wants a taste of home on our show page and on my Instagram account. We hope you decide to try it out in your kitchen. And when you do, we want to hear about it. Share your pictures, your feedback, your own family spin on red rice, or your thoughts on this special conversation and messages about the importance of building a supportive kitchen table in your own life. Now, remember, use the hashtag #YourMamasKitchen on Instagram or wherever you post. We'd love to see all of it.
Michele Norris: Thanks so much for being with us. As we launch this new show, we've got so much more in store for you in coming weeks, including conversations with Gayle King, Andy Garcia, D-Nice, W. Kamau Bell, Hari Kondabolu, Abby Wambach and Glennon Doyle, and Kerry Washington. Those are just the start. We hope you'll make Your Mama's Kitchen a part of your regular podcast diet.
And this week's special thanks go to Clean Cuts in Washington, D.C., Phil DeRosa and Anthony Esposito with TPS Audio on Martha's Vineyard. Phil's looking at me right now as I'm reading this. Crystal Carson and Melissa Winter. Melissa Bear with Say What Media and Good Ear Music supervision for their help in getting us the music you will hear at the end of these episodes, that's 504 by the Soul Rebels. Love it. Okay, that's it for now. I'm Michele Norris. Come back next week to see what we're serving up. Until then, be bountiful.
This has been a Higher Ground and Audible Original, produced by Higher Ground Studios. Producers for Your Mama's Kitchen are Natalie Rinn and Sonia Htoon. Sound design and engineering from Andrew Eapen and Ryo Baum. Production support from Angel Carreras and Julia Murray. Higher Ground Audio's editorial assistants are Jenna Levin and Camilla Ther de Koos. Executive producers for Higher Ground are Nick White, Mukta Mohan, Dan Fierman and Michele Norris. Executive producers for Audible are Zola Mashariki, Nick D'Angelo and Ann Hepperman. The show's closing song is 504 by the Soul Rebels. Special thanks to Joe Paulsen, Melissa Baer and Angela Peluso. Head of Audible Studios, Zola Mashariki. Chief Content Officer, Rachel Ghiazza. Copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Sound Recording copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio LLC.
