Mark Bittman Always happy to talk with you.

Michele Norris You're someone who has helped America figure out how to eat and how to eat well, at a time where we approach food in a in a different way. But I would like you to go back down memory lane and tell us a little bit about your relationship with food starting in the kitchen, and why don't we begin with that kitchen that you grew up in? Where did you grow up? Tell me a little bit about the house you grew up in, and then I want you to walk me past the foyer, past the dining room, into the kitchen, and describe that space where your mom and dad held court.

Mark Bittman I grew up in an apartment in Stuyvesant Town, which was, at the time, the world's biggest middle class should be said almost exclusively white housing project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an entire neighborhood called the gas House district had been razed to the ground in order to build this thing, primarily for World War Two veterans and their families. So everybody's parents were the same age. Every kid was the same age. It was like, imported family kind of thing. Everybody moved at the same time. So there were some quite unusual features about that neighborhood. The kitchen was right off the front door to the left, and it was, I don't know, six by eight maybe sort of a typical New York kitchen crammed with cabinets. Not a lot of room for more than one person. My mother was a responsible cook, I think an obligatory cook. As were many, if not most women of that generation, and maybe somewhat resentful about it. But she would never talk about that. But very dutiful. And she did it every meal, and the food was as real as she knew how to make it. And as good as she knew how to make it, it was a great. But, and I used to make fun of my mother in interviews like this, you know. Then I came to realize she did all that work. And she taught me how to cook, even though she didn't teach me how to cook. Well, she taught me to put food on the table all the time.

Michele Norris Your mom's name was Gert. Dad was Marie, right? And your mom cooked. You said she was a dutiful cook. Dutiful is such an interesting word. Because it's kind of loaded in some ways. Did she do things in the kitchen, as you remember, to take the edge off the duty or the burden of cooking? Do you remember, did she have a radio? Did she have something that brought sunshine into the kitchen, that made that space feel like it was less obligatory and more of her own, her sort of secret garden that she could create that would turn that space into just something that didn't feel like drudgery?

Mark Bittman You know, honestly, mealtime was not a particularly happy time for us. Our mother did not appear to like to eat until she got older. I would say when she was in her 50s, she started to develop a sort of more of an appetite. But by then she was done cooking for her children, so there could have been something there. But I think, you know, so much of this is about women's roles and I mean in the world, but in the United States in particular, in the mid 20th century in particular, my mother was not what came to be called the women's libber. She didn't want to have any truck with that, but I think that she was well aware of the fact that there were expectations of her that were beyond our control, or seemed to her to be beyond our control, that there were roles that women of her age were only beginning to be really questioned. We're talking about the 50s and 60s here. And she was not among the questioners. I think she was a pre question or a contemplate or but more of a simmer or a sigh either. You know, I think she was resentful. I think she carried anger around it. I don't think she liked that. She was expected to do all of the cleaning, which she was, and, all of the cooking, which she was, and by the time my sister and I were old enough to start doing chores, she had a job. She worked 9 to 430. I mean that wasn’t considered totally full time, but effectively full time. And then she came home and made dinner, and then she cleaned up after dinner. And, I mean, I kind of do that, but I do it mostly in the comfort of my home and mostly willingly and anytime I don't want to do it, I don't. But that wasn't an option for her, and I think it robbed her of whatever joy she might have had in cooking it. But at the same time, she wasn't openly angry. She was just sort of quiet, had a resentful air about her. And it's not that she never enjoyed cooking, but I think, you know, when you're doing something, and especially when we were little, when she was cooking breakfast and lunch and cleaning the house and then dinner, etc. etc., and when you're doing that six days a week, seven days a week, I mean, you're the equivalent of a servant. So you may love the other people, but you're an unpaid worker in a way, and many people have outgrown that or changed that. But, you know, that sort of relationship exists.

Michele Norris The generation that you're talking about are is post years, and there are a lot of magazines that were suddenly targeted at women, and mainstream magazines that weren't targeted at women, often had stories that were advertisements that were targeted at women. And the idea around expectations, you use that word. The expectation was that there was going to be a certain kind of perfection in the kitchen. And so there was this, for many women I think, a fear of failure, a fear of not living up to that American idea that was portrayed in Look magazine, in Life magazine. And so that was always kind of hanging over women of that generation.

Mark Bittman Right.

Michele Norris You said at some point, though, you realized that your mom, even though she may not have been the world's best cook, taught you how to cook or taught you at least the routine of cooking. When and how did you realize that?

Mark Bittman She taught me that cooking was important, I guess, and by example, completely by example. She never – I was a boy. So you were more likely to say, I'm going to grow up to be an astronaut than you were to say, I'm going to grow up to be a food writer. I think I just took it for granted. You're at home. Someone's going to cook. I did take that for granted. So there were the college years where I lived in a dorm. I ate cheeseburgers, vanilla ice cream and coke. I mean, you can get anything you want. That's what I wanted. You know, I also slept till two in the afternoon and took a lot of drugs. It was not a happy time. The second year, I got my own apartment and I started cooking, and I just thought, well, I have an apartment. Obviously, I need to be able to cook, and I didn't really know how to cook anything. I knew how to cook a hamburger, and I knew how to make sandwiches, and I knew how to make scrambled eggs. Very rudimentary stuff that I had sort of done for myself growing up. But the year after that, I wound up living with three women who were all great cooks, and there was really no room for me in the kitchen. But I kind of elbowed my way in and started making desserts, which was actually the first ambitious thing I did. And then I just started cooking from cookbooks and cooking as many interesting things as I could find. And soon after that I started feeling like, yeah, this is just a seamless part of life. This is just something you do 5 or 6 in the afternoon. In the evening you settle down and you start cooking dinner. And that just never stopped.

ACT II

Michele Norris So how does the person who is known for creating so many well-loved, well-used cookbooks come to cookbooks yourself? How did you find those cookbooks that you were foraging through?

Mark Bittman Well, when I moved in with Karen and Ellie, they had The Settlement Cookbook. New York Times, Craig Claiborne's first New York Times cookbook and cookbooks by this woman Paula Peck, who was a devotee or a student of James Beard's. Those are the cookbooks that were there. Fortunately, they were all I mean, Paula Peck and Settlement were especially reliable. New York Times cookbook was good because it was so eclectic and non-personal in a way. Like just was all over the place. You didn't know what you were going to find. And then the following year I was living by myself again. I just started buying cookbooks that appealed to me and I had become fascinated by Indian food. The first, I still have it, the first cookbook I bought was this little tiny paperback called House of India Cookbook. I bought Joy of Cooking because everybody [who was] a cook said, you have to buy Joy of Cooking. I bought James Beard because people said, you ought to buy James Beard. I bought Julia Child because that was the thing. I was off and running. I mean, really, if I had those 6 or 8 cookbooks I just mentioned now would kind of be enough.

Michele Norris And so were you cooking because you loved the food or because it was the science of it, the process of it, the cookbooks themselves were beckoning you in some way.

Mark Bittman Well, I loved the food, for sure. It became the thing that I cared about learning how to do. And I got good at it. And then I started writing about it. So there was reason to do it more, you know, the stupid pun as they fed each other. But the writing impelled me, compelled me to cook better. And the better I cooked, the better, more interesting my writing was, I think so. I look at stuff I wrote then, now, and it's corny, but it wasn't corny then. It was innovative.

Michele Norris Then by this time in your life, you had held several jobs. You were a cab driver. You were a gofer for an electrician. It sounds like an interesting line of work there. A substitute teacher, a traveling salesman and a trucker. You were a trucker for a while. So how did the things that you learned during all those other jobs work their way into who you became as a cook?

Mark Bittman The traveling salesman thing was in Connecticut. So I have as thorough a knowledge of the food of Connecticut, southern Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Westchester as anyone has. But that wasn't that interesting a food scene, but it was helpful when I later became a restaurant reviewer and sort of I had an inside knowledge of where might be good. So I was a cab driver in New York. It was something I always wanted to do. I became a cab driver in New York in September, October of ’69. I was 19 as a junior in college. There's two things you can do when you're a cab driver in New York anyway. You can cruise, just drive up and down away for someone to hail you, or you can sit at cab stands and both have advantages. We don't have to get into the techniques of driving a cab, I don't think. But if you sit at cab stands, you talk to other cab drivers, which is one of the advantages there. And the other cab drivers were from all over the world, all over the country and all over the world, and they were every age. They were 18 to 19 year olds like me, and there were 70 year olds who'd been driving cabs for 50 years, and everybody knew the best place to eat for them. So people would say, well, next time you're in Brooklyn, you got to check out this place. Next time you're in the Bronx, you got to check out this place. Next time you're in Harlem, you got to check out this place. If you want to try Indian food, go to this place if you want. And so I just had this running list of organized by borough of restaurants that I was supposed to knock off. And if someone, you know, cab drivers in those days were notoriously white cab drivers, didn't go to Harlem, they didn't go to the Bronx, they wanted to stay in Midtown. It was the 70s. Everybody was afraid of everybody else. I for whatever reason, I wasn't like that. So if guys said to me, next time you're in the Bronx, go to this place. And it was a, you know, a Puerto Rican restaurant, I go to the Bronx, I go to the Puerto Rican restaurant. They say, go to this ribs joint in Harlem. I go to the rib joint in Harlem, but I'm not, I wasn't being particularly brave. It just was my nature to think that was fine. So I had a running list borrow, buy bar out of restaurants I was supposed to go to, per the other cab drivers. Needless to say, they were all cheap. They're all fast. They're all greasy spoons, more or less. There was nothing fancy on there. But I suddenly at 19 and then 20, I was out 3 or 4 nights a week, winding up at some place or another where I'd had some food that no one I knew ever heard of, and this was the time of the great student rebellions. This was the time of the so-called counterculture. This was the time where smoking pot was so cool that if you smoked pot, you didn't need any other justification for being a cool person, etc., etc. and here was this thing that suddenly I had that I didn't have in common with other people that I could become good at and understand. By myself, and that was an amazing thing to me. And that's probably the first time in my life that it happened to me. And it wasn't, you know, it didn't feel like fate or it was thrust upon me or anything like that. It just felt like the way it was if it wasn't going to be a subject in school, because that's not who I was. It wasn't going to be the the roots of World War II or the history of reconstruction or it wasn't. Well, what I'm saying these things because they're all things that I'm kind of interested in now, but they were not going to be the things that turned into my life's work. And this, for whatever reason, was.

ACT III

Michele Norris So how as a 19 year old did you wind up living with three women? Because that was probably a little unusual for a 19 year old also.

Mark Bittman One was becoming my girlfriend. The option was I was living at my parent's house. It was clear that it was preferable to live with them and they weren't against it. So that's how that happened. And that was really life changing, not only from the cooking perspective, but because by then it was the spring of 1970 and Nixon was bombing Cambodia. The world was on fire. They were shooting students at Kent State and Jackson State. I mean, all of that stuff about the so-called 60s, because by this time it was 1970 was kind of at its peak right then. So it was it was an exciting time. And really at that time, food was not, it sounds bigger than it was, because that's what we're talking about. But really, the big stuff felt like we really thought we were on the verge of making the revolution. I mean, we really thought that we were going to make big change in this country and in this world. And, you know, that's an adolescent, I now think that's a kind of adolescent thing to think, but I'm not ashamed. We thought that we did good work. We did interesting stuff. I think we supported the right people. We allied with the right people. I think we took the right side. I still think that. So, you know, it took 30 or more years of food writing for me to be able to figure out how to work those politics into my career. And that only happened really when I was 60. So that was a really happy thing for me to be able to say, how do I bring these left politics that I've carried since I was 20 or really 16 or whatever, but these politics that have always felt like such an important part of my life, how can I bring that into my career? And it's not. I always thought it was worthwhile to teach people how to cook and to show people that cooking was useful and important. Then I used to say, if I could teach Americans how to eat rice and beans once a week, that is, those Americans who don't know that my career would be have been a successful thing. But when in 2007 or 2006, so I was in my mid 50s, late 50s, I started to write about the politics of food and nutrition and environment and climate change and so on, that was a huge, huge thing for me. And to be able to do that for the New York Times, no less, not my own blog. That was really important to me. That was kind of full circle.

Michele Norris That revolution, that revolutionary thought, those revolutionary ideas played out in small ways in people's lives. Also in some of the decisions that they made. And it sounds like that happened in your own partnership. Your wife was going to medical school, and you made a decision that you were going to hold down the kitchen when your daughter came along. Kate came along. Was that part of your revolutionary thinking, or was that just more pragmatic? Somebody has got to cook, so it might as well be me.

Mark Bittman By 1969, 1970, if you wanted to justify yourself as a progressive and you were male and you thought, oh, yeah, somebody's got to cook and it's going to be the woman in this house, then you were booted out, or you were not taken seriously. It was so.

Michele Norris Hypocritical then for you to hold these ideas, but then.

Mark Bittman Continues to be hypocritical. I think that part was easy, and I don't, I mean, it happened that cooking became my hobby and then my career and Karen was eventually squeezed out of the kitchen, I think, or felt to some extent. I think every woman I've lived with since then has felt like the difficult part about me in the kitchen is not getting me in, but getting me out. Not that there are so many complaints about that. But that was a bit over the top, let's say, or an unusual, it wasn't just that I saw that it was my responsibility as a good partner to share in those kinds of things cooking and cleaning and childcare. It wasn't just cooking, but it was cooking I was passionate about.

Michele Norris You said that cooking at home right now is the most radical thing that people can do. As someone who had radical ideas in your life, it's interesting that now you're saying that cooking is the most radical thing that people can or maybe should do. Can you explain?

Mark Bittman That? I mean, I'm sure I have said that. I've said a lot of things. I don't know that I would say that right now, that the most radical thing you can do is cooking. Now, when young people ask me what I think they should do, I say, go to Nebraska and run for Congress. I think that's what I think people should do. But, sure, cook at the same time. So I did write this. I did write this thing once called Cooking Solves Everything, and I think I was and it was in that vegan before six period when I really thought, I do think that cooking can have a big impact on who you are, what you do, and also on the world. But I've come to recognize since then that not everybody wants to cook. Not everybody can cook. Not everybody has the means or the time to cook for a minority of the population. It could be a big minority, but for minority population, I think cooking is and can be really important and really rewarding and really gratifying and a gift for a lot of the other part of the population. Having said all of that, I really do think that we need to find the means to get food to people who don't, can't cook or don't have kitchens, who don't have families, who don't even have apartments, who don't have money, you don't have time, etc. Those people need to be fed and they need to be fed, not crumbs that are swept off the table, not the food that's left over from what the rest of us eat. But they need to be fed good food in a dignified way, in a way that everybody respects and recognizes is legitimate. I have thoughts about that, many thoughts about that. But we are really far from seeing that happen for the most part.

ACT IV

Michele Norris When you go about your cooking and I would love to see your kitchen, I just can imagine it, but I imagine it's organized and I imagine you're so particular about the things that you use, the implements, the pans, the way it's organized. But as you go about your life and your cooking and your writing, but mainly when you're cooking, is there something that you do, some pan you reach for some way you clean something, some way you chop something where every time you do it, you think, oh my God, I'm doing what my mom used to do. I'm doing what my mother used to do. She's inside me because of all those meals I saw her make. Is there one thing? And what is that one thing?

Mark Bittman I have really reinvented… There are things that I do in the kitchen that I think oh, I remember when I started to do this, this way. But my mother did not have anything approaching a chef's knife. My mother didn't have a cutting board. My mother used a kind of funny electric frying pan, which I think might be fun to have, but I don't have room for it. There are things I do in the kitchen that remind me of other people, but not so much my mother.

Michele Norris But she lives inside you in the routine.

Mark Bittman Yeah. For sure.

Michele Norris We always love to leave our listeners with a recipe that means something special to our guests. And you talk about something called potato nik, the name is interesting. You're going to have to explain that and tell us what it is and why it's special to you.

Mark Bittman It was my grandmother who did the sort of things she went crazy about, and she would do roasted chicken with garlic and paprika. She made amazing cookies. The one recipe in my whole life that I've never shared with anyone outside of my family is called Mama's Cookies. And for some reason, we still refuse to share it. But the thing that my grandmother, she treated all holidays the same, it didn't matter if it was a Jewish holiday or American holiday or whatever, if it was a holiday. She made the same food. Thanksgiving. She made a turkey every other time she'd make a chicken. But all the side dishes were the same. And one of those side dishes was what she called the potato nik. And I've since found out other Eastern Europeans call it the same thing. And it's basically a giant, like a giant potato pancake. So you take a recipe for potato pancakes, and instead of making individual potato pancakes, you make a pie. You make one giant potato pie. So it's potato, onion, bread crumbs or matzo meal. Egg.

Michele Norris The potatoes are shredded, right?

Mark Bittman Shredded potatoes. So my grandmother did them on a box grater. And the joke was always that some of the blood from our knuckles was added extra flavor. But that was always the joke. I have the advantage of a food processor, and my grandmother did in a cast iron skillet. If you have a nonstick skillet, it's like the easiest thing in the world. And there's a very cool technique that my grandmother did, which was you slide the thing out onto a plate and then you put another plate over it, and then you turn the two plates over and you slide the uncooked part, the uncooked side, back into the pan, which as a six year old or an eight year old or whatever, I thought that was pure genius.

Michele Norris And you get a nice little crisp on it on both sides.

Mark Bittman Yeah, yeah. But with a nonstick skillet, the tricks are minimized, and with a food processor, the work is minimized. And yeah, my grandmother never thought that my cooking was particularly interesting or good, but she did say that my potato nik was credible. I mean, she didn't use that. I think she said, that's pretty good. You know, not bad kind of thing.

Michele Norris That’s high praise, though.

Mark Bittman Yeah. It was. Well, yeah. My mother, you know, I gave the impression that my mother was grumpy, but I think she came by legitimately.

Michele Norris So is potato nik on your holiday table? Is that something you serve up for?

Mark Bittman Yeah, I make it. I mean, my partner runs a thing called Glenwood Center for Regional Food and Farming, and the center is on a farm. So I live on a farm. I'm not a farmer. Sometimes people think I'm a farmer. I'm the farthest thing from a farmer. But we really try to eat seasonally, almost exclusively, as much as we can. And I've come to think of from November on, I've come to think of it as peeling season, because every vegetable you do, you have to peel. I realized you're lucky enough to get greens, so once peeling season comes, I start making. I make many kind of vegetable pies, which is what potato nik is. So you can mix those potatoes with sweet potatoes or carrots or beets or an all of which you can cook individually in the same way, pretty much. I mean, some adjustments need to be made. I can't go into details on that, but you can make a vegetable pie out of almost any vegetable. And then the other thing I make is mash. I mean, what Northern Europeans sort of call mash, which is mashed anything, but it's all about peeling. You wind up spending 20 minutes every night peeling stuff.

Michele Norris Last question about the potato nik. Would she serve those with applesauce and sour cream?

Mark Bittman I think applesauce was a concession. Sour cream was a staple for my mother's family. My father's family, both of them. And probably a billion other or, you know, a million other Eastern European Jewish family. Sour cream was a, I think, an important protein source because it kept for a long time and you could serve it with almost anything. My father's line when he was yelling at us to finish dinner was, When I was growing up, we were we had a boiled potato for dinner with sour cream if we were lucky. So sour cream was like a daily kind of luxury. And believe me, potato nik is ten times better with sour cream than applesauce. I'm with my grandmother on that. But do you have to serve applesauce as a concession to people who think that that's important? So.

Michele Norris And you're not obviously not one of those people. So. This has been fun. Thank you so much, Mark.

Mark Bittman Yeah, it was fun. It was not what I expected it to be, but it was really fun. I don't know, thank you.

Michele Norris It was it was delightful, I enjoyed it. I hope you did too.

Mark Bittman I enjoyed it too. Thank you.

Michele Norris There's something oddly comforting about knowing that the highest praise a cook as widely celebrated as Mark Bittman could get from his grandmama is pretty good or not bad.

Hearing him talk through his journey, it's clear how influential all the women in his life were to his development in the kitchen. The three women he lived with as a young adult gifted him access to his first cookbooks. And while his mom and his grandmother had different skill levels together, they taught him that cooking consistently is a form of love, and it was a way to remain connected to the food of his Ukrainian heritage.

So much of Mark's story doesn't happen, though, without his own willingness to explore by taking the road less traveled literally as a cab driver to expand his palate. He's a true testament to the power of curiosity.

I can't wait to try my hand at Mark's grandmother's potato nik. If you'd like to find out how to make it, head on over to my Instagram page at Michele underscore, underscore. Norris. That's two underscores. Or go to our website YourMamasKitchen.com. You will find all the recipes from all the previous episodes there. And before we go, we want to remind you that we want to hear from you. We want to hear about your mama's kitchens. Thoughts on some of the stories you've heard on this podcast. Maybe you want to share what tastes like home to you. We want to hear all of that. Make sure to send us a voice memo at YMCA@highergroundproductions.com. And your story and your voice might be featured in a future episode. That's it for today. Goodbye, everybody. Please come back next week because you know us. We're always serving up something interesting. Until then, be bountiful.

CREDITS

Michele: This has been a Higher Ground and Audible Original. Produced by Higher Ground Studios.

Senior producer - Natalie Rinn.

Producer - Sonia Htoon.

Additional production support by Misha Jones.

Sound design and engineering from Andrew Eapen and Ryan Kozlowski.

Sound design and engineering from Andrew Eapen and Roy Baum.

Higher Ground Audio's editorial assistant is Camila Thur de Koos.

Executive producers for Higher Ground are Nick White, Mukta Mohan, Dan Fierman and me, Michele Norris.

Executive producers for Audible are Nick D’Angelo and Ann Heppermann.

The show’s closing song is 504 by The Soul Rebels.

Editorial and web support from Melissa Bear and Say What Media.

Talent booker - Angela Peluso.

Chief Content Officer Rachel Ghiazza.

And that’s it - goodbye everybody.

Copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Sound recording.

Copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC.