The Kitchen Sisters Present

Host Frances McDormand leads us through this rich international story collection of land, community and food. From the organic olive groves and vineyards being grown on confiscated Mafia land in Sicily, to secret night clubs embedded in Soviet dissident kitchens. From tales of "cooking dogs" in Medieval England, to the little-known tale of agricultural explorers — the "Indiana Joneses of the plant world" — who introduced exotic dates from the Middle East to the Coachella Valley. We also go underground into the world of wine, war, and counterfeiting.Plus, actor Gael Garcia Bernal takes us to his grandmother's Sinaloa kitchen in Mexico, Salman Rushdie takes us to Chocolate Town, Werner Herzog eats his shoe, and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti gives us his recipe for happiness.Hidden Kitchens World was produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) in collaboration with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell, along with listeners around the world. Mixed by Jim McKee.

The Keepers, from The Kitchen Sisters and PRX with host, Academy Award-winning actress Frances McDormand. Stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians. Guardians of history, large and small. Protectors of the free flow of information and ideas. Keepers of the culture and the culture and collections they keep.In this hour Henri Langlois’ legendary Cinémathéque in Paris, The Keeper of the National Archives, Nancy Pearl: the first librarian action figure, The Dark Side of the Dewey Decimal System and stories of Prince’s epic vault in Minneapolis and the Lenny Bruce Archive. 

Today, we're thinking about Marcyliena Morgan, a keeper extraordinaire, a linguistic anthropologist who founded and championed the Hip Hop Archive at Harvard. Marcyliena Hazel Morgan was born in Chicago, May 8, 1950 and passed away September 28, 2025. We were fortunate to interview her in 2018 as part of the opening story in our NPR series The Keepers, about activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians. Keepers of the culture and the cultures and collections they keep. Guardians of history large and small, protectors of the free flow of information and ideas. Individuals who take it upon themselves to preserve some part of our cultural heritage. Marcyliena Morgan was all that and more. Our story delves into the the founding of the Hip Hop Archive and Research Institute at Harvard by Dr. Morgan and Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. to “facilitate and encourage the pursuit of knowledge, art, culture, scholarship and responsible leadership through Hiphop.”You’ll hear from Professor Mo

The worlds of a young Canadian immigrant, an Italian pasta-making family, and a 70-year-old survivor of the Armenian Genocide converge in this story of the San Francisco Treat.A Canadian woman, Lois DeDomenico, marries an Italian immigrant, Tom DeDomenico, whose family founded Golden Grain Macaroni in San Francisco. Just after WWII, the newlyweds rent a room from an elderly Armenian woman, Pailadzo Captanian, who teaches the young, pregnant, 18-year-old Lois how to cook — including how to make yogurt, baklava, and pilaf.During those hours in the kitchen, the old Armenian woman tells Lois the story of her life — her forced trek from Turkey to Syria, leaving her two young sons with a Greek family, her husband’s murder, the birth of her baby along the way (his name means “child of pain”), the story of the genocide. Mrs. Captanian shows Lois a book she wrote shortly after her experiences — one of the only eyewitness accounts written at the time. Most survivor accounts were published 30–40 years later. Hers was pu

In the 1950s, some ingenious Russians, hungry for jazz, boogie woogie, rock n roll, and other music forbidden in the Soviet Union, devised a way to record banned bootlegged music on exposed X-ray film salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives. The eerie, ghostly looking recordings etched on X-rays of peoples' bones and body parts, were sold illegally on the black market.“Usually it was the Western music they wanted to copy,” says Sergei Khrushchev, son of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. “Before the tape recorders they used the X-ray film of bones and recorded music on the bones—Bone Music.”“They would cut the X-ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole,” says author Anya von Bremzen. “You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan — forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens.”And we follow the making of X-ray recordings into the 21st century with Jack White and Third Man Records in Nashville, Tennessee.Pr

Muriel "Aggie" Murch and her husband, Academy Award winning film editor and sound designer Walter Murch, have lived on Blackberry Farm in Bolinas for some five decades, along with their children, chickens, and horses. The two just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.They both have newly published books, and are out on the circuit telling their stories that stand at the intersection of the organic farming movement and the independent filmmaking movement of the 1970’s.Director Francis Coppola, Walter’s longtime collaborator, describes his new book, Suddenly Something Clicked, as "a vast encyclopedia of cinema and everything that can be touched by it."Director Phillip Kaufman said this about Harvesting History While Farming the Flats: "Blackberry Farm is Aggie Murch's Walden Pond. She made existence sustainable, rebuilt life over and over, helped spirits enter the world and gently helped them leave. She’s got the gift."We have known and admired the Murches for some four decades and asked if we might do a s

The Real Ambassadors is a poignant tale of cultural exchange, anti-racism, and jazz history. And it's a love story — between life-long husband and wife partners, Iola & Dave Brubeck and their vision for a better world. Appalled by the racist treatment of Black jazz musicians in the United States in the 1950s and 60s, the Brubecks wrote a musical based on the Jazz Ambassadors Program established by President Eisenhower and the US State Department during the Cold War. In an effort to win hearts and minds, jazz musicians were sent out around the world to represent the freedom and creativity of America through their art form. Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and most of the other Jazz Ambassadors were Black. The irony is that they were treated like royalty around the world, but could not stay in hotels or play in integrated bands in their own country.Performed live only once, at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1962, the Real Ambassadors featured Louis Armstrong, Carmen McCrae, Dave Brubeck and Lambert Hendricks

The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, popularly known as WSPA, ran for four summers from 1974 to 1979.    You could learn woodworking in the morning and feminist theory in the afternoon, and then let loose and make candy houses in the evening. Childcare was free, tuition was minimal, and the locations were scattered throughout the country, making it easy for interested parties to attend.WSPA was the brainchild of seven women, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Phyllis Birkby, Katrin Adam, Bobbie Sue Hood,  Ellen Perry Berkeley, Marie Kennedy, and Joan Forrester Sprague. These women represented a mix of academic, professional, and practical experience. What they wanted to create was an educational curriculum, by women and for women, that freed architecture from the hierarchies of existing schools and practice. At their workshops, held on a succession of college campuses, starting with St. Joseph’s College in Biddeford, Maine, everyone was a student and everyone was a teacher. No one was passive. For many of the

We travel to the Mississippi Delta and the world of Lebanese immigrants, where barbecue and the blues meet kibbe, a kind of traditional Lebanese raw meatloaf. Lebanese immigrants began arriving in the Delta in the late 1800s, soon after the Civil War. Many worked as peddlers, then grocers and restaurateurs.Kibbe — a word and a recipe with so many variations. Ground lamb or beef mixed with bulgur wheat, cinnamon, salt and pepper. Many love it raw. However it’s made, it’s part of the glue that holds the Lebanese family culture together in the Mississippi Delta and beyond.We visit Pat Davis, owner of Abe’s BAR-B-Q at the intersection of Highway 61 and 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the famed crossroads where, legend has it, blues icon Robert Johnson made a deal with the devil to play guitar better than anybody. Since 1924 Abe’s has been known for it’s barbecue, but if you know to ask, they’ve got grape leaves in the back.Chafik Chamoun, who owns Chamoun’s Rest Haven on Highway 61, features Southern, Lebanese and

“Some people might think that honesty boxes are from the past, from a different age, a simpler age, a more honest age, but I would say they're a future thing as well.” – Mark CousinsThroughout the islands and out of way places in Scotland, along the rural roads, at the end of driveways, out on their own with no house nearby, you'll find fresh baked bread, homemade jam, cauliflower, scones, Victoria Sponge Cake, ceramics, you name it. If someone can make it, bake it, grow it or sew it, it may turn up for sale in an “Honesty Box.” Just a wooden or metal box, sometime with a slot, nailed down so it can’t be nicked, sometimes an open bowl of money, with a price list of the items and the implicit understanding that if you fancy a shortbread, or a dozen eggs, or a pound of sausages, or a home-knitted hat, you’ll leave the money in the Honesty Box. No one is there to watch you. It’s a trust thing. An honor thing. In this era when trust and honor are in such short supply in AmericaProduced by The Kitchen Sisters (Dav

Willie Nelson and Dallas-born actress Robin Wright, along with some wild and extraordinary tellers, take us across Texas and share some of their Hidden Kitchen stories. Gas station tacos, ice houses, Chili Queens, Stubb's BBQ, cowboy kitchens, car wash kitchens, space food. With special guests Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Kinky Friedman, Joe Nick Patoski,  and so many more.Produced by The Kitchen Sisters with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Texas Humanities, KUT, NPR and contributors to The Kitchen Sisters Productions.

Fish Fries, political BBQs, family reunions — during the 1930s writers were paid by the government to chronicle local food, eating customs and recipes across the United States. America Eats, a WPA project, sent writers like Nelson Algren, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Stetson Kennedy out to document America’s relationship with food during the Great Depression.When we were searching for Hidden Kitchens and stories about how people come together through food we opened up a phone line on NPR and asked the nation for their ideas. Mark Kurlansky, author of Choice Cuts: Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History told us about America Eats, a federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) program in the 1930s that sent writers throughout the country to document foodways.Each region had its own America Eats team. Their writings, photographs and even some scripts for a proposed weekly radio program are tucked away in collections around the country — at the New York Municipal Archive, the Mississipp

“From the very beginning the intent was that the American people needed to be able to access the records so that we would be able to hold the government accountable for its actions.” - David FerrieroDuring the first Trump administration, when access to certain websites and information was being threatened, we started our Keepers series about activist archivists, rogue librarians, historians, collectors, curators — protectors of the culture and the free flow of information and ideas. Today our national librarians and archivists are being fired, our museums are being threatened, our journalists are being hampered, and truth and transparency is once again under attack.In 2017, we talked with David Ferriero, the 10th Archivist of the United States, about the the beginnings of the National Archives under Franklin Roosevelt and its purpose. Ferriero tells of early keepers like Stephen Pleasonton, a brave civil servant who saved the Constitution and Declaration of Independence as the British burned Washington during

Deep within the National Museum of American History’s vaults is a battered Atari case containing what’s known as “the worst video game of all time.” The game is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and it was so bad that not even the might of Steven Spielberg could save it. It was so loathsome that all remaining copies were buried deep in the desert. And it was so horrible that it’s blamed for the collapse of the American home video game industry in the early 1980s. The story of just what went SO wrong with E.T.Produced by Lizzie Peabody for Sidedoor, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. The Kitchen Sisters Productions is part of Radiotopia from PRX.For more visit kitchensisters.org

The Kitchen Sisters are excited to share the first episode of Radio Pacific, a new monthly show from KALW in San Francisco that takes a deep and creative look at the issues facing California and the rest of our country today. The hour-long, monthly program features journalists, writers, and documentarians who are grappling with life in the country’s most populous and diverse state.In this first episode, California legal scholar Kevin R. Johnson puts the first months of Trump’s administration in perspective and helps us understand California’s unique and disturbing role in the country’s immigration history.Then we look into “Rapid Response Hotlines.” These community-run, 24/7 lines keep tabs on ICE activity in their neighborhoods, and dispatch legal assistance to those who need it. To understand how they work, we sit down with filmmaker Paloma Martinez, whose beautiful short documentary “Enforcement Hours” follows the San Francisco Rapid Response Hotline during President Trump’s first term. We’re joined by Fin

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a mixed race shoemaker in New Orleans, was arrested, convicted and fined $25 for taking a seat in a whites-only train car. This was not a random act. It was a carefully planned move by the Citizen’s Committee, an activist group of Free People of Color, to fight a new law being enacted in Louisiana which threatened to re-impose segregation as the reforms made after the Civil War began to dissolve.The Citizen’s Committee recruited Homer Plessy, a light skinned black man, to board a train and get arrested in order to push the case to the Supreme Court in hopes of a decision that would uphold equal rights. On May 18, 1896 the Supreme Court ruled on the Plessy v. Ferguson case establishing the "separate but equal" doctrine, upholding the constitutionality of racial segregation. The case sharply divided the nation racially and its defeat “gave teeth” to Jim Crow. The “separate but equal” decision not only applied to public transportation it spread into every aspect of life — schools, public t

Pie Down Here — Produced by Signal HillIn the 1980s, when Robin D.G. Kelley was 24 years old, he took a bus trip to the Deep South. He was researching and recording oral histories with farmworkers and Communist Party members who had organized a sharecroppers union in Alabama during the Great Depression.Kelly used those oral histories to write his award winning book, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression.Recently Kelley listened back to those early recordings with Signal Hill contributor Conor Gillies. He hadn’t heard some of the recordings in decades. Memories came flooding back as Kelley reflected on the people, the story and the power of oral history. Robin Davis Gibran Kelley is an American historian and academic, and the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. His books include the prize-winning Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002, new ed. 2022. His essays have

In 2004, we opened up a phone line on NPR asking people to tell us about their Hidden Kitchens— secret, underground, below the radar cooking, and how people come together through food. One caller told us about immigrants and homeless people, who didn't have official kitchens, using the George Foreman Grill to make meals and a home. Did George Foreman know about this? We called him up to find out.George Foreman the legendary two-time World Heavy Weight Champion and Olympic gold medalist talked with us about growing up hungry and violent, about his time in the Job Corps, about his career and comeback, about becoming a preacher, and his work with kids. “Feed them,” he says. “Hunger makes you angry.”In honor of George Foreman who left this earth March 21, 2025, The Kitchen Sisters Present an Unexpected Kitchen: The George Foreman Grill and Beyond."No one should be given up on. You never lose your citizenship as a human being just because you've been in trouble." - George ForemanThe Kitchen Sisters Present is prod

In 1981 The Kitchen Sisters interviewed Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston for a story about life on the homefront during World War II. Jeanne told stories of her childhood growing up in Manzanar, a hastily built detention camp surrounded by barbed wire and armed guard towers in the midst of the Owens Valley in the Mojave desert, where Japanese Americans were incarcerated for 3 years during World War II. Jeanne was 7 years old when her father, a commercial fisherman, was taken away with no explanation by the FBI and imprisoned in Bismarck, North Dakota. The family had no idea where he had been taken or why.Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's book, Farewell to Manzanar, written in collaboration with her husband James D. Houston, has become a curriculum staple in classrooms across the nation and is one of the first ways many are introduced to this dark period of American history. In listening to this interview recorded 44 years ago we are struck by how Jeanne's memories of those years — the sense of fear, of families being separa

Tom Luddy was a quiet titan of cinema. He presided over the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley for some 10 years, co-founded and directed The Telluride Film Festival for nearly 50 years, produced some 14 movies, match-made dozens of international love affairs, and foraged for the most beautiful, political, important, risky films and made sure there was a place for them to be seen in the world. And that the people making this powerful work were known and knew each other. Tom Luddy with his photographic memory, his infinite rolodex, his encyclopedic knowledge of global cinema and his catalytic ability to connect people, caused the most unusual of collaborations to come to be. Tom championed the French New Wave, the Czech New Wave, Brazilian cinema novo, dissident Soviet cinema, directors Francis Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Agnes Varda, Les Blank, Paul Schrader, Agnieszka Holland, Barry Jenkins, Laurie Anderson and countless others.Tom passed away on February 13, 2023. There’s a giant hole in the scre