Minneapolis-raised Michele Norris finds rich conversations in'Your Mama's Kitchen'

CATHY WURZER: This is Minnesota Now on MPR News. I'm Cathy Wurzer. Food is a powerful way to show love. Think about hanging out in the kitchen as your grandma or your mom was making one of her signature dishes. Think of all the conversations you've had in the kitchen. Some pretty funny, some pretty serious stuff has probably been talked about while the cooking was happening.

That's the focus of a new podcast that debuts today hosted by a Minnesota native. The podcast is Your Mama's Kitchen. The host, Minneapolis native award-winning journalist and now columnist for The Washington Post, Michele Norris. Michele, of course, was the longtime host of NPR's All Things Considered program, and she's on the line. It's really nice to hear your voice again. How have you been?

MICHELE NORRIS: Cathy, it's so good to talk to you again. It's great to be with you.

CATHY WURZER: Oh, gosh, you've got so many things you've got going on here, so we've got to get right to this podcast. But first, for folks who are not familiar, you grew up on 48th and Oakland in Minneapolis. What do you remember about your mom Betty's kitchen in Minneapolis?

MICHELE NORRIS: So my mom's kitchen was organized. My mom's kitchen was delicious. My mom's kitchen was a gathering space. We had a dining room, and sometimes we ate in the dining room for fancy meals or holidays, but everyone seemed to hang out in the kitchen. When we had our friends over, that's where they hung out. My dad was a good cook, too. So he was often in the kitchen.

And we had a radio. My mom was a big radio person, grew up listening to the radio, and also music. The kids would get control of the radio and turn on the stations that we liked, and we'd wind up having little dance parties while we were baking and making all kinds of things, arts and crafts in the kitchen. My mom didn't mind if we made a little bit of a mess in the kitchen, as long as we cleaned it up.

CATHY WURZER: Good, and I'm sure you did.

MICHELE NORRIS: [LAUGHS] Oh, you betcha. If you've ever met my mom, Betty Norris, you know that we definitely cleaned up the kitchen. We did what we were told.

CATHY WURZER: [LAUGHS] So I am betting, because all that action was in your mom's kitchen, it was the scene, too, of all kinds of interesting conversations.

MICHELE NORRIS: Yeah, I mean, that's why I love the idea behind this podcast because kitchens are so much more than just-- they're about so much more than just food. So it's where my parents talked about politics. It's where we, as kids, talked about our dreams or the debates that we had at school. The kitchen is sort of a high octane emotional space. And so you can have really open, really honest conversations in that space. And it's where we often have our loudest laughter. But if we're honest, it's sometimes where we also have our loudest arguments or our most heated debates. And all of that shapes us and interestingly.

CATHY WURZER: So I'm really curious to hear what Michelle Obama, Gayle King, Glennon Doyle, some of these guests are going to say about their mothers' kitchens. What did they tell you?

MICHELE NORRIS: Our first guest is First Lady Michelle Obama. So we know a lot about her because she has opened up her life. And yet, when we sat down and had a conversation, we learned things that she'd never talked about before because we were walking through a slightly different door-- the kitchen door. So we learned that her tiny kitchen, she describes a very small kitchen that she grew up in on Euclid Avenue on the South Side of Chicago. I don't want to give too much away because I want people to listen to the podcast.

But we learn that her mother brought the family together, that mealtime was an appointment. It wasn't like a drive-by space. That the family came together and they had meals together on a regular basis. And the same question you asked me, what kind of conversations did you have, those conversations, the humor at the kitchen, the laughter at the kitchen, the debates at the kitchen table, Michelle Obama says that that shaped her in significant ways. One of her relatives was a bit of an early feminist, and she talked about watching how women responded to the arrival of the feminist movement, where, suddenly, the expectations around womanhood had changed a little bit, and what that meant for her mom and what that meant for her aunts.

First Lady Michelle Obama grew up in a working class community, in a working class household. So they didn't always have a lot of money, she said. But what people did is often use the kitchen as a way to say thank you. Use the kitchen as a way to show love. Use the kitchen sometimes as a way to barter. And I hope that, through the podcast, that people will see a little bit of themselves in the story, but also maybe learn about other cultures.

CATHY WURZER: Listening to you carefully here, Michele, it sounds as though, yes, you're using the kitchen as this launching pad to have conversations about a whole lot of different things, but it feels like it's also about your mom, about mothers and mother figures, right?

MICHELE NORRIS: Yeah, I thought about this a lot because it's called Your Mama's Kitchen. It's not called Your Family Kitchen. It's not called Your Daddy's Kitchen, Your Grandmother's Kitchen, although people talk about-- in many cases, people move around a lot. So I ask them, which kitchen do you want to talk about today? And sometimes it's their grandmother's kitchen. Sometimes mom isn't around, so dad did the cooking. That's unusual. Haven't heard a lot of that, but sometimes it does happen.

But I realized that I was leaning into the gendered nature of the kitchen space. And I had to think about that for a minute, Cathy, because we don't want to confine women to the kitchen. And yet, for a long time-- and it's still true for a lot of people-- that the kitchen is still a gendered space, that even if you're working, it's often the mom that does more of the cooking or more of the procuring or more of the cleaning up.

And so we talk a little bit about that in a lot of the conversations, where people, the comedian Hari Kondabolu, whose mom was a doctor, came to this country as a doctor from India, gave all that up so her husband, his father, could pursue his career, and realized that there was a little bit of anger underneath the surface. And he talked about how she dealt with that and how cooking became an avenue for exploration.

On the other hand, some people talk about their mothers being in a space where they were absolutely the queen of that domain, that in a world where women did not have a lot of agency, but the kitchen was a place where they had complete agency and control. And some of the people we talked to talked about realizing that their mothers used that as a center of power. And so it's a window to, I guess, understand our mothers and our families a little bit better. And yes, people talk about other family members, aunts, dads, siblings, cousins, but really, these conversations often really do center around motherhood.

And for me, I think about my own role as a mother, as an auntie, as a wife, as a sister, as a member of several communities. But I also think a lot about my mom and all these conversations, and I realize how much gratitude that I have for my mom and how I need to express that more often because for decades, I probably have not said thank you enough for all the big things and the small things that she did to hold it down for us and to make sure that we were nourished.

I'm talking about all the advice, all the little notes in the lunchbox, coming home from summer camp, and realizing that there were chocolate cupcakes with a little teeny bit of coffee in the frosting that she always used to put. My mom worked. She did not have a lot of time to do this, but she figured out how to do stuff like that, how to put a little bit of love in our back pocket when we left the house.

CATHY WURZER: Listening to you, Michele, it's clear, given your experiences in your mama's kitchen, that I can see why you became a journalist. It's pretty clear to me listening to you. And because you are the journalist you are, and we tend to, in this business, as you know, in the traditional media that we've all worked in, you kind of get a little pigeonholed, right? Podcasts are a little bit different form of storytelling, where you can be a little more free. What do you think of that? Do you enjoy that? Do you like to have the guardrails of a more traditional program? Where is your thought on that?

MICHELE NORRIS: I am loving it. I mean, I've worked in audio for a long time, new to podcasting. So, swimming in new waters and--

CATHY WURZER: No. Really?

MICHELE NORRIS: Yes, yes, it was the first podcast I've ever hosted. And I love the freedom of this. It's interesting because as a journalist, you don't talk so much about yourself, and these stories are mainly about other people, but sometimes we're sharing conversations. When I talked to the First Lady Michelle Obama, she talked about getting her hair done in the kitchen. For a lot of little girls, the kitchen was-- maybe little boys, too. That's where you get haircuts, right?

For her, she talked about Saturday night, getting that hair done before you go to church on Sunday morning. And boy, does that bring back memories for me because that was a tussle. I had a lot of hair, and for women of color our hair is beautifully curly, kinky, coiled, reaching for the sky. But if you grew up as we did in the 1970s, often, our mothers were trying to tame that.

So you had to sit while they combed it out, and then while they put a hot comb on it, and then while they tried to curl it. And then you'd go to bed with this little sausage roll, pink curler at the top of your forehead, so you'd have that little sausage bang. And then we'd have to sit still so we didn't sweat it out. Or, you know, come home and our hair would revert to its natural state, which was, of course, beautiful.

And when we had that conversation, as a journalist, I might not interject in the same way, but we're talking about a communal experience. In this case, it feels like we are at a kitchen table. And we are sitting with a cup of coffee at a Formica table, and we are laughing with each other. And I hope that people listening to this have the same experience.

CATHY WURZER: What a great concept for a podcast. I'm glad you're having a good time, too. Michele, I know you're busy. Thank you. We're excited to hear the podcast as it drops today. And I wish you all the best. Thank you so much.

MICHELE NORRIS: Cathy, I always love talking to you. Take care.

CATHY WURZER: Michele Norris is the host of Your Mama's Kitchen. That's a new Audible podcast out today. By the way, we just got done listening to the first episode with former First Lady Michelle Obama, and she admitted that everybody else in her whole household loved breakfast food, except for her. She hated breakfast. So she'd eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches most every morning, well into college. Check out the podcast at audible.com.