On the occasion of her 80th birthday in 2000, The Kitchen Sisters, along with food writer Peggy Knickerbocker, visited the home of Cecilia Chiang, the legendary Chinese-American restaurateur, chef and founder of The Mandarin Restaurant in San Francisco for a bit of an oral history. Cecilia Chiang introduced regional Chinese cooking to America in the 1960s, revolutionizing what most Americans thought Chinese cooking was. Elegant and savvy, her restaurant drew in celebrities and food enthusiasts, ...
Dec 17, 2024•27 min•Ep. 252
A pioneer in her field, Catherine Bauer Wurster was advisor to five presidents on urban planning and housing and was one of the primary authors of the Housing Act of 1937. During the 1930s she wrote the influential book Modern Housing and was one of the leaders of the "housers" movement, advocating for affordable housing for low-income families. Catherine Bauer’s life divided into two names and two geographies: her urban east coast youth, and her later life in the Bay Area. She hobnobbed with th...
Dec 03, 2024•49 min•Ep. 251
Pushed to the side and rarely credited for her architectural work at Davis Brody, Phyllis Birkby became a significant figure in extending the lesbian women's movement to architecture during the 1970s. Her environmental fantasy workshops played a crucial role in galvanizing the community, providing a creative and empowering space within a male-dominated profession. Growing out of other consciousness raising techniques, freed up in her classes, Phyllis released the rigor of her conventional traini...
Nov 19, 2024•45 min•Ep. 250
It is Tuesday, November 5, 2024, the day when millions of Americans go to the polls to vote for who will lead their towns, their states, the nation. Souls to the polls today across the country, and so much hangs in the balance. On this fraught and tender Tuesday, when all our nerves are frayed, we offer a moment of respite and contemplation — an episode of the podcast Constellation Prize from radio producer and filmmaker Bianca Giaever, featuring writer, poet and activist Terry Tempest Williams....
Nov 05, 2024•31 min•Ep. 249
July 17, 2024, Washington, D.C. Some 200 young people from across the nation aged 14-19 — aspiring poets, storytellers, MC's, activists — are gathered in the nation’s capital for the 29th annual Brave New Voices Festival — four non-stop days of slam poetry competition, coaching, workshops, late-night freestyling and in 2024, voting information. In summer, as the election loomed larger and larger we decided to turn our microphone to young people across America to hear their thoughts and feelings ...
Oct 15, 2024•32 min•Ep. 248
Today, The Kitchen Sisters Present: “Tupperware” — an homage and a eulogy. It was 1980. Nikki and I had just met. We had just named ourselves The Kitchen Sisters. And we had just bought our first cassette recorder, a Sony TC-D5M. We hadn’t even taken it out of the box or been trained on it when we were invited to a Tupperware party our friend Kirsten was hosting. This was 1980 in Santa Cruz, a stronghold of the women’s movement. You just didn’t get invited to too many Tupperware parties back the...
Oct 01, 2024•11 min•Ep. 247
As elections loom, we need to get involved, step up to the civic plate, take part in discourse. And that’s what Manny Yekutiel has been driven to do since 2018. He’s created a community-focused meeting place in San Francisco — a gathering space for people to watch presidential debates, meet people working on the front lines of social change, and discuss issues with policy makers in person. From community forums debating the new trash can designs in San Francisco, to town hall meetings with polit...
Sep 17, 2024•32 min•Ep. 246
There was a moment at the 2024 Democratic National Convention when Oprah took the stage — and the crowd went wild. She spoke boldly about Kamala Harris and her place in a long line of strong Black women who have paved the way. At one point she veered into the story of Tessie Prevost Williams, who recently passed away, and the New Orleans Four. November 14, 1960 — Four six-year-old girls— Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, Tessie Prevost and Ruby Bridges—flanked by Federal Marshals, walked through screami...
Sep 03, 2024•18 min•Ep. 245
On the night of Summer Solstice 1986, Larry Harvey and Jerry James built and burned an eight-foot wooden figure on San Francisco's Baker Beach surrounded by a handful of friends. Burning Man was born. This summer, the 39th annual Burning Man gathering begins to assemble on a vast dry lake bed in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, the nomadic ritual's home since 1990. An estimated 80,000 people will come. During production of our Keepers series, chronicling activist archivists, rogue librarians and keep...
Aug 20, 2024•19 min•Ep. 244
In honor of the Paris Olympics and the astounding contribution of the French to culture and art of the world, The Kitchen Sisters Present, Archive Fever: Henri Langlois and the history of the Cinémathèque Française, featuring Francis Ford Coppola, Wim Wenders, Tom Luddy, Lotte Eisner, Simone Signoret, Agnes Varda, Costa-Gavras, Barbet Schroeder. Henri Langlois never made a single film — but he's considered one of the most important figures in the history of filmmaking. Possessed by what French p...
Aug 06, 2024•31 min•Ep. 243
San Francisco officially declared July 15th Linda Ronstadt Day. In her honor, The Kitchen Sisters Present this story about her book, Feels Like Home , about her family, and the food, culture and music of the borderland of Arizona and Mexico where she is rooted. Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands is an historical, musical, edible memoir that spans the story of five generations of Linda’s Mexican American German family, from the Sonoran desert in Mexico to the Ronstadt family hard...
Jul 15, 2024•30 min•Ep. 242
Route 66—The Main Street of America— the first continuously paved highway linking east and west was the most traveled and well known road in the US for almost fifty years. From Chicago, through the Ozarks, across Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, up the mesas of New Mexico and Arizona, and down into California to the Pacific Ocean. The first road of its kind, it came to represent America’s mobility and freedom—inspiring countless stories, songs, and even a TV show. Songwriter Bobby Troup tells the ...
Jul 02, 2024•59 min•Ep. 241
In 1977, a cavernous, rarely used sculpture gallery in the Brooklyn Museum was filled with drafting tables, their tops tilted to display collages of the work and under-told stories of women working in architecture in the United States. We revisit this first significant effort to publicly tell the little known stories of American women in architecture: “Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective.” On view at the Brooklyn Museum from February-April of 1977, the groundb...
Jun 18, 2024•27 min•Ep. 240
As this year's hurricane season ramps up, we go to New Orleans for a kind of biblical reckoning. A story of science and prayer, with a cast of improbable partners—environmental architects and nuns—coming together to create a vision for living with water in New Orleans. Mirabeau Water Garden, one of the largest urban wetlands in the country designed to educate, inspire and to save its neighborhood from flooding. New Orleans. Surrounded by The Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, besieged by ...
Jun 04, 2024•18 min•Ep. 239
On February 16, 2024 Russian dissident Alexei Navalny died under unexplained circumstances in a penal colony in the Russian Arctic just weeks before the election that enthroned Vladimir Putin for another six years of near-absolute power. Within days of Navalny’s death his wife Yulia Navalnaya rose up, spoke out and vowed to continue her husband’s struggle. A decade ago The Kitchen Sisters were in Moscow reporting for our NPR series Hidden Kitchens: War and Peace and Food. We were at lunch with w...
May 21, 2024•16 min•Ep. 238
On April 12, 2024, Eleanor Coppola, artist, filmmaker, mother and wife of director Francis Ford Coppola, died at her home in the Napa Valley surrounded by family. She was 87 years old and had lived a most remarkable life. Shortly before her death, Eleanor had completed her third memoir. In it she wrote: “I appreciate how my unexpected life has stretched and pulled me in so many extraordinary ways and taken me in a multitude of directions beyond my wildest imaginings.” On May 6, 2008, on the occa...
May 07, 2024•53 min•Ep. 237
Over the years, The Kitchen Sisters have zeroed in on Memphis, Tennessee in a big way. The inspiration for that and the inspiration for some of our favorite stories is Knox Phillips. Davia met Knox in 1997 in Memphis when she was doing casting for Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Rainmaker. She was on the set standing next to a guy. Cool hair, great smile . During the long set up between takes they started talking. About Memphis, about music, about radio. She told him about a new series we were s...
Apr 16, 2024•40 min•Ep. 236
In 1898, the United States Department of Agriculture created a special department of men, called “Agriculture Explorers,” to travel the globe searching for new food crops to bring back for farmers to grow in the U.S. These men introduced exotic specimens like the mango, the avocado, and the date. In 1900, the USDA sent plant explorer, Walter Swingle, to Algeria to study the date. As Swingle took temperature readings and soil temperature, he realized that the conditions were very much like those ...
Apr 02, 2024•15 min•Ep. 235
Niloufer Ichaporia King lives in a house with three kitchens. She prowls through six farmer’s markets a week in search of unusual greens, roots, seeds, and traditional food plants from every immigrant culture. She is an anthropologist, a kitchen botanist, a one-of-a-kind cook, a Parsi from Bombay living in San Francisco, and the author of My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking . Niloufer is known for her ritual celebrations of Navroz, Parsi New Year, on the first day of Spr...
Mar 19, 2024•18 min
Little known stories of pioneering architects — Julia Morgan, the first accredited female architect in California, who designed Hearst Castle and was nearly written out of the history books. Natalie de Blois, who helped imagine the first glass skyscrapers on Park Avenue by day and raised four children by night. Amaza Lee Meredith, a Black queer modernist architect from the 1930s South who helped establish Sag Harbor as a haven for Black intellectuals, artists and beachcombers. A new special from...
Mar 05, 2024•51 min
A look at the President’s kitchen and some of the first cooks to feed the Founding Fathers—Hercules and James Hemings—the enslaved chefs of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Hercules, described as a “dandy,” had eight assistants—stewards, butlers, undercooks, waiters. He cooked in a huge fireplace—hearth cooking. He walked through the streets of Philadelphia in a velvet waistcoat, with a gold-handled cane. When Washington was getting ready to leave Philadelphia to return to Mt. Vernon, Her...
Feb 20, 2024•16 min
Jelly Roll Morton talks of being a “Spy Boy” in the Mardi Gras Indian parades of his youth. Bo Dollis, of the Wild Magnolias, tells of sewing his suit of feathers and beads all night long. Tootie Montana masks for the first time as Mardi Gras starts up again after World War II. Big Queen Ausettua makes connections between the black Mardi Gras Indian traditions of New Orleans and Africa. Sister Alison McCrary, a Catholic nun and social justice attorney, tells of Big Chief Tootie Montana’s death a...
Feb 06, 2024•23 min
Sarah “Sally” Pillsbury and Jean B. Fletcher were both architects who married architects. The two women and their husbands were founding members of The Architects Collaborative (TAC), a visionary, idealistic architecture firm founded just after WWII. The two women, who had 13 children between them, lived with their families and several other founding partners in Six Moon Hill, a residential community in Lexington, Massachusetts, designed by the group. TAC was a world class firm of eight architec...
Jan 16, 2024•45 min
For five years Davia’s father, Lenny Nelson, asked her to go to Rattlesden, England, to visit the Air Force base where he was stationed during WWII and to find an old photograph hanging in the town pub honoring his 8th Air Force squadron. It was still there, over 50 years later, he told her. Finally, one fine Sunday, Davia headed out in search of the pub and a piece of her father’s past—the piece he was proudest of. Lenny died on Christmas Eve 2015. In his honor, we share the journey with you. S...
Dec 24, 2023•22 min
Deep in the hidden archives of Harvard’s Houghton Library are the butter stained recipes of Emily Dickinson. Who knew? Emily Dickinson was better known by most as a baker than a poet in her lifetime. In this story a beautiful line up of “Keepers”— dedicated archivists, librarians, historians, poets and more—lead us through the complex labyrinth of Emily Dickinson’s hidden kitchen. Black cake, gingerbread, slant rhyme, secret loves, family scandals, poems composed on the back of a coconut cake re...
Dec 19, 2023•30 min
Lou Reed, musician, rock icon, poet, leader of the legendary Velvet Underground, was obsessed with tai chi — the practice, the community, the health and spiritual benefits. Lou had been writing a book about this ancient martial art that was unfinished when he died in 2013. Lou’s wife, the artist and musician Laurie Anderson, looked at Lou's unfinished work and decided the book needed to be completed, that there was something important to be shared in Lou’s long, life-altering journey with tai ch...
Dec 05, 2023•35 min•Ep. 227
Late autumn is Kimjang season in the Republic of Korea when families and communities come together to make and share large quantities of kimchi to ensure that every household has enough to sustain it through the long, harsh winter. This story is part of series Hidden Kitchens: Kimchi Diplomacy — War & Peace and Food “Kimchi is everywhere in Korea. It’s like air,” says Hyunjoo Albrecht, a San Francisco-based chef who grew up near the DMZ border between South and North Korea. 1.5 million tons ...
Nov 21, 2023•20 min
Anna Wagner Keichline (1889–1943) was the first registered woman architect in Pennsylvania and was among the first registered women architects in the United States. During her long career, she designed dozens of commercial and residential buildings, as well as numerous industrial products. She was awarded seven patents for her innovative residential and building designs, including one for The Building Block (1927), popularly known as the K-brick, which was a forerunner of today’s concrete block....
Nov 07, 2023•26 min
In this episode, we borrow a cup of sound from the podcast, What You’re Eating , a production of FoodPrint.org, hosted by Jerusha Klemperer. In the episode, “Coffee: From Seed to Cup,” Jerusha interviewed coffee entrepreneur Bartholomew Jones, who co-founded CxffeeBlack , a "multimedia coffee educational company," with his wife Renata Henderson in Memphis, Tennessee in 2018. Bartholomew is an educator, an MC, a “coffee nerd,” and an amazing storyteller. Today, The Kitchen Sisters Present… Make C...
Oct 17, 2023•24 min
Since the start of the pandemic, more than 90 colleges have merged or closed permanently. One of these schools, Lincoln College, closed its doors with only about one month’s notice in May of 2022 — after 157 years. Due to the pandemic and a ransomware attack, administrators say the school was unable to retain, recruit, or fundraise. Since then, students have been left scrambling and many have dropped out. Alan Jinich and Max Strickberger, recent graduates of the University of Pennsylvania and pr...
Oct 03, 2023•23 min
