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Hidden Kitchens: Stories, Recipes, and More from NPR's The Kitchen Sisters
 
 
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Hidden Kitchens: Stories, Recipes, and More from NPR's The Kitchen Sisters [Hardcover]

Nikki Silva (Author), Davia Nelson (Author), Alice L. Waters (Foreword)
4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)


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Book Description

October 13, 2005
"The Kitchen Sisters off-beat kitchen stories make me want to walk through my neighborhood, go on a road trip and eat the food of family -- they have heart."
Francis Ford Coppola

Hidden Kitchens, the popular and highly acclaimed radio series on NPR's Morning Edition, is the inspiration for a new book by the Peabody Award-winning producers, The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva. Hidden Kitchens explores the world of street corner cooking, legendary meals, kitchen rituals, and visionaries - how communities come together through food.

When the Hidden Kitchens project began, The Kitchen Sisters and co-producer Jay Allison, opened up a NPR Hotline and asked listeners, "What food traditions are disappearing from your life?" "Who glues your community together through food?" Hundreds of listeners called to share their stories, tips and rituals.

Hidden Kitchens: Stories Recipes and More" interweaves stories and characters from the radio series, with phone messages from listeners and a wealth of new material from the enormous archive of interviews, photographs, and recipes gathered for the series.

There are stories about a midnight cabyard kitchen on the streets of San Francisco, makeshift kitchens crammed in the racing pits of NASCAR, a secret civil rights kitchen tucked away in a house in Montgomery, and the most unexpected hidden kitchen of all, The George Foreman Grill. The reader gets a peek inside the world of secret, little known, private kitchens, where traditions are carried on and communities are tended and fed â€" from the freighter galleys of the Great Lakes, to fire pits in Kentucky, to a fennel patch in San Francisco.

Hidden Kitchens is a sometimes poignant, sometimes wild chronicle of American life and how family and community traditions are passed along through food.



Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

NPR listeners are probably familiar with Nelson and Silva's radio program, "Hidden Kitchens," in which they interview amateur cooks who use improvisational methods to prepare food in unconventional places. This book expands on that concept, with Nelson and Silva offering expanded commentary and a handful of recipes from their interview subjects. While the cooks profiled use everything from George Foreman grills to makeshift fryers to whip up their meals, the recipes assume the reader has a conventional, working kitchen and are fairly straightforward and easy to make. But it's the stories behind the food that comprise the book's soul. The Sisters solicited tips from listeners in researching this book, which provided them with plenty of leads, though the verbatim transcripts of phoned-in tips that appear on nearly every page, and sometimes several times on a page, can make for a frustrating read. However, Nelson and Silva's mini-expose on the popularity of the George Foreman grill among the homeless is a solid piece of reportage that blends in the narrative of Foreman's life with that of the people who depend on his countertop appliance for their meals. The Chili Queens of Texas, women who sold tamales, chili and tacos as unlicensed street vendors at the turn of the century, also receive an in-depth profile, as do cooks on the NASCAR circuit. The book isn't so much about Rube Goldberg-like contraptions used to cook food (although there is some of that) as it is about American ingenuity and people making the most of what they have.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

From THE MIAMI HERALD and THE PALM BEACH POST
A Chicago homeless man explains the beauty of the George Foreman Grill that he uses to make meals in a tunnel. An inmate at Louisiana's Angola prison made praline candies while in solitary confinement. There are underground meetings of raw milk societies in New York City and Indiana.Who knew? In one of the year's best nonfiction audio books, National Public Radio's Kitchen Sisters - Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva - take you to weird places where people sometimes create strange food, proving that not everyone in this country eats only microwave or takeout.You meet the Chili Queens of San Antonio and vegetarian tailgaters at Phish concerts; You visit a cooking schoolat a San Francisco jail. After Nelson and Silva put out the word on all-powerful NPR for listeners to call in their favorite hidden kitchens, they were swamped with responses. This audiobook lets you hear those radio tips that were taped on an answering machine. Actress Frances McDormand as the reader is more than you should expect for $19.95. She fits this material perfectly (remember the pregnant deputy in Fargo, asking about buffets?) As a bonus, you get to hear Tony Joe White's Polk Salad Annie. You'll love this audio book if you're a fan of NPR's eclectic mix of stories on All Things Considered, which first aired the Kitchen Sisters. These stories, each one better than the last, stream past: Mexican street vendors; a Sicilian gourmet cook; cooking for NASCAR teams; Native Americans harvesting wild rice in northern Minnesota. My advice? Buy four or five copies for holiday gift-giving, because you don't know anyone who won't love Hidden Kitchens.


Product Details

  • Hardcover: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Rodale Books; 1ST edition (October 13, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 159486313X
  • ISBN-13: 978-1594863134
  • Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.8 x 0.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #883,026 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

12 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.4 out of 5 stars (12 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars The Joy of Cooking in Unlikely Places, May 4, 2008
This was a membership gift from NPR. I thought, of all my choices, it would be most interesting. I'm glad that I didn't buy it. The book focuses more on the narratives of the different cooks in unlikely places than on the recipes that they use. All of the stories are excellent reminders that all people love food, and that we are quite clever in inserting good food in our daily life, wherever that might be. The most inspiring to me was the first story of the homeless and nearly homeless who use the George Foreman grill on the streets or in SRO hotels where cooking is forbidden. This is contrasted with Foreman's life as a child, where hunger was a constant presence. I am sure that I will try some of the recipes, but cannot recommend the book unless you like The Hidden Kitchens on NPR, which I had never heard of until now.
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16 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars PURE DELIGHT !, October 20, 2005

Someone has said that a kitchen is the heart of a home - it's certainly the heart of this delightful audio book splendidly read by Academy Award winning actress Frances McDormand. Few who saw "Fargo" will forget her command of the screen; few who listen to "Hidden Kitchens" will not be enchanted by her command of the stories, whether they're funny, moving or absurd.

Renowned chef Alice Waters contributes a special commentary in which she notes: "The curious and wonderful thing about the stories in this book is how much they resemble good things to eat. They can be surprising and they can be reassuringly familiar and they can be comforting and they can be outrageous."

How true!

The audio is taken in part from NPR's Hidden Kitchen Hotline, which hundreds of listeners have called with a plethora of messages regarding recipes, kitchen happenings, and cooking successes and failures. There is also a good deal of new material which Nelson and Silva have gathered from a variety of sources.

Listeners will be amazed to hear of the doings in a San Francisco cab yard, or by the lakes of Minnesota, or in a NASCAR kitchen paralleling a race track. And, there's more.

"Hidden Kitchens" is pure delight.

- Gail Cooke


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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Random selection of phone messages !?!, May 17, 2008
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Ommm "YogaMama" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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A selection of quirky pieces. Most are phone message left for the kitchen sisters. Some good, some just ramble on and on. I am a fan of the show so I was expecting more.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
chili queens, hidden kitchens, kitchen vision, ham balls, kitchen story, cooking team, kitchen stories, chili pot, shrimp rolls, lunch company, raw milk
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
San Antonio, George Foreman, Georgia Gilmore, San Francisco, New York, Blessed Mother, Haymarket Plaza, White Earth, Kitchen Sisters, Angelo Garro, Martin Luther King, Stetson Kennedy, United States, Apple Family Farm, Native Harvest, Dutch Belted, Great Lakes, Library of Congress, Mark Gilmore, Mary Ann, North Carolina, Alamo Plaza, Big Grandma, Board of Animal Health, Civil Rights Movement
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