Last week two brilliant American women provided me with much needed inspiration. Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva better known as The Kitchen Sisters came to London to speak about their award-winning radio series Hidden Kitchens and their other radio projects.
Hidden Kitchens is primarily broadcast on National Public Radio (NPR) in the US and explores the world of secret, unexpected, below the radar cooking across America - how communities come together through food.
The series gave rise to their first book, Hidden Kitchens: Stories, Recipes, and More from NPR’s The Kitchen Sisters. The book is ‘unputdownable’ so it’s no wonder it was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2005 and got nominated for a James Beard Award for Best Writing on Food.
As a journalist and a lover of radio, I was struck by their passion for the medium, and the creativity they bring to making radio. It seems that radio is these days defined by the commercial radio formula where everything is done according to pre-ordained playlists and there’s no real room for creativity or personality.
But on places like NPR and the BBC World Service, there’s still room for storytelling and this is what Davia and Nikki do excellently. You actually don’t hear them during the programmes because they let the characters and the music do the talking.
One of the Hidden Kitchen stories that really resonated with me was Janete’s Midnight Cabyard Kitchen.
Davia found out about Janete from the Brazilian cabbies in San Francisco where she’s from. She noticed that they weren’t just from Brazil; but they all seemed to be from the same town: Goiânia.
They told her about Janete, a woman from Goiânia who “comes every night to an abandoned industrial street outside a cab dispatch lot to set up a makeshift, rolling night kitchen — hot salgadinhos, bollinhos, pão de quejo. She cooks the food of home. By dawn, Janete and her blue tarpulin tent are packed up and gone”.
This resonated with me so much, because in the Caribbean this is how lots of people earn their living. They’d set up outside big factories, under big umbrellas, tarpulins and even from their cars to provide delicious meals for the hundred of workers in the vicinity.
One of my favourites was Mr Brown who used to sell food from the back of his station wagon at the bottom of Abercromby Street in Port of Spain. He sold some amazing paime and pone!
I strongly recommend listening to the Hidden Kitchen series, not only it is an incredible chronicle of American life, it is top notch storytelling by two great programme makers. And if you think you have any stories of hidden kitchens, do contact Nikki and Davia because they’re always on the lookout for great ideas all over the place.