Families and friends around the United States will gather together this Thanksgiving to share a meal. It is among the best-known eating rituals in America, but by no means the only one. The many ways food traditions help create community in this country has inspired a new book called (Rodale). Authors Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson compiled the book from tales they gathered while doing their series for National Public Radio.
A group of Brazilian cab drivers in San Francisco helped launch Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva on their quest for hidden kitchens. The men led the two California-based radio producers to a woman named Janete, who set up a nightly mobile kitchen on a deserted San Francisco street and cooked the drivers their favorite Brazilian dishes:
"We went one night around midnight," Davia Nelson recalls, and there they were, with drivers huddled around these grills, parked cabs, music spilling out onto the street. It was what we call a Hidden Kitchen vision, and we said, 'If Janete is doing this here in San Francisco, who else is out there?'"
An appeal to National Public Radio listeners brought hundreds of stories of hidden kitchens - secret, unexpected, or unusual places where people get together to eat across the country. Nikki Silva says the responses ranged from childhood memories to the imported traditions of community newcomers. "It just opened windows for us to food culture across America we had never thought about."
From Kentucky came word of a frontier stew called burgoo brought to the region by its early settlers and still cooked at picnics and community fund-raisers today. "Men get together all night," Davia Nelson explains. "It's a nine-hour process. They burn sassafras and hickory and they grill Boston butt (pork) and mutton and chicken. And then in these big huge vats, they make this stew, and it has to be stirred and stirred or it will scorch. It's not a stew, it's just an epic, a community epic."
Many hidden kitchens have sprung up at work places across America. The Kitchen Sisters - who are actually friends and colleagues, not sisters - heard of enterprising cooks aboard nuclear submarines, on auto assembly lines and at nail salons run by Vietnamese immigrant women. Nikki Silva describes a salon in San Francisco, where Davia Nelson happened to be getting her nails done on Christmas Eve. "She noticed all these Vietnamese manicurists from other shops suddenly started to arrive with plates of food, and they were going to have a Christmas Eve feast of pork and shrimp rolls and fish and pho. They brought their families, and suddenly the nail salon was transformed into this community kitchen.
"It was amazing to go back to the nail salon a few years later and say 'Could we have a recipe for our book,' adds Davia Nelson. "No one's asking the manicurists of America, all these Vietnamese manicurists, what do you cook?"
The quest for hidden kitchens also yielded stories of people who cooked on the road, binding people together when they were far from home. "One of our favorites is a traveling circus kitchen," says Davia Nelson. "A woman called, and she said her family owned a traveling circus, with hundreds and hundreds of performing artists, and every single day, no matter what, even if a tornado blew away the tent, even if the animals escaped, the cookhouse flag would go up and all these circus performers would gather together and have a meal. And she said, 'How much I rejoice in this wild community kitchen in which I grew up.'"
Some hidden kitchens have helped people cope with hardship and adversity. Nikki Silva says one woman nominated the portable grill marketed by heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman. "She thought this because for so many homeless people and immigrants to this country who have to live in single room occupancies where you don't have a kitchen, the George Foreman Grill was a way these folks could get a hot meal. The homeless folks would plug into the power plugs on the street and fry up whatever they could find to eat."