Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast - Food that Connected Susan Orlean to the Land her Parents Fled

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

Author Susan Orlean joins to talk about her upbringing in Shaker Heights, Ohio. She describes the life skills her mom failed to teach and the Hungarian food that reminded her parents of the home they could never return to. Plus we learn about her mother’s cocktail party treat, cheese balls. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast is brought to you by Alloy Health. Emily Henry and more. Like a good book, you will be feeling inspired and entertained. Join me for my brand new podcast, Open Book with Jenna. New episodes of Open Book with Jenna are released every Thursday. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. I grew up, well, there were civil uprisings around the country and in Cleveland. My dad built a lot of Section 8 housing and after the civil uprisings in Cleveland, he stuck us kids in the car and said, we're going to go down, drive into the city. I want you to see that not everybody lives the way you live and take a look at, you know,

maybe why this happened. Hello and welcome back to Your Mama's Kitchen. This is the podcast where we explore how we're shaped as adults by all the things that happened in our kitchens, not just the food, but the card games, the homework, the arguments, and the laughter. I'm Michelle Norris, and I'm so glad you're here. Today we're talking to journalist, TV writer, and bestselling author, Susan Orlean. You've probably heard her name before.

You may know her from her New York Times bestselling book, The Orchid Thief. You may have seen the film that was adapted from that book, starring Nicolas Cage and Tilda Swinton, where Meryl Streep portrayed Susan Orlean. That's not something a lot of people get to say. You may also know Susan Orlean from her many other books, Rin Tin Tin, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, or her most recent book, The Library Book.

Susan Orlean is what you would call a writer's writer, so deeply and widely respected for her deep research and for the way her words just sparkle on the page, whether she's writing one of her novels, one of her introspective works, or whether she's writing for magazines like Esquire and The New Yorker. I'm thrilled that she's with me today because I want a chance to learn a little bit more about her kitchen and maybe that's the place where she developed her keen eye and her keen sense of observation. Susan, I'm so glad you're with us. Thanks for joining us today. I'm thrilled to be with you. I'm delighted to be with you as well.

Now this is a show where we talk about food, yes, but so many other things. And it's interesting because as I was thinking about this conversation, I was thinking about all the kitchens that you've written about in your various novels, and we'll get to that in a minute. But let's begin with that childhood kitchen. You grew up in Ohio, Shaker Heights, Ohio. Tell me a little bit about the kitchen you grew up in. If I walked up to the front door and went through the foyer and went through the dining room and walked in the kitchen, what would I see? What would it smell like? What would I feel? My mother was a kitchen maven. The kitchen was her territory.

In fact, we would eat dinner at about 6.30. By the time we were done with dinner and my mom had cleaned up, she would literally say to us, the kitchen is now closed. She was very particular about the kitchen. We had moved when I was in fifth grade into a house that my parents had chosen largely because it had a very big kitchen. This was my mom's glory to have a big kitchen.

She cooked every meal, breakfast, lunch, dinner. She was very much a scratch cook. Even though I grew up in an era of TV dinners and package dinners and cereal boxes and the kinds of prepped food that became very typical in the 60s. That was not in my life. I mean, that just wasn't the way we lived. I don't think I had a Pop-Tart until I went to college. No Pop-Tarts?

No Hostess Twinkies? No. I mean, I probably had them on my own secretly, when I wasn't at home, but my mom baked cookies and baked cakes and made every meal. You know, she was a very old fashioned cook. My mom was born in Hungary. A lot of what she cooked was very European, sort of middle European, classic, and traditional, but real meals. I mean, we just didn't, I don't think I ever had, for instance, a hamburger for dinner

at home. We just didn't eat like that. We had- That instance, a hamburger for dinner at home. We just didn't eat like that. We had- That wasn't a meal. No, that was, you know, you could go out and have a hamburger or you could have a hamburger for lunch, but that was not a meal. So it was very traditional.

We'd have chicken poppercash and veal cutlets and stuffed cabbage and these, you know, very classic, I think of them as Hungarian, but you know, middle European meals. It also sounds very hearty. Yes, very, very hearty. A lot of meat, A lot of meat. The funny thing is, my mom was so particular about the kitchen that she, I watched her cooking a lot, but she did not let us cook at all. And the night before I left for college, it suddenly dawned on her that I

had no idea how to cook. And she sort of panicked and said, well, wait, I have to show you. And I said, Mom, it's too late. It's too late. I'm leaving tomorrow. I'm not going to learn now in the two hours I have before I go to bed. But some of that had to do, she was fastidious. She just didn't like us. In a way, it's a shame because it would have been a lot of fun to cook with her. But I think she was sort of a control freak about the kitchen and probably worried that we'd be spilling things all over or burning things or burning ourselves or, you know, somehow not, that she couldn't focus on cooking and teach us at the same time, I'm quite different.

And I would drag my son into helping me, partly just because it was free labor. And I'd say, cut up these onions. Oh, yes. That's the thing you want to outsource most definitely. It's cutting up the onions. Right here. Cut up onions for me and chop this garlic. But that just wasn't the way it was with my, now I have to assume maybe that was the way

she grew up. Our mothers grew up in an age where they didn't have as much agency over their lives as we do today. Was the kitchen the space where she had control and maybe she didn't want other people in that space because of that? A hundred percent. That was, you know, my parents had a very traditional marriage. My dad, my mom did work, but it was more almost, I mean, she took a lot of value from it, but she worked part time. She didn't have a career. She had absolute control in the kitchen. My dad didn't cook at all.

Your dad's Arthur and your mom's Edith, right? And my father never cooked. The only thing he ever did was grill steaks. Very typical American style. Dad cooks once a week where he grills the steaks outside. But other than that, you know, and I don't think he knew how to cook, but I also think my mother would never have allowed him to cook. The kitchen was her kingdom. Certainly, I think that extended to some degree to us kids,

that she just wanted to run the show in there. And as I said in the beginning about her saying the kitchen is closed, she really meant it. Like, I'm, the shop is, you know, I'm putting, putting up the closed sign and you're hungry. I get the image of returning. Yes. Turning the sign.

Exactly. Closed for the day. Closed for the shades. And, you know, if we would come down and be hungry, well, there's always a plate of cookies or brownies, something for us to eat. But if I had come down at 10 and said, I'm just in the mood for some pasta, I think my mother would have thrown me out. Well, I was going to ask your mom, I want to go back to that conversation with your mom what you realized, oh my goodness, my daughter doesn't know how to cook.

Did she try to teach you in some way or pass on a cherished 10 of recipes or some sort of annotated yearbook of recipes along the way? I have her recipe file. And what happened was she realizes as I was leaving for college that, and I'm not exaggerating when I say it was literally the night before I left, when she suddenly realized she hadn't taught me these life skills. How did that over dinner?

She just said, oh, my daughter doesn't know how to cook? Yeah, I think I might have said to her, how do you do laundry? And she said, oh my gosh, because that was the other domain that she had absolute maintenance over, which was we did not do laundry, not because we were spoiled brats, but because she didn't want us messing around with the laundry. It was really a matter of control more than indulgence, if that makes sense. Mm-hmm. It does. So she said, oh my God, I didn't teach you how to do laundry or cook. And I said, laundry I'm not so concerned about.

Cooking, yeah, I don't know how to cook. And the first two years of college, I lived in a dorm. I didn't need to know how to cook. But I think she realized that these years when I could have been acquiring the skill organically by helping her. And now I had observed her a lot. I would often sit in the kitchen and talk to her while she was cooking. So I had some intuitive sense of what it meant to chop onions or brown meat or, I saw it, but I literally never did it.

I never baked anything. I had never, I mean, it's shocking to say it. I literally had never cooked anything. I had never scrambled an egg. When you decided to learn how to cook, where did you take cooking classes? And did you find that even though you weren't in the kitchen, did you have sort of intuitive skills because you had watched your mom do all that cooking? I do feel like I started with a little help having watched her and also having eaten food

that was homemade. So I think that you begin to understand a little bit more about food if you're eating good food or homemade food. And also my mom was a great baker and we would have very, you know, really wonderful baked desserts all the time. So I started not from, gee, I grew up eating Pop Tarts but I grew up eating food cooked from scratch.

I went to Peter Kump, which is a, you know, a traditional French cooking school in New York City. In order, I thought, oh, I'm gonna take like some fun, cool cooking class. But the rule was you had to start with French cooking 101, just the foundational basics. And it was actually fantastic. It was really fun. And also really hard when a recipe called for the parsley to be minced, you had to mince it. And they would

come look and say, no, that's chopped, that's not minced. And you just have to go back. Everything had to be done precisely. It was very funny because the one thing you had to bring to class was a chef's knife. Everybody had to buy their own chef's knife. And I would take the subway to class and I would carry the knife in a backpack without any sort of shield over it. I was oblivious to what this might result in. And what it resulted in is the knife cutting through the bottom of my backpack. So I was on the New York City subway with a backpack with a large 12 inch blade sticking out of my backpack. Well, you're really lucky you didn't get hurt. I mean, you know, you'd rip that backpack around and put it on your back.

You really could have done some real damage to your screen or something like that. Well, right. I had no clue. But I remember being on the subway and someone tapping me on the shoulder and pointing, you know, just looking at me with their eyes wide open and going, you might want to check your backpack and there was the knife. I learned after the first two times. Did you get like one of those leather sheaths for your chef's knife? I didn't go fully pro, but I did fashion something on a cardboard with a lot of duct tape that worked. But you know, it was really wonderful to take that class and get this very rigorous

education and I don't cook that way, but I learned the basics. They were very particular about knife skills, about teaching you what it meant to, you know, braise something or and we had to make souffles. We had to make, you know, go through the whole syllabus of introductory French cooking. And it gave me, most importantly, the confidence because baking is very precise and it's scientific. In a way, I think it's actually very easy because if you simply follow the recipe very precisely it will come out as promised. And it really is science. Cooking is a little bit more impressionistic. And it's a little bit, you need more confidence, I think. Baking is like classical music. Cooking is like jazz.

Yes. It's improvisational. And it actually really cooks, it really works when you're loose. And you sort of play around a little bit and develop your own interpretation, even of a classic dish. That's why French cooking is sometimes a little bit precious and a little bit hard because they are... French cooking is the classical cooking because they really want that souffle to come out exactly right or that beurre blanc to have exactly the right texture and you have less leeway. Right.

And I think that you are doing more scientifically specific things with French cooking like a souffle, which yes, it has to be exactly as prescribed. But early on after I took the Peter Kump course, I got a cookbook. There was a restaurant in New York that I loved and the owner had published a cookbook called A Tuscan Kitchen. I opened the cookbook, I bought it, I was all excited.

I opened the cookbook, I bought it, I was all excited. I opened the cookbook and every recipe only listed ingredients but not quantities. Oh, amounts. That sounds like a game show or something. Yes. Like something that you see on the food channel today. These are the ingredients and you have to figure out how much. Exactly. And in the introduction he said Italian cooking isn't about specific amounts, that it's about flavors and if you want, if you do one recipe with more water, maybe it'll be a soup. If you do it with less water, maybe it'll be a stew.

If you do it with no water. Maybe it'll be a stew if you do it with no water maybe it's a sauce and that's the point is these are the the flavors that Work together well these are the Basic techniques to meld them nicely

the basic techniques to meld them nicely, but what you do with it is up to you. And I had recently written a little piece for The New Yorker, they were doing a food issue. And I was asked to mention a cookbook that was meaningful to me, and that was the one that I chose because at first I thought I'm going to return this book. This is outrageous. Like I need, I need the amounts. I can't do this.

And then I thought, well, let me see. I mean, if you mix tomatoes, garlic, sausage in greater or lesser quantities, you probably won't kill anybody, right? Like, you can't really go wrong, right? And of course, that's the point of the book, which is try, see, you know, see what texture pleases you the most. See how, you know, you've got the basic sort of proportions of how these things can go together, but it's up to you to craft the final result. And it really taught me, it gave me the confidence I needed to think, I know how to cook. I know now I understand. And it doesn't mean that I've never cooked something that didn't turn out exactly like I wanted

it to. But I feel really, it gave me that sense that, all right, I'm going to put these things together and they're going to be tasty. Now I want to get that cookbook. I love that concept because that's also the way that people just have to cook because I only have two tomatoes or I can only afford this much meat this month or it's the end of the month and I can't do sausage and ground beef so we're going to do this with just ground beef and maybe that little bit of breakfast sausage that's left. I mean, that's the way that a lot of people have to cook. Once you

develop that confidence, Susan, when did you go back to your mother's recipes? And what did you discover about yourself and about her when you were starting to cook those Hungarian dishes or your dad is Polish, right? His family is Polish. So Hungarian or Polish dishes. What did you discover about her and yourself when you dove into her, your book of recipes? Well, it's interesting. When my mom passed away, I kept her little wooden box that was filled with her recipe cards on these index cards. And she had made little notes here and there on them. And I realized that she was a very precise person. She was really good at math and, you math and could add figures in her head,

and she worked at bank. That was her part-time job. And that for her, she would annotate these recipes to alter in tiny percentages the ingredients to make it the way she wanted it. She had a real pride in assembling the dish precisely as it was meant to be. So she was not a jazzy cook. She was the classical music cook. She was the precise cook.

I also think it's really interesting that she was born in Hungary, but her family left when she was about five. And the attachment and you know, my grandparents were, lived in Hungary till they were parents of young kids. So that was their entire life was they were Hungarian. First, they moved to Mexico for a few years and then they moved to the US. But I think keeping, so the food of their young life was, I mean, my grandparents never adopted American food. They ate the food of their childhood, their young adulthood, that connection to Hungary. And even though my mom didn't remember Hungary very well, I think it still was the foundational food of her memory. Why did they move to Mexico? Were they running from Hungary when they left or were they running from something or to

something? It was a little bit of both. My grandfather sensed that things were not going to go well for the Jews in Hungary, a little before it dawned on a lot of other people and he wanted to leave. They could not get American visas because there was a quota at that time on Jewish immigrants. He then got a job. My grandfather was an accountant and got a job with an American company in Mexico, a mining company. And so they went there, I think, without planning to stay indefinitely, but to sort of wait there until they could get American visas. Interestingly though, one of my grandfather's

brothers also came to Mexico and stayed and have been there now for three generations or two generations. So is that possibly why they held on so tightly to Hungarian food because they left rather swiftly and it was a way to hold on to something that maybe felt like it was snatched from them? I think so. I think, first of all, it was what they were familiar with, but I think emotionally it was a connection to a country that they never returned to ever. And had they returned what they remembered of it would not have been there anymore, including the relatives that didn't leave. So the emotional

connection to the, you know, I do think food is perhaps the most primal connection to certain memories. For them, it was full of emotion. It was the recreation of a world that was lost to them. You'd hold on to that too. I was just thinking of the sentence that you just said, to leave a country and never return. It's hard to imagine leaving America and never looking over your shoulder again. Right. think about this now with, you know, this is a country of immigrants and for people where it's in their experience, you know, my mom came here as an immigrant, my father didn't, but his parents were born in Poland and again, never went back,

never really could go back. So what do you hold on to? You hold on to those textures and smells and sounds and feelings that connect you to a past that you can't reclaim. And food can do that in a very unique way. Hey there, it's Michelle Norris. I'm sure you've heard of that term aging gracefully. That's all good and fine. But I think most of us really want to age healthily.

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It was a petri dish for integration. There have been books and documentaries made about what was going on in Shaker Heights. Did your parents discuss some of that at the kitchen table or the dining room table? And did that influence you ultimately as a journalist? Absolutely. I grew up in the very thick of a pretty extraordinary experiment in Shaker, which had been a white wasp wealthy enclave when it was founded in the 20s. And then in the 60s, there was a deliberate effort to integrate the city of Shaker by encouraging realtors to encourage black families to buy in the city. And there was a, when I was a kid, there was a section of Cleveland that

was all black that was added into our school district. So it wasn't annexed to the city of Shaker, but those kids came to Shaker schools. So I grew up going to a very integrated school and it was talked about. It was so present, it was so much part of our life. Because it was so present, it was so much part of our life. And at that time, Cleveland was the first major American city to have a black mayor. So it really was part of the experience of growing up in the Cleveland area. This was where change was really happening. My dad was a real estate developer and for many years when I was probably from the middle of junior

high through high school, no and beyond actually, his partner was black. And you know, this just wasn't, it was both ordinary because that was just sort of part of our lives. But we were conscious of this being different from the rest of the world. And this was also, I grew up, there were civil uprisings around the country and in Cleveland. My dad built a lot of section eight housing. And after the civil uprisings in Cleveland, he stuck us kids in the car and said, we're going to go down, drive into the city. I want you to see that not everybody

lives the way you live and take a look at, you know, maybe why this happened. That's extraordinary. My dad was really exceptional. And I think that he filled me with a sense of appreciation that the world is full of texture and that it's important to learn about it and examine it and experience it. And as a writer, to me, that's probably the most important thing that I feel I can do

for readers is to say, don't turn away from the world. Look at it. learn about it. Even if it's stuff that makes you uncomfortable, learn about it. And then you can live how you want to live. Okay, this is making so much sense to me, because you know I'm such a fan of your work and I followed you for so long, but suddenly things are making sense. I mean, when you go out and try to explore how America has fun on a Saturday night, you know, I'm now seeing this when you're talking about the strawberry queen. I'm now seeing this.

I'm now seeing where this comes from, this sort of curiosity, but almost like immersion, George Plimpton type journalism, where you just drop yourself into a space and try to understand it. And you know that I credit entirely to the way I grew up. It's not a matter of saying, oh you can't be judgmental. We all have opinions and feelings of what's comfortable, where we want to be. It's not that. It's an appreciation for learning and experience.

And I know that I have the freedom as a journalist to sort of go into whatever world I want to go into. It's the wonderful thing about being a journalist. So what I feel like I can do is take my readers by the hand and say, just come on, I'll take care of you. Just come with me and see this other world. And that way you, then you can know about it. And you don't have to choose to move into it or participate in it in any way.

But the worst thing is to turn away and say, I don't want to know. I don't want to know. Or you're a stranger. I don't want to know you, which, you know, I have to say I blame a lot of what's going on politically in our world on that refusal to even learn about other people. Curiosity is a superpower. It really is. And it's the most, it's the gift that keeps on giving. There is never a reason not to

learn about a different person, a different culture. There is no downside. There's zero downside. Except your own personal trepidation. If you can just get past that, there's just nothing but a reward. There's nothing but reward. And again, I know I have the privilege because this is what I do for a living. But then I feel like I can give people the vicarious experience of saying, I learned about something new. And I like writing about things where I don't feel instantly comfortable. But in your most recent book, the library book, you actually went to a place where you're very comfortable.

That's true. You spent a lot of time. You were a library kid. That book wound up becoming really an elegy to your mother. Very much. And all the time that you spent with her going to the library. True. And it really was almost, it almost surprised me to discover that it really was an effort to explore the relationship I had with my mom around these trips to the library, but also around her dementia and the way libraries in a sense

are shared memories and that when you see someone losing their memory, how a library comes to be a sort of concrete manifestation of our internal memories. A repository for all those things. Did your mom remember in the end when she was starting to experience dementia? Did she remember your trip to the, was it the Bertram Woods Library? Do I remember that correctly? Yes. Yes, you have an incredible memory. No, I just did my research. I knew who I was talking to. I think at the point when I first told her that I was writing a book about the Los Angeles Public Library and this terrible fire, and she said to me, well, I really take credit for this

because I took you to the library all the time. And I loved that she had this scrappy kind of response, which was that really it was her, she was the one who deserved credit for me doing this book. And her dementia moved quite quickly. And by the time I was really in the thick of the book, she was mostly no longer cognizant of what was going on around her. But so the book for me emotionally was a kind of tribute to that memory of those times that we had spent together. And yes, the library was an extremely

comfortable place for me to spend a lot of time and, you know, it was probably the most welcoming, benign environment that you could enter for working on a book, which was kind of fantastic. But it also took me into some pretty dark stuff about the history of burning of libraries throughout history. And because I was trying to examine this epic, the largest library fire in American history, trying to understand the guy who was accused of that fire and what would be going through the mind of someone who might start a fire at a library. And you had to burn a book yourself so you would understand how books burn. You know, it was interesting because, you know, in the library fire in LA, 400,000 books

were burned. As I was writing about it, and I thought, well, I want to describe this, I thought, well, I've never seen a book burn. I would say most of us have never seen a book burn. I finally thought I really should burn a book to both for the visual cue of being able to describe it. But also, I was wrestling with this incredible taboo that I think is innate in most of us, which is that people don't even like throwing books out. I mean, I'll have a book that someone sent to me, I don't want it, I don't have any plan to read it, and I can't get rid of it. I think it's a human resistance to destroying books that tells you a lot about how closely connected we are to the book as an object. And I thought, well, I've got to burn one

for the sake of this story. And it was really hard for me to do it. And finally, at one point, I just remember saying to my husband, you know, I can't do this. It's just too creepy. And I thought, well, this is like a superstition. It's just go ahead and do it. And I thought, I can't do it. One day then he came home and he said to me, I found a perfect book for you to burn. He handed me a copy of Fahrenheit 451, the classic Ray Bradbury book about a society in which books are outlawed and anytime a book is found, it's burned. And I thought, you know, Ray Bradbury would smile upon me for doing this.

So I think I can do it. How did you do it in the end? Did you set up in the driveway and or did you go to some secret location? Really, I was scared actually. Living in LA, there's also this fear about having an open fire in any instance. Yes, justifiable fear. For real. I mean, we had a little concrete landing in our backyard. And first I brought out many buckets of water because I was really scared about causing any sort of fire. And then I lit a match and it was a paperback

because I just was worried about trying to burn a hard cover knowing that would take a longer time. And embers would be flying. Right. And it's just very dangerous in Los Angeles to have a fire anywhere, anytime. So I thought I'll do a paperback. And I lit the edge of the cover, and it went up so fast. It burned so fast that my jaw was gaping. It just vanished. It was really, and you know, it's interesting because the taboo is so powerful, even though

there are millions of copies of Fahrenheit 451. It's not a precious commodity that once I destroyed it, it would be lost to civilization. It's not like that at all. But it's a taboo that is deeply felt and I suspect that this is pretty universally felt. And it's why book banning and the sight of people burning books when they ban them is so disturbing to us. I mean, I think we have this kind of collective sense

of connection to books and horror. And dread because we know what has happened in other cultures. Not that long ago, when people start burning books, they start turning to other things to extinguish. Absolutely. I talked to you when you were starting to work on the library book and I too was surprised to see that it wound up becoming a book that really honored your mother and it was a really delightful aspect of that book. Thank you.

I have loved learning more about her and because on the show we always gift our listeners with a recipe. There is one of the recipes from your childhood. It's not quite a tater tot. Right. This recipe for these cheese balls, which are made with Bisquick, which is probably, I mean, my mom might scold me for having shared this particular recipe with you because it was slightly less than totally scratch since she used the Bisquick, which is really just

flour and baking powder, I think. It's just, it already has, you don't have to add the baking soda and the baking powder, it's already formulated in there. Right. And these were one of my mother's go-to special occasion treats. She would never make these for us just on an ordinary occasion for dinner or nothing. It was so connected to either it was a holiday or they were having a party or it was always something special was connected with these. It's a very sweet memory because I remember her making them and saying, you know, I'm making cheese balls and we would think, oh, it's a special occasion.

Did she call them cheese balls? Or did they have like a special fancy name or maybe even a Hungarian name? No, they didn't have a fancy name. And it's funny because a lot of the other things she made she had a Hungarian name for them. But these and I, you know, my mom was a great reader of good housekeeping and all the great housekeeping sorts of magazines of that era. And maybe it was a recipe that she got out of there. I never asked her, but I still, you know, I have the card that she wrote the recipe on and it's stained from many, many years of handling it. But I wanted to share it with you because this is a special occasion to be on the show with you. And I thought, well, I need to give you a special occasion food.

I love it. And I love that you included her little notes. So it's a cup of Bisquick, a half a cup of grated sharp cheddar cheese, two tablespoons of mayonnaise. She prefers Hellmann's. Yes. It's noted in the recipe. One third cup milk, I assume whole milk. One tablespoon garlic powder and not garlic salt, exclamation point.

You say the emphasis is your mom's. And then chopped parsley, not minced, but chopped parsley. Right. Chopped. Definitely chopped so that you would see green speckled through it. And people always at my mom's parties would say, these are so delicious. I mean, it was a kind of, I just have such strong memories of this food in those very particular occasions where something was a little special. You brought out the better China. You, you know, treated it as something other than an ordinary day. And it's funny, even if we had begged her to make them on an ordinary night, she probably wouldn't have. I think she believed in the magical

property of certain recipes, that they were, this was for special occasions. Well, thank you for sharing it with us. I am going to roll this out on one of my special occasions, but I'm going to before that road test it soon. So I'll let you know how it goes. They're actually really good. They're very delicious. And they're the size of a walnut. So it sounds like they're small. You just pop them in your mouth. Great little snacky thing for a cocktail party. All right. Let's try this out. I'm so glad you shared this with us. I'm so glad you agreed

to come and talk about your mama's kitchen. What part of that kitchen lives in you most strongly? I have the strongest memory of my mom really in front of the sink, looking out in the backyard after completing a meal for us. And she would gaze out, she loved to garden too, and would glance, look out the window of over the sink and look out on her garden. And I think she really felt like she was the master of her universe. That's what I remember. That's a wonderful memory. Well, here's to Edith. Thank you so much.

Thanks for being with us. I love this conversation. My best to you. Thanks Michelle. I don't know about you, but there are a few things that are going to stick with me after this conversation with Susan Orlean. And one is the image of her mother, Edith, standing at the kitchen window so proud that she has taken control over that space and knowing that she has just created magic in her realm.

I've been a long time admirer of Susan's work and I wanted to know her origin story and whether that origin story would help me understand her keen powers of observation. Clearly, when her father packed she and her siblings up in the car and drove them into inner city Cleveland at a moment when so many people were trying to flee that space, that clearly had a strong and a long impact on her. And as I said in the podcast, curiosity is a true superpower. And I think that that's one of the ways that she developed curiosity and a real desire to understand the outside world.

Now, the third thing I'm going to remember from this, among many, but one thing that will really stand out for me are those cheese balls. So simple, just a few very specific ingredients and only 10 minutes in the oven, yum. I am definitely going to be giving that a road test in my kitchen. If you want to do the same thing, you can find that recipe at our website, yourmommaskitchen.com and at the website, you will find all the recipes from all the previous episodes. And before we let you go, please remember that we want to hear from you. We'd love to hear about your mama's kitchen, your memories, things that happened in the

kitchen where you grew up and how it may have impacted you. You can make a voice recording on your phone, it's simple, and send that to us at ymk at highergroundproductions.com. We have loved the stories that have come in so far. Please keep them coming and please come back again next week. We know we're always serving up something special. Until then, be bountiful. Your customers are scrolling past your social ads, using ad blockers, and paying for ad-free streaming. But when they're listening to a podcast, they're hearing Acast ads, which are 4.4

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