Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast - Roy Wood Jr’s Childhood: Country as a Sugar Sandwich

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

Comedian Roy Wood Jr. dishes on his Birmingham roots and how his radio personality dad and law school student mom navigated meal times with their opposing schedules. He shares the simple but delicious meals that limited his palette before he ultimately became the foodie we know and love today. Plus, we learn about the biscuits that had his cousins fighting over who gets the last one.Your Mama’s Kitchen is a production of Higher Ground.Produced by Sonia Htoon.Associate Producers are Camila Thur de Koos and Jenna Levin.Sound design and engineering from Andrew Eapen, Ryan Kozlowski and Roy Baum.Executive producers for Higher Ground are Mukta Mohan, Dan Fierman and Michele Norris.The show’s closing song is 504 by The Soul Rebels.Editorial and web support from Melissa Bear and Say What Media. Our talent booker is Angela Peluso.Copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC / Sound Recording copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

And like, in my grandma's house, you would wake up and you'd already smell breakfast happening. Breakfast is in progress. That was the constant. That's what got you up? What's that I smell? Yeah. Like, you ever seen them old school Tom and Jerry's and cartoons where they smell something and then they float.

And they float over it. They float to wherever the scent is coming from. That was me back in the old days. Hello, hello, and welcome back to your mama's kitchen. This is a podcast where we explore all the ways. we are shaped as adults by the kitchens we grew up in as kids. And my guest today is a proud member of Club Birmingham. He says he's a proud resident of Birmingham.

Even though he no longer lives there, Birmingham always follows him wherever he goes. I'm talking about Roy Wood. And if you need a recommendation of someplace to eat in Birmingham, he's the person. And that's one of the reasons that I'm glad to be talking to him today because I have Birmingham roots too. It's where my father's family is from. You know Roy Wood from lots of things. You've seen him on the Daily Show.

He now has a show that's called I Got News for You. It's on CNN. If you haven't watched it, you need to watch it because it's fantastic. And Roy Wood Jr. is with us right now. Welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. It is an honor and a pleasure to be in your presence. Oh, talk that talk.

So I really am happy to talk to somebody else who has Birmingham Roots. I was not raised there. I was raised in Minnesota, but I was sent to Birmingham every summer of my youth to live with... What was that like? It was exiled. It was always interesting, and it was a loving place for me. I have very fond memories of Birmingham. My grandparents lived in Ensley on Avenue G near Tuxedo Park.

Yeah, I was Avenue I, after high school. My mother moved over to Avenue High, but I grew up in West End. I went to First Baptist Inslee for church, so I... Which is not the... far from there. Tuxedo Junction, all of that. Yes, Sam. I know all about it.

But to answer your question, my childhood could be described as extreme weather. Winters in Minnesota and summers in Birmingham, Alabama. It was either really cold or really hot. Got the worst of both spectrums. Poor child. At least mine was just Memphis to Mississippi and then Birmingham to Mississippi. Like that's comparable.

Yeah, that's a little triangle that kind of makes sense geographically. Yeah. So we always ask people about their mama's kitchen. I want you to describe it. That's how we begin this show. Tell me about your mama's kitchen. And your mother actually had several kitchens. And it might make sense to start with a kitchen in Memphis.

Yeah. Here's what was interesting about this. And I'm like, well, what did my mama cook? Man, my mama was in grad school. She wasn't cooking anything. It was my kitchen. My mom bought the groceries. And I don't say to that as a dig at my mom.

I'm just talking about the circumstances of my childhood were very latchkey growing up. And, you know, we didn't eat a full formal meal outside of Saturday and or Sunday. Like, that's just the nature of scheduling. And so, you know, we lived in, A small apartment complex near the airport in Memphis, near Winchester and Airways, perfect for, you know, single mom at the time. My parents were separated.

So, you know, I was latchkey. So I was taught how to make my own bologna sandwiches, how to make franken beans, how to make my own hot dogs. I was scrambling eggs. Like, I knew how to cook fairly decent stuff to sustain me. was never a fan of bacon because it always bit me, as I like to say. What do you mean? Because it gave you indigestion or because you burnt up the kitchen? No, the grease popping.

Okay. Yeah. Baking. Get you in the eye. Get you. Yeah, knowing what I know now is I was frying the bacon at too high of a heat. And so it's just making more noise than it probably needed to be. So I wasn't crazy about that.

But yeah, my mother's home was very loving. You know, she made sure I always have food. You know, I ate school lunch, but, you know, breakfast was a quick-boiled egg and some toast, maybe some fruit. You know, generally speaking, my mom did not prepare like a formal, here's a baked chicken and roasted carrot. That was Saturday. That was maybe Sunday. And what was Saturday or Sunday like when she did have a little bit of time to spend in the kitchen? It was cool.

I mean, you don't appreciate it until you get older. you don't appreciate the time and attention that cooking requires and then translating that as if you want to get into love languages as some sort of act of service, you know, in terms of it being loving until you're way older. The place where I really ate a lot of food was my grandma's house. It was never really my mother's house. It was, you know, I got sent to Mississippi on a pretty regular basis as a child. We lived in just for the geographical context.

My mom and I lived in Memphis. My mom is from Clarksdale, Mississippi, which is about an hour south of Memphis. So it wasn't uncommon on a Friday after school for my mama to drive me down to Clarksdale, drop me off and come back to Memphis to study. Like she was literally in grad school in Memphis State. And so that's where, you know, my grandma cooked three square meals a day every day. never repeated and there were never leftovers. In my grandma house, you would wake up and you'd already smell breakfast happening. Breakfast is in progress.

That was the constant. That's what got you up. What's that I smell? Yeah. Like you ever seen them old school Tom and Jerry's and cartoons where they smell something and then they float. And they float over it. They float to wherever the scent is coming from. That was me back in the old days.

So it was very much a It was You know myself and my cousins We would sit around We would fight over the last biscuits It was alga syrup We'd mash up pats of butter in the syrup So you didn't have to bother

Yeah Yeah just the syrup syrup for whatever you were Stopping the biscuit with You would put butter in that So you didn't have to butter the biscuit and then come back behind it and put syrup in the biscuit. Like it was just a much more efficient process top to bottom. But yeah, that's what we did.

And, you know, my grandma would make Salisbury steaks and she would bake chickens and fry catfish. And we ate it. My uncle would sometimes catch catfish and bring them over to the house and go out back and skin them and, you know, gut them, skin them, filet them. And that's what we would eat that night. You know, it was really memorable, you know. But, you know, in terms of my mother, you know, it was Saturdays and Sundays,

but it was never nearly as frequent as my grandmother. Because she had stuff to do. She was busy. And she had hit those books, right? Yes. Yeah. She had no choice. You know, this is a woman trying to figure out her life and what's,

next and as far as she knew at the time, I got to provide for this boy by myself. So I'm going to do it with education. So, you know, she's taking night classes. She took classes on weekends. Summer is when she really took a gang of classes as well. And so I would spend two months at a time in Mississippi in the summer. And I would do all of my summer programs. I learned how to swim in Mississippi.

I learned how to ride a bike in Mississippi. Shot BB guns, chase squirrels, climbed trees, everything. All of that happened in Mississippi. It's interesting because I think about my life now and the weeks I have my son, sometimes I'm doing a lot. And I'm like, hey, man, we just got to eat quick. We ain't got time to be marinating stuff.

And you now know what that's like because you think of your mom. How am I going to do this? The juggle is real. People talking about how the struggle is real. The juggle is real. Absolutely. Well, I asked about your mom's kitchen,

but now I'm interested in your grandma's kitchen. What was her name and describe that kitchen for me also? Vera. Vera was, you know, just a quintessential black woman that was, you know, child of a sharecropper, you know, with nothing. It was just a hard worker, just very blue collar, you know. My grandmother, I remember walking with my grandmother to the National Guard Armory to get government cheese and government peanut butter every month. go get our welfare food provisions for the month

and head back to the house. You cut the cheese up and make grilled cheese sandwiches. And like, that was the world. We would just eat that on a slice of white Wonderbread. There were days where we had sugar sandwiches where you would just take us a piece of white bread and just put sugar on the bread and just eat it.

It's like cinnamon. It's like untotable. It's cinnamon toast is the only way I can describe it. It's for sure a lost art. When you say that, I can actually taste a sugar sandwich when you say that. Yeah. Yeah. With a little bit of butter. Traditional four aisle stove and had the preen hand spoon rest hanging on the back, the back splash.

And then under the microwave was some show. The microwave was on a cart. And then on the shelves underneath the microwave was like all types of like random. like dishes and displays. And I remember when she got an electric can opener, that man, that may as well have been an iPhone 16. Like, she was just head over heels. She ain't got to work this little, because her wrist,

she was getting old and her wrists was starting to give way a little bit. And you just put that can and it clicked and then it just do, do, do, and even by today's standards, that was a, huge can openers were like the size of a roll of paper tiles. Like they're a roll of a toilet tissue, I mean. They were pretty. Yeah, they were they was big. It was.

Yeah, you could imagine somebody. Bigger than it needed to be probably. Yes, absolutely. The technology was not there. But yeah, it was definitely homely. That's where she lived. My grandmother lived in the kitchen. She lived for her grandchildren.

There was about at peak there could be seven of us in the house, but generally it was about the numbers fluctuated between three to four in a usual summer. Did you listen to music in the kitchen? No music. My grandmother, she was sometimes talking to phone, but, you know, my grandmother cooked. She did yard work. She read the Bible. And she watched Perry Mason.

That's it. But that's what she did. You know, my grandmother would get up in the morning. She would do yard work before the sun rose. So she would do, and this is before I was older enough. to help. She'd trim the hedges. She'd cut the front yard first. About seven in the morning, she'd come in, start breakfast. Breakfast is done. We didn't even have the presence of mind to help her with the dishes. We was just some ungrateful, little hungry-ass kids. And we were ready to go play.

She probably maybe didn't even want you in her kitchen because she had her ways of doing things. That could be a possible explanation. Yeah, I think her love language was acts of service in that regard. And so, you know, my grandmother would do that. And she would sit down when it got hot outside around 11 o'clock in the morning. That's when, you know, she would sit, watch Perry Mason, Matt Lott, Price is right. She would go through those things around 1 o'clock, whip up lunch. Lunch would come, you know, between one to three. We would come back in from outside playing hot, sweaty, musty, demolished lunch, go back out. side.

And then she will watch Pressure Look. Or like the evening was game shows. The afternoon was game shows. And so, you know, she would cook dinner. And, you know, usually by then my aunt would be home from work. She was a school teacher in Clarksville. And my aunt sometimes would do dinner instead of my grandmother. And once we got older, my cousin, Tasha,

You know, girls helped in the kitchen. The boys helped with yard work. And that was kind of the traditional gender division of labor over the course of the summer. So once I got older, I would be out working with my grandma at 6 in the morning doing yard work until 7.30 in the morning. And then that night in the evening, cut in the backyard. And this is before self-bagging mowers. So you had to rake the grass as well. So there's something I tell my son.

you know, when he's working hard. And I can see him drink water sometimes. And I can tell that, like, that water is like gospel to him in that moment. And I say the water tastes better when you earned it. And I can't explain it, but those meals at my grandmother's house tasted so much better after a whole day of yard work and that hot-ass Mississippi son it was too much.

It was too much. But man, when I tell you, when that first piece of butter from that biscuit hit your lips and you already been up for an hour and a half, yes. And there's nothing, you know, people,

if you've never had a homemade biscuit, you know, I just, you have an assignment to go figure, out. If you can't make it yourself, go find somebody who's going to make you a biscuit that is rolled and cut with that little, you know, I don't know what she used if she had a little biscuit round or some. She had the pen and then she used a glass. It was like a little Tupperware lid, like a little Tupperware cup. And she would do the cuts like that and then would take

the scraps from those cuts, rerow that, and then make more biscuits from that. And yeah, It's also interesting because that was like the few times where I can remember seeing my mom be a daughter. Because you think of your parents just as parents, but there's something about when your parent cooks for you, the dynamic is still the same. You're still their child and you still need to clean the table and put the dishes away. And watching my mom and her sisters for like Thanksgiving and bigger family gatherings. that we used to have in the old days watching the dynamic of how they moved around the kitchen. Everybody had an assignment,

and you could tell it was still nobody's assignment had changed. Somebody's on prep, somebody's on dishwashing. So at some point, your mom and dad, they split up, and they got back together, which is an interesting love story. Your father was a radio personality, you worked on radio and TV, Roy Wood, Sr., in Chicago and in Birmingham. What was it like for you as a young person to see your parents get back together? It was fine.

I think there was still dysfunction, but knowing what I know now as an adult, I would imagine the degree of the decision was made by my mother in the spirit of me having a man around to yoke me up to keep me from acting a fool. And I think raising me took a little bit more precedent than them finding every ounce of love again. What do you think of that? That's deep that she opened up her heart in her home to someone because she really wanted you to have a man in the house. Yeah. Yeah.

It's deep, but in a way it's self-sacrificial to your own happiness. You kind of hate that somebody had to have made that choice, you know, like that. It's not, it's noble. It definitely helped. I'm not going to lie. I was starting to act of food. Part of why we left Memphis, too, is because I almost burnt the apartment complex down.

Okay, we, we, I think we need to spend a minute with that. You almost burnt the apartment complex now? Were you cooking? We're talking about food. This is like the arts and podcasts. Were you cooking when you almost burnt the? Oh, no, baby. We was out in the forest playing with them lighters,

like a proper third grader. Got me a lighter from the corner store. broke the safety of y'all. We were playing around with pine needles and there was a lot of, it was in the fall and there was a lot of brush and dried leaves. And we were just burning pine needles

and throwing them down into the river below. There's a creek that ran through. You mean like pine cones? Like turning them into like? No, just loose pine needles. Oh, okay. There were pine trees, you know, all over the apartment complex.

And there was a creek that ran through the apartment complex. So we would get bushels like eight or ten pine needles light them all, watch them light, look at the smoke, ha ha, ha, ha, and then throw them down into the water, which is a fun activity so long as you hit the water. If you miss the water, then you have a fire on the embankment, and the embankment is covered with fuel for the fire,

aka dried leaves and pine needles. You had a situation. So, yeah, Memphis Fire had to come out and get that one straight to security. security guard told a resident manager who informed my mom and I know I'm sure that oh wow I can't control this boy might have been part of her thought process and maybe you need a grown man in your face from time to time um so yeah they figured it out they got back together and you know they did as best they could on the relationship I'm not going to sit here and act like it was some perfect thing it

wasn't but in terms of did she accomplish the goal? of me having a man in my life that would check me and give me structure and give me love. Yeah, mission accomplished. So I think about that sometimes, but I don't feel like it's ultimately my place to even decide for my mom whether or not. Oh, that was unfortunate. Maybe she was happy about it. I don't know. No, but that's her story.

So I try not to, it's not. something she and I've ever even talked about because you just don't know how sensitive of an issue that might be for somebody. So, you know, I leave it alone. But yeah, you know, third, fourth grade, we moved to Birmingham and

it's different there because my parents are on two different clocks. So again, even in Birmingham, we still only ate on Sundays. For then, for sure, it was just Sunday. So they're on two different clocks. They're working different shifts.

My father did radio news radio station. So he was up at 5 a.m. to be in the station by 5.30. So he did morning news until 9, maybe 10 a.m. He'd make his rounds and then, you know, post-production and all of that. But he's home in the afternoon until about 5. I'm usually getting home around four or five. And at that point, he's headed out the door to do an evening shift. My mom is home from five to six before going back out to law school. So they really were. Yeah. And so by the time she's back home at nine, she's in the bed and sleep. My dad's not home until about 11. And he got to go right to bed because he got to be. So it's just, this idea of

cooking was just such a weekend thing, you know. It was very much, I'm going to make a meal on Monday that will last this house through Tuesday or Wednesday. And then maybe Wednesday or Thursday we eat out. And then maybe Friday, it's quick meals. So, you know, we're talking. My dad could do a quick pot roast. He was really good with pot roast. So he could 20 minutes per side per pound.

I don't remember the math on how he used to do it, but you cook it on medium heat, 20 minutes per pound, flipping it also every 20 minutes. Okay, flipping it every 20 minutes. For any overages, you split the flip time. So if it's a three-hour, if it's a three-pound roast, 20-20, but because you're only going to flip it a third time

in the 20 minute interval, you flip 10 in 10 so that you get an even you get an even cook on both sides. You take that pot roast, you boil some vegetables with it. Usually a lot of stuff out the can in my house because we were just a transient home. You know, if I had a couple of dollars, I was trying to go to McDonald's anyway.

So, you know, I'm coming home with a spoiled appetite anyhow. So, yeah, we were just shipping of ships in a night as a house. Like it just, there was never the idea of the family all gathering around the dinner table. We were never that. Sunday morning was the day. That was food day. That's how a lot of people live, though. You know, not everybody comes home to cookies at the end of the day or to a table that's set and to, you know, a home-cooked meal.

That's not reality for everybody. Yeah. There was food. Don't get me wrong. The fridge was never empty. But at this point, by third grade, I know. knew how to make my own pot pies. I could make my own breakfast. I was a pretty self-sufficient child. So my parents just had stuff in the fridge that I could always go to and grab, if need be.

You know, this is before the era of grocery store rotisserie chickens. So you couldn't just go buy a whole bird for $8 to build a meal around. But what's so interesting, Roy, is that I've heard you talk about food. And I've seen. seen you write about food in social media and you have a culinary, a passion for good food. I mean, you love good food. So at some point in your life, I don't know if it's because you started cooking food or you started to make a little coin and you could take yourself out to eat. But for someone who didn't, who didn't have that in your childhood home, maybe you had that with Ms. Vera and your grandmother's house, at some point you became something of a foodie yourself. Yeah, I think that a lot of that I would attribute to later on in life

and just getting exposed to different foods. You know, if we're talking to Alabama, and then we're talking about college where I ate even worse, you know. Once I got to high school, it was a rap on eating at the house because I worked food service. So everywhere I worked,

I just took food from work. When I worked at Subway, I ate Subway every night for like a year and a half. And then I worked at Shoney's restaurant. And I was at Baskin Robbins for a minute. Then I figured out at Baskin Robbins, I could take the ice cream, and I could barter it with the dude who sold corn dogs in the food court at Western Hills Mall. So I'm just trading food for food.

It's commerce. Black walnut ice cream was always the hardest to get. It was the most popular flavor. Black walnut? Black walnut ice cream. And here I thought it'd be butter pecan. Butter pecan is cool, but black walnut is like, a delicacy.

Like, that's butter pecan to the 10th power. But you never knew when it was coming in. You never knew how long it was going to last. So if you had black walnut, it was like finding a $50 bill on the ground. So what I would do, when black walnut ice cream would come in to Baskin Robbins off the truck, I knew that this tub of black walnut is not going to make it through the day. So I would immediately scoop off four scoops, put those in a cup, Throw that in the freezer, hide it behind some Sunday toppings or whatever.

And then on my lunch break, cut up to the food court and then start talking. Basically, who wants to make a deal? So you got, and you have to make a deal fast because it's ice cream, so you can't let it melt. I have four scoops of black walnut ice cream. Will you give me a cinnamon sugar pretzel? Yes or no. Yes, cool. All right.

You. And I would just. So the idea of even eating at the house was foreign. I get to college, you're eating on campus for two years on the meal plan. And this is Florida A&M in the mid-90s. The food options are not what they are today, where kids have wingstop and Chick-fil-A and Wendy's and all of these other legit food options.

Or Michelle Obama's food program that made its way through and now you got actual steamed vegetables. You got some habaichi dude over there. You got an omelet station. We ain't had no omelette station. We got the cereal joint like they have in the hotel. Yeah, at the Hampton Inn. Where it's eight tubes of cereal with the trapdoor at the bottom.

Pick your cereal, boy, and go over there and get 2% milk. Get the hell on. So, you know, I worked food service during that time at Golden Corral. And I, you know, I enjoy soul food. And, you know, I eat out when you could with your friends. But it was a Denny's that was considered good eating. I would say it wasn't until 2007 when I moved to Los Angeles and I got an agent. And then you start, white people start taking you out.

When your career started changing, white people go, I'm going to buy your lunch. You want some lunch. Let's do lunch. I didn't have guacamole until I was almost st. And was it appealing when you first saw it? No. I didn't get avocados. I didn't understand it.

It just felt like mush, which it is. But then I realized, oh, you got to put all this other shit in it. And then it's banging. So once you start adding eight other chopped up things in the avocado, I understood it. So, you know, I was very culinaryally, that's not a word. I was culinary sheltered. You know, because most good food is not quick. It's not accessible.

I lived under circumstances that required simplicity and preparation because I was doing it alone and I was young. And then when I got older, I had stuff to do. So I don't have time to make a rue or do a beef stew for two hours. I don't. Neither does my mom. And my dad is in and out the house and all over the place. so nobody's going to take the time to do that. And it sounds wild, but you just have to think about

being middle-class Birmingham in a city that's 70% black. Everything I did in Birmingham was black. Everywhere I went was black. So when was I going to ever have Calamari? When was it ever going to happen? I didn't travel. I left the country once,

and that was to go to Mexico, for a senior class trip. And you know what I ate when I got there? Burger King. Because that's what I recognized. It was familiar. The idea of experimenting with food was so far from my mind.

If I paid money for this and it's not good, I'm broke the rest of the trip. This was my food money for the day. So no, I don't want to try guacamole. I'm good. Then you get into situations where you ain't got to pay for none of this shit. You know what I'm trying to tell him all right. I'll try that.

Let me try. What do you say that is? Oh, oh, a mozzarella bite. Oh, rigatoni. Oh, spaghetti shape different. I think I will. That's where I think a lot of the discovery of different cultures and different countries, you know, started to come from.

Birmingham now, the irony is that it is an extremely culturally diverse. food place now. A big thing that happened was the Olympics in 96 coming to Atlanta. Birmingham was a satellite city for qualifying events. So that required construction. So our Latino population spiked in the mid-90s. And then also, as Birmingham grew, it became a banking hub. Charlotte, a lot of mergers and collapses have happened since then,

but I'm taking you back late 90s, early aughts. where Birmingham and Charlotte were the banking centers of, you know, of a great part of this country. And so as a result, because banks, a lot of these banks are international, you have a lot of foreigners coming in that were making beachheads and coming here. And so they were willing to be patrons of businesses that normally would be niche. They had a waiting list. And then if that type of food is popular, well, then maybe we can open a second place like that that's popular. but growing up, Pizza Hut didn't even deliver to my neighborhood

when I tell you things were basic. It was basic. Like, I'm old enough to remember where Domino's was the only place that delivered. No one else did. Papa Johns did not exist. Pizza Hut was where you went to sit down and a waiter would come to the table and go, would you like pizza?

What kind of pizza? It's like getting Chicago Deep Dish or something. So, yeah, I'd say as my entertainment profile grew, that's where I found myself. Your palate grew to. Being in situations where, oh, they're serving rabbit. Okay. Guess I'm eating rabbit tonight. Now, rabbit is something you could find on the menu in Birmingham because, you know,

because there are people who hunt a lot in Alabama and out in Hoover and, you know, So, you know, you may have had an opportunity to have rabbit before you got to Los Angeles. And I've stopped myself. I was going to say maybe even a little squirrel too. But, you know, it happens. No, don't stop yourself. That's true. I know some people that eat it.

You know? We always like to gift our listeners with a recipe or something special. in the life of the person that we're talking to. And I wonder if in your case it might be those biscuits. Did your grandmother ever write down a recipe for those biscuits? Does one of your cousins have a recipe cards somewhere where she wrote down the secret to a flaky golden biscuit? I can ask my cousin and see if she has it.

But, you know, my grandma was one of them old school freestylers. Like, she just take the hand, sprinkle it, put a little sprinkle them on, and then throw the extra salt over a shoulder to throw the salt in the devil's eye. You saw me do that. You saw me do that, didn't you? You know, a little salt over the shoulder, yeah. That's what my grandma would do.

Yeah, I'll have to find that one out. Can I just ask you, what is that about that? Because my family used to do that too, like a little salt over the shoulder. Yeah, I told Satan, get thee behind. You throw some salt in the eye. That's what I was taught. That's what I was told it was.

That's what you're doing. The devil's following you, but you put a little sprinkle of salt in his face. You're going to be good for the rest of the day. But yeah, I'll try and find that recipe. I'll talk to my cousin about it, but my grandmother never had any type of cards or anything. Everything was just off memory.

I don't know how she did it, but she did it. I can't get you the recipe to my mama's banquet pot pies that are five for a dollar at Pigley Wiggly in Birmingham. You need that. I remember Pigley Wiggly and Bruno's. Yes. Yes. See, you didn't think I really knew Birmingham, but yeah, I remember Bruno's.

That was the good one. My grandfather used to drive Jitney, for those of you who remember what Jitney is. Yes. And he would drive people to the Bruno's, wait outside, and then bring them back. Yes, yes, Bruno's had a deli department. You know, the good grocery stores had a deli department. We're going to make sandwiches for you right here. Yeah, right around the corner from the Anzley Grill.

Yes, yes, indeed. Ray Wood, I have loved talking to you. Now you got me thinking about pop pies. I actually love Popeyes. Banquet or Swanson or Marie Calendar. Marie Calendar is my joint. And Marie-Callor ones are big and substantial. But if you can talk to your cousin to see if you can get a biscuit recipe, we would love that.

If you're listening to this and you think you have a Knock'em Dead biscuit recipe, you might want to share that with us. You can go to YMK. You can go to your mama's kitchen. and tell us about your family's biscuit recipe. But I am going to keep my fingers crossed and hope that we might get Ms. Vera's biscuit recipe. And then you can have it and you can mix it up

with a little syrup and butter and slatter that on that biscuit and keep on stepping. Roy Wood, I have loved talking to you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. You know, we ask people about their mama's kitchens, but on the show we often learn about lots of different kitchens.

Their aunts, their grandmothers. In this case, we learned about Miss Vera and how that kitchen made such a big difference in Roy's life. I'm going to be thinking about her and those biscuits. And if you want to try those biscuits, we're going to do our best to get that recipe and we hope we can share it with you at your mammaskitchen.com. And like I said, if you have a biscuit recipe, if you have a tip for rolling out biscuits to make sure that they're extra flaky, why don't you share those with us?

And what we're talking about sharing things with us, please remember that we always want to hear about your mama's kitchens, your recipes, your memories, maybe your thoughts on a previous episode. You can make either a voice memo or a video memo and send that to us at yMK at higherground productions.com. Thanks so much for being with us. Make sure and come back next week because we always serve up something special. But until then, be bountiful.