Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast - The Colberts Find Love in the Lowcountry

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

Late Show host Stephen Colbert and his wife Evie reminisce on their romcom-worthy meet cute, which somehow happened years after they left their shared hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. We learn about what kind of food they ate while growing up in the coastal Lowcountry (hint: lots of seafood) and some of the cooking hiccups they faced as a new couple in their first shared kitchen. Plus, Stephen teaches us how to make his version of his mama’s fudge – a recipe that none of his siblings can agree on.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.

You both cook a lot and you cook together. We do now. We didn't for 30 years. What's the story there? Because your kitchen personalities collide? I think that's a good one. One of our personalities collides. I think, Stephen, that's a lovely way to put it.

I'm going to steal that, Michelle, and I'm just going to say our kitchen personalities collide. Okay, who's the bossy one? Who's the bossy one? Well, listen, Stephen is a big. Oh, I see one. That's very nice of you to not leap to conclusions, Michelle. Hello, hello. Welcome back to your mama's kitchen. This is a place where we explore how we are all shaped as adults by the kitchens we grew up in as kids. And not just the food and the meals, but all the things that happen in that magical space. The homework, the arguments, the laughter and the silly stuff. I'm Michelle Norris. And I am so glad you're here. We're joined today by two people, husband and wife, who have the kind of meek, cute story that's the stuff of rom-com. movies. Stephen Colbert and his wife,

Evelyn McGee Colbert, everyone calls her Evie. She too is in the entertainment business. She's an actress and a producer. Stephen, of course, is the king of late-night television. He makes us laugh. He makes us think. He introduces us to interesting people night after night. He leans into prickly political commentary

and tells it like he sees it with humor that's always steeped in wisdom. And if you watch the show, as I do regularly, you know that he adores his wife, Evie. She talks about her all the time. shows up as a guest, and I'm so glad that both of you are guests with me today on your mama's kitchen. Hello, hello to both of you. Hello. Thank you, Michelle. Thank you so much. Happy to be on. Now, before we jump into our chat, a quick word on that meat, cute story,

because it's important to this conversation. Stephen spotted Evie at an event, the Spoletto Festival. She was grabbing a nibble at a food table. She spotted him walking into the event looking very handsome, with his mother on his arm. They discovered that their families were friends going back to their childhood growing up in South Carolina's low country. They connected over their shared love of everything about the low country, especially their shared love of South Carolina cuisine. Now, after three decades of marriage, three kids, successful careers, they're sharing

that love of the low country with all of us in a new cookbook called, Does This Taste Funny? I love this cookbook. It reads like a book, like a novel of your life, and it includes all these wonderful recipes. I am so glad that you're with me today. Oh, thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you. Now, we always begin this episode with a simple six-word question. Tell me about your mama's kitchen. I would like to hear from both of you. If you could close your eyes and go down memory lane, and I know it might be a little melancholy because I know that both your mothers have gone to glory. But if you could kind of go back to that space for us and describe, what it was like. What did it smell like? What did it feel like? What did it taste like? Who goes first? You go first. Ladies first. The kitchen I picture was that 1970s mustard yellow on the walls. Remember that very popular color? Harvest gold. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that was after the big fancy renovation that my family did. So that was the fancy version. And one of the things, the kitchen always had a pot of boiling water, usually with, hominy or grits going, almost always, in the morning anyway. And generally smelled like cheese because my mother was always making those cheese biscuits which are in the cookbook. So it always smelled like melting cheese and baking and just a homey feel. You know, it wasn't a big,

we didn't have a eat-in kitchen. So there wasn't, we weren't like sofas and tables and things. We had just a tiny table my sister and I would eat at. But it led to another room. And so it just kind of, we just overflowed from the kitchen into the other room. But it was always comfort, right? That's what I think of when I think of my mom's kitchen. Comfort. I'm one of 11 children, and I'm the youngest of 11 children. So when I think of my mom's kitchen, I think of, it's like a rail station.

There are people coming and going all the time. Like so many people, the house just turned around the kitchen. And, you know, 11 hungry mouths to feed, plus my dad, there's really never a lot of food because we were always hoovering it up the moment it arrived. My mom was not, and she would be the first to admit this, she was not a great cook because cooking for 11 people was about volume, not about finesse or style. She had a couple of things that she did all the time that she was terrible at because you had to time, like pork chops were always hockey pucks. They were always just little kind of curled cups with like a little floating,

little well of fat in the middle where the... I think that's why they put applesauce on them. That's exactly. You had to drown that stuff in applesauce just to be able to bite it when I was a kid. You know, big pots of spaghetti. You know, we're Catholic, so a lot of fish ticks on Friday. And my mom, like Mrs. Paul's fish sticks or Gortons or whatever, probably Mrs. Paul's fish sticks.

And then my mom had so many of her recipes, especially when we were going through her recipe box, working on this book because we wanted so many family recipes in there. My mom's recipes were often cut off the back of a box of some other ingredient. Like my mom's idea of a sauce for the fish sticks was you took a can of tomato soup, Campbell's tomato soup, and did not dilute it, just heated it up and spooned that over the condensed tomato sauce, tomato soup over the fish sticks. And I'm pretty sure she saw a photo of that in a magazine or on the back of a box of Mrs. Paul's because her mom never taught her to cook. She didn't have a time to learn to cook, again, just volume.

And she became a mother in 1945 as a first child, and I'm 1964. So we're exactly the baby boom. And that's when the explosion of processed foods and frozen foods and all that. So that's what we lived on. That and just unlimited helpings of television. And so when I think of my mom's kitchen, I think of someplace very warm and loving and fun and active, but I don't think about the food that much. I grew up in a very Catholic community in Minneapolis,

and there were a lot of huge families, the Mahoney's, the Woolseys. And they fell into two categories. The kind of, I was going to say feral, but I'm going to be careful. What a feral? Free-range children. I was the feral version of that. I was the youngest.

And so I kind of was off the leash. And so it was come one, come all. We're feeding 13 kids. So, you know, who cares if it's 18 or 21 or, you know, their kitchen was always open. That was not our house. At 5 o'clock, which was about a half an hour before my dad came home. My dad was home by six to have his bourbon and branch and get angry at Walter Cronkite. And he would bite through his pipe stem going, oh, it was subversive.

And by the time my dad came home, half an hour before my dad came home, everybody had to be out of the house. Only children. No friends. Everybody got out. Okay. And my mom would like brush out her hair and make sure like she was looking at her best when when dad came home. Oh, okay.

All right. So very, very, um, sort of formal. Sorry, I, I really don't do that, do I? But you always look your best. You don't have to do that, darling. I'm actually not even sure I'm. You're most glamorous. So do you, are you waiting with a bourbon and branch and a pipe, you know, when, I'm usually, I'm usually, I'm usually not even home.

But I was going to say the other version of that family were the kids who ate in shifts. and if you missed your shift, you missed dinner. We didn't eat in shifts, but we did eat fast. That was one of the things that, like, one of the things that Evie noticed about me when we first started going out is that I would inhale the plate at the restaurant. She's like, why are you, what's happening over there?

I'm like, if you didn't eat fast, you wouldn't get seconds. I also think it's funny. Your family does not even acknowledge or know what family holdback means. You know, if you go to a professional, party and you want to say, you know, don't eat everything. Family hold back because, you know, let our guests have, that just doesn't work with your family. Everybody's like, no, I'm going now to get what I want to eat now. Okay, so it's elbows out. Everyone's like, exactly. Elbows out. And keep your eye on your glass of milk when I was a kid. You'd keep your eye on it because if you

didn't keep an eye on it, somebody would have balled up their paper napkin and thrown it as had basketball shoot it into your milk. And it would go in there and you would go in there and you would see it because the napkin was white and the milk was white, but it would just swell up and you'd go to drink and you'd get a mouthful of napkin. It was fantastic. Oh, that is crazy. Were you on the receiving end or were you throwing those little napkin balls? I was the youngest. I was in the receiving end all the time. Oh, okay. Poor little Stevie. You both grew up in the same area of coastal South Carolina. Your families were friends, but you didn't know each other. Well, we sort of met. We met, I don't know, honey, a couple of times. One of us is a year older. And I'm not so

was to say who. And she went to the all-girls school. And I went to a school that had been until shortly before I got there, all boys. So they kind of mixed on grades, like eighth grade dance, ninth grade, dance, that sort of thing. So we didn't meet that way. And our parents knew each other, but it's not like our families did things together. No, but we had a friend who's so funny at our rehearsal dinner. Yesterday was our 31st wedding anniversary, by the way. Oh, congratulations. Yeah. So 31 years ago, or he stood up and he said, I tried to introduce these two, what, like four times, honey, I think it was.

Yes. And when I finally told him that I asked Evie McGee out, he goes, I'm glad to hear you finally got your ducks in a row, Colbert. I've been waiting for years to realize that I've been right this whole time about her. That's fate, though, because you had to meet, sometimes when it's right,

it's right on time and you had to meet at the right time. That is totally right. I've been telling our kids, don't rule out someone you know now. You never know. They might become more interesting when you're older. I don't, I think I would always have been interested in you. I'm definitely on the, the, getting the dirty end of that stick in this conversation. That's the right thing to say. That's like a Jerry McGuire line. I would always have been interested in you. That is exactly. But that's not true. I, we were, I was not nearly, you know, hip enough for you with your cool music and all that stuff. Anyway, we won't get into it.

The first time we actually met, though, you were very frosty and distant. I attempted to be interested in you. And you wanted nothing to do with me. She was a frost queen on a glacial mountaintop at a distance. I could not have reached her with a grappling hook. She was so distant. So the same friend, Scott, we were talking about and tried to introduce us during a college party, and we were both there.

And I was about to go study abroad for a year in England. I didn't want anything to do with a guy from my hometown. I was, you know, too, maybe I was just too obnoxious. I was like, oh, come on. Boring. And I had been enjoying the party very much before she got there. So I probably wasn't looking my best. So you were a little loose.

He was a little loose. I was dancing in a dance called The Worm. Yes, he warmed his way over to me. I was like, you just keep worming on by, buddy. All right. That's a, I'm picturing that in my mind. Yeah. quite graceful. So when you finally met, one of the things you connected over was just your memories

of South Carolina. And one of those things was the food. Food in South Carolina is a very particular thing. People may be kind of familiar with low country food. They may see it on a menu and it's usually shrimp and grits. But could you sort of describe what low country cuisine is and why it's so special to you? Well, I think like you said earlier, there's a lot of seafood because we're on, you know, at least at Charleston, we're on. the coast and, you know, that's what low country means, right? Right up against the coast. And so a lot of fresh seafood, a lot of shrimp, a lot of flounder. You know, when we were younger, I mean, no one would have anything besides grouper or flounder or things that they caught right here off the

island. You know, tuna or salmon wasn't really a thing back then. And crabs, lots of crabs. And then lots of rice. Rice is, you know, Charleston's staple. And, you know, you know, Charleston's staple. You just have rice with everything. There's a major, obviously, because of the Atlantic slave trade, there's a major West African influence. My favorite thing in the cookbook is something that I had, I mean, almost on a daily basis as a kid, which is red rice. And a lot of different parts of the country do red rice. And we do our red rice in a particular way. And it's very much like Jolof rice from West Africa, Okra, West Africa,

sesame, peanuts, all of that, highly influenced. And also pretty simple. It's not a very complex or like sauce-based cuisine. It's fresh foods, local ingredients, done in a simple way, not a lot of spices. Matter of fact, when we have Hopinjohn every New Year's Day for good luck, which is beans and rice, and then we have collards with it together. And Evie insists that we have it, no matter where we are in the world,

if we're on trip. So we have to get beans and rice someplace and some sort of greens to have. We can have good luck. I always say, like, I'll put a little hot sauce on there. And she's like, Stephen, we're not from New Orleans. We're from Charleston. What are you doing? I'm like, I'm allowed to Ed's.

I know it's not a part of the cuisine because there's really nothing spicy. Not a lot of garlic, you know? It's really, it sounds bland, but it's not bland. It's just, I think it's because the ingredients are often so fresh and fresh produce. Take everything beautiful about like West African cooking and then tone it down with an English palate. That sounds awful, though, actually. I don't know if I'd describe it quite that way. I'm just shooting you straight, Michelle.

No, it's better than that. It's better than that. But it just, you know, I think it was just what you had, right? And so people would season with, you know, whatever herbs or the kind of things they had. But not a lot of garlic. It's interesting. Not a lot of garlic. You know, I often think if America's going to find each other, it's going to be through food.

Oh. I read this cookbook. And I thought, is this my mama's cookbook? because I am from Minnesota, but my father's from Birmingham. And so my mother fixed a very southern palette. And everybody, you know, of color up north usually is from the south, you know, because of migration. Where was your mother from? My mother is a fourth generation, Minnesotan, which is unusual. But if you go back far enough, it goes back to Chicago and then Kentucky and then New Orleans. So everybody moved north. But when I read, you know, collard greens, harmony, I was like, wait a minute.

This is, we're eating the same food. We grew up eating the same food, not as much seafood, but it's just really interesting. Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, I think what we found when we're working on the cookbook is, and when we want to sort of find recipes we wanted to share, you know, it's all wrapped in memories and they're happy memories, right? So you want to find, you want to sort of share the food that we grew up with, you know, that was in the kitchen, as we're talking about, right? And so there are recipes, a lot of recipes in the cookbook that we, we made for our own children, and we raised our children in New Jersey. So, you know, there were different, different kinds of things that we also added. But I think what was really fun for me as we started this process

was going back and thinking just about that. Like, what was the palate? What was, what was sort of, what made it my mom's kitchen? What made my youth when it was local food and it was easy recipes? It was half of everything we ate was out of the Charleston Receipts Cookbook, which was a junior League cookbook at the time that my mother just cooked everything out of. So I have to ask you about that. The Charleston receipts cookbook. Because when I first got a copy of the cookbook, you know, you never read a cookbook start to finish.

You just open up to a page. And I opened up a page and it said receipt instead of recipe. And I thought, is there a typo? You know, I had somebody text me that. I had a good friend of mine say, you're not going to believe it. They didn't catch this. And I said, go back and read the introduction. It's true.

I just say receipts and Stephen says recipes, you know, we just figured we'd stick with what we know. Charleston loves their old-fashioned nomenclature. You know, it's not a portrait piazza. It's not a terrace. It's a loggia. It's not a recipe. It's a receipt. It's not, it's not, it's not limea beans. It's civi beans. It's not black-eyed peas. You know, all those very specific things. Because they just, they just, Charleston has to be different. Charleston, like, almost wants to be its own country and it tried once. Just not bring that up. No, what are he talking about? What are you talking about?

But I love those old, I love those old recipes or those old receipts, especially, like, in the original versions, like in the first printings of Charleston receipts, the ingredients are so vague at times. It's like a good amount of butter, you know, add salt as you wish. Heaping spoon. Right. A heaping spoon. You don't know what size food. My mom, there's one recipe in the book, which is this fudge recipe. And she didn't have many recipes that didn't come from the back of a bottle of chili sauce or something.

But fudge, she learned from her mother. I don't know why, but her mother, who did not know how to cook, knew how to make fudge. It's a very particular type of fudge. It's not that kind of that gluey stuff that you get at some vacation destination. And I don't know why fudge is associated with vacations, but it is. Her fudge was very specific, but she never wrote it down. She just told it to us and showed us. everybody in the family's got a different recipe, a slightly different version of it.

And my mom's ingredient, when you have to add butter at the last minute right before you whip it and get it shiny. And she said, oh, about the size of a, she said to me at least, oh, about the size of a medium egg. That's how much butter you're supposed to use. I'm like, what, eggs come in medium? I just didn't realize that was a weird term until I was an adult. Literally, until I went to go right down the recipe for this book, I went, what does it medium egg mean? Well, I love the fudge in the book because several of your sisters. siblings have their own version of the recipe. It's almost like a Roshaman exercise.

There's four of us. They're four, and they're all definitive, four definitive fudge recipes. And the funny thing is, I think just the other day, so as Steven says, he's a lot of siblings. And I forget which one, but someone whose fudge is not in there was like, how come my recipe's not in there? Oh, no. Oh, no. That's for the website. That's right. But as I keep saying, I think it says so much about Stephen's mother and the wonderful way she raised her children that every single one thinks they're right. I have the definitive version. My sister Mary says that we have double dominant pride genes. Yeah, she might she might be right about that. But in a good, in a good way, not in a bad way, not in an obnoxious way,

in a self-confident way. So I wonder if your siblings' personalities are evident in their interpretation of the recipe. So Ed says that the granulated sugar has to be extra fine if you can get it. Is he particular in all things? That is such an interesting question. You speak, Stephen, but I think the answer is yes. What does that say about Ed, you mean? Well, Ed's a lawyer.

He's very detail-oriented. Yes, he is. He's very attentive to getting things right, you know. Yeah, and he's so specific that it'd be like him to have an ingredient that is hard to get. See, I knew there was something there. And now Margo uses much more butter than anybody else. That is Margo. I think Margo is, I think that's, you know, on the food pyramid, that's her vegetable.

Yeah. She'd be the first to admit, you know, why do we need vegetables? We were having dinner the other day and she turned to me literally where to restaurant. She said, I'm just going to give you my broccoli. I mean, she's not, it's too funny. I'm not going to pretend I'm going to eat this. That's been her entire life. I love, Michelle, that you're asking this question.

I think it's so funny. I've never thought about it that way. What does it say about them? Yeah. Yeah. And your recipe is somewhere in between Mary and Ed's, the one that you cook and your family. Right. That you make in your family.

Like being the youngest, you borrow from everybody else. Yeah. When do you make this fudge? Is it a holiday treat? Yeah, it's more of a wintertime thing. You just made it, didn't you? Yeah. Do you make it together as a family?

We used to. We did with the kids. I've talked the kids how to do it. Yeah. I've talked the kids how to do it. I don't know if they remember. The other thing we make at holiday time with the kids is the candied orange rinds that are in there. They are so funny.

They hardly ever throw away the peel of a tangerine. If they eat it in our house, they just stick it in the freezer. We always have a plastic bag riding it out in the freezer filled with chandrine rinds as the year goes on. That's the other thing my mom did. That's another thing that she learned from her mom. And again, very old-fashioned. You know, candied orange rinds is like a candy treat from the 18th century. entry. The ship would come in from old Cathay with oranges and lemons and stuff like that, and you wouldn't

throw anything away because you wouldn't see it again for another year. Oh, citrus was such a treat. Exactly. So you would just keep the peel, lose all the pith, and then you would boil it in sugar. And that's basically all it is. You're boiling it in sugar water and then letting it dry. And then tossing it with some, Ed will like this, castor sugar, some super fine sugar. And it's like you're making a little lemon drops and orange drops. I love it. My mom always did that at Christmas time, sometimes dipping it in dark chocolate. And I helped her when I was a boy. And then when she passed, I took that over as, I don't know, my contribution to the family. And I try to put it. together little kits of it at Christmas time and send it to my brothers and sisters in my mom's memory. You package it up and everything. I send a cocktail to my brothers and sisters every year. And it started the year after my mother died, which was, what is it, 11 years ago now, hon? 12 years ago now. And my mom's drink was an old-fashioned. And that's sort of the family drink. And old-fashioned with a slice of candied orange rind in there, that is it on a stick, baby. And so that year, I made a lot of candy,

orange rinds, and I send out an old-fashioned kit. And every Christmas, I send them a different cocktail with some candied orange rinds. Both cook a lot. And you cook together. We do now. We didn't for 30 years. What's the story there? Because your kitchen personalities collide? One of us does. One of our personalities collides. I think, Stephen, that's a lovely way to put it. I'm going to steal that, Michelle, and I'm just going to say our kitchen personalities collide. Okay, who's the bossy one? Who's the bossy one? That's very nice of you to not leap to conclusions, Michelle.

Well, that's usually what happens in the kitchen. Yes, yes. Some people take on a bit of a commander personality when they pick up a spatula. Yeah. So this is kind of the spoon story that we refer to in the cookbook. So years when we were first married, I was in the kitchen and... I mean, first married. like, I mean, we're literally just back from our honeymoon, I think.

And we had been given non-stick pants for Christmas, for our wedding gift. And I was scraping the bottom of a non-stick pan with a metal spoon. And Stephen walked in and looked at me like I had grown, you know, two heads and said, what about a wooden spoon? And as he says, you know, a gentle way, as I heard it an aggressive and horrible way. And I like to say that I put my metal spoon down. down and I walked out of the kitchen for 30 years. When he was in it, when he was in it.

Exactly. When I was in the kitchen, when I had something I was working on, he was like, I'm just going to let you do that. I'm not even going to try to try to help you because you're not going to like how I'm chiffonauting the basil. I don't even think that chiffonauts are real words. But I will say this. I will give myself this much credit. Now that I've heard you tell this story recently. And I want to, I want to defend myself and say that maybe I was, maybe I shouldn't have done that.

But when you put down the spoon and walked out of the kitchen, I didn't pursue you and say, why are you being like this? I just watched you leave. And I went, okay. So this is part of being married too. What just happened. That's, well, we've got to that quickly. Well, I mean, honestly, we're sort of being funny because the truth is, you know, for so long,

our schedules were very different. Stephen worked nights. I worked days. We didn't really cook together because we weren't ever really able to. And then we had three very young children. And Stephen would still work late nights. So even when we had young children, I'd be cooking, you know, the chicken nuggets and the mac and cheese kind of thing. And Stephen, you're much better and more adventurous cook than I am. So you don't know what better, but I think I enjoy like the adventure of it. Right. So you would make ambitious things. And I would be intimidated by that. And at the same time, I'd say, but we have three little mouths over

here. So I'll just whip up some mac and cheese while you go make some gorgeous something. So we made it work. I don't think the kids, Ev is, I don't think the kids really want the port wine reduction on the chicken nuggets. I'm like, look at more than more for me then. Rumelod? What's that? What?

Exactly. Exactly. So you have three kids. Peter, John and Madeline. Madeline, I assume, named for your sister. Evie? Yes. Yes.

Yes. who was named for my grandmother, actually. And by the way, there's a great recipe for Madlands on the cookbook that I plan to tackle also. But when you worked on the cookbook, I wonder if there was a bit of a sandwich thing going on. You were honoring your mothers. And in your case, your mother was ailing as you were working on the cookbook. Correct. And at the same time, giving a gift to your children.

So they would always have these memories and these recipes going forward. Right. It was emotional. It was absolutely, and it became more emotional, right, because mom died in November of 2022 and we weren't finished with the cookbook. So everything took on a different meaning for me. And then my father, who just passed this past April, he was excited about it. And so now that I don't have either one of them, it's such a treasure for me because I know they both knew about it. And it became very much something, as you said, a way to honor them, but also, so a way for our children to wrap in in food all their memories of their grandparents and of Stephen's mother and of their aunts and uncles and all the life that we've had with them up to now. And, you know, I think it's a mark in time for them. And they're funny. They look at it and think, well, you never made some of these things for us, you know, because we didn't have fancy meals, right? We did sometimes. But a lot of it was basic food that we would cook. I mean, a lot of the recipes in there

I made for them so often they didn't want them anymore. I made the swordfish recipe, which I love. After a while, they were like, I don't want that anymore. Or the lemon chicken. I'm tired of that. No more pork loin. No more pork loin. We're good with the lentil soup for now, Mom.

Yeah, exactly. All those things, we cooked a lot for them. And I think when they're our age, they might open up this cookbook and say, wow, remember Mom's lentil soup, you know? So you're right. It is a wonderful way to capture that for them that maybe they don't know now. They might appreciate later. For me, one of the most beautiful aspects of it was the time that you spent with your mother

because your mother more than knew about the book. She was very influential. And she was excited about it, very excited about it. It was so endearing, so moving, so heart touching to see the two of you have that time together to go through these recipes. She could talk about her mother and what she learned from her. You know, she was passing down a tradition to you and the stories and what foods went with what party. Right, right, right. My mom did not have much of a card catalog,

but one of the things she had in her card catalog was a layout. My father was an academician and an administrator at various universities, and she would have to throw faculty parties. And so she'd have a list, and some of these were back to St. Louis in the 1950s, and it would say, how much does it like a, how much is a handle of scotch, how much is a handle of bourbon, of vodka, gin, almost no wine. There was like almost no wine ever on the list back then. It was just hard liquor, mostly brown liquor, and not a lot of mixers either.

And then, you know, jello mold salads and stuff like that. And she would, and she would, she had to do a budget. And I remember, like, a party for 150 people was like $300 or something, something crazy like that, like from, from 1954. But I loved that image of her as a young wife having to throw the party for the other faculty members of the other administrators and her having a plan. She had the sheets of paper. And we had like five or six different parties planned out on pieces of paper in her recipe box

that she kept into her 90s. I'm sure she didn't look at that, you know, after the Kennedy administration. You know, can we just say a word about those recipe boxes? I lost my mother too this year. Oh, I'm sorry. Going through those boxes, they are archaeological treasure. Totally. You know, they're more than recipes inside there.

There are commentaries and dreams. And, you know, my mom had a recipe where she wrote Nailed It. Oh, cute. That's so cute. Which means that it must have been recent because that's not something she would have heard my kids say that, right? Because that's not something that she was 93. that she would have said. But I wondered, who was at the table? Like, who was she trying to impress? So, when you went through your mom's boxes or files, because Stephen, that sounds like she had a whole,

like, treatise on how to throw a faculty dinner. What, where did they keep those little boxes or those folders? And what did you learn when you went through them? Where'd you find yours, hon? My mom didn't keep filing cat, you know, she didn't have things on index cards. She had dog-eared cookbooks. So that was another thing I did with her. We pulled out all the old cookbooks. And she would say, you know, this is the recipe, but then I adapted it. And then we'd have to try to figure out how she, because she didn't write it down. So she, like her pickled shrimp, I think we made it 10 times before she said, you've got it,

that's right. Because she couldn't really remember how she would do it. She just knew it wasn't quite that. It was different. But in some ways, I think what she could. kept notes of, which were really fun to look at, were who came to her parties, the names of the people, you know? And sometimes she'd have the menu written out what she was going to serve and the names of the people invited. And that was her sort of documentation of that event. And as we say,

I love your family's postmortems where they would take out the list afterwards. They're all right, who showed up and who did what? And they would go down. And what did they do? Really, doing a post-mortem is a really interesting exercise. Isn't it? It's funny. And then your family looked forward to it. They would sit down. They'd finally get people out of there. And then they would, generally speaking, your mom and dad would refresh their drinks one last time. And then sit down in an easy chair and go, all right, let's go over the list. Who showed, who didn't show, you know? The funny thing I remember about them, again, it's a small community. My father was born and raised here. My mother moved here. She was from Marion, South Carolina, but she'd been here since she'd gotten out of

college. So they knew a lot of the same people and they all moved in the same social circle. So they always had the list of people that they owed. Like in other words, someone had invited them, they had to invite those people. And they categorize it with like, you know, okay, so they didn't come. We invited them. Maybe we don't have to invite them next time. It was like a real balance sheet, you know, of who's up, who's next. So do you two do this now? And would you admit it in front of a microphone? That's funny. Sure. We haven't actually had a planned party in a while. We used to have big Christmas parties, which were so much fun.

They were sort of multi-generational where we'd have families so people would bring all their kids. And we did a lot of singing around the piano. But, you know, we raised our kids in Montclair, New Jersey, which is a lovely suburb outside of New York. But it's a wonderful community. And we made so many friends there over the years that it's just been wonderful to have a whole group of our own like my parents had here of people that helped raise your children. They'll always be friends. And we do a massive Thanksgiving every year. Yeah, we have a big, huge Thanksgiving.

Like our family, a whole other family, stragglers, friends, you know, people who are like, don't have family in town at the time. And it's usually 25, 26 people. And do you cook or cater? We cook. We cook. And what's funny is because it's two families and sometimes more, you end up with two, sometimes three turkeys.

Because everybody would know, I have to make. make it my way. We don't really plan. We just go like, what are you guys doing? What are you guys doing? And then nobody stretches anything off their list. Everybody just does what they want to do because your turkey is not going to be as good as our turkey. You're not going to make the stuffing right. You're not going to make the, you can have the wrong cranberry sauce. What are you doing? That's not how you do Brussels sprouts. Okay. The post- autumn after this sounds like it would be really interesting. Exactly. You see, we're all very competitive. So it, you know, it definitely is to sit down and say, all right, maybe their stuffing was dry this year. Maybe our stuffing was dry this year. Our stuffing's never dry Because we actually stuff it It's not dressing We put it in the bird

Salmonella be damned I have never met a salmonella I couldn't handle Oh God Everybody just grow up And put it in the bird That's tempting fate Don't say that

So there is that whole debate Over stuffing versus dressing Yeah Yeah It's not a debate Someone's wrong It's stuffing We do both

At least that's what my family We do it too where you stuff it, but then you also make more dressing like a casserole, right? Because you don't often have enough in the bird when you have that many people. And also, you have people who might not want it with sort of in the turkey. They might want more of the casseroles dressing. Some people don't eat turkey like Evie. And so we make a little tray on the side and she has her sad little dry bread. I just recently, maybe five years ago or something, I don't know.

I stopped meat. So I eat a lot of seafood, but I don't eat meat. So do you do, what is Christmas? a feast of the seven fishes that do you do very heavy seafood for the Christmas holiday? I'm the only one like that. And I, you know, I'm a real joiner, I guess. I don't know. So I just fill up on sweet potato and rice and vegetables and we have turkey and we have beef tenderloin and I don't eat it. And we have an oyster pie. We have an oyster pie if it's ready, which it never is. It's always too wet and it takes forever to set up.

Oyster pie is complicated and it's not familiar to people. in many parts of the country. Can you just talk a minute, Stephen, about oyster pie? Oyster pie, at least the low country oyster pie that we grew up with, it's pretty simple. It's oysters with their liquor and milk. So you're not shucking them. Well, at least we usually get them already. Shucked. So they're in a container with their, with liquid. And like a mason jar? Makes it faster. They were recently shucked. I mean, they're local oysters, but local oysters shucked with the liquor from the oyster shell in there. and then whole milk, cream, mace, butter, salt and pepper. Sherry and a little sherry.

A little sherry. A little sherry. And then a cracker crumb top. Ritz. Or do we do saltine. Salteen. Salteen. Just plain old suss, crumbled, saltine, cracker crumbed top.

And then you put it in the oven. And I don't know why, but this always ends up being the last thing that goes into the oven every year. And it's the thing that takes almost as long as the damn turkey because it's so wet that it really needs over an hour to cook, and it's never ready on time. And it ends up being essentially an oyster dessert pie. So we always have plenty left over, and I'll send you some this year. So this year in the cookbook, we decided to abandon the oyster pie altogether. And we just took the oyster pie recipe and just put it in the shell. So it's like individual little oyster,

like little oyster tarts. Oh, okay. That probably cooks much faster that way also. Oh, yes. You can broil it. It's like little oyster Rockefeller. It's really good. That actually sounds great and you can almost pass them if you do them earlier. Right, right. There aren't any recipes that call for mace. No, there aren't. And we all know what mace is, right? I'm not sure that many people do. It's the shell of the nutmeg. Oh, I didn't know that.

The shell of nutmeg, yeah. So it's, and that's ground specifically. Yeah, you just grind that separately. And has a different taste, almost like chickory, like a more of a bite to it than the nutmeg. What is on the Christmas table in your home that people might find surprising or that you might not see in other people's homes other than that oyster buy. Well, now our beef Wellington has been for the past

five or six years. I don't know if that's, maybe that's kind of traditional. Wild rice. He makes that. He makes that. He makes that. Patty, Patty, for many years, for many years, she was like, I wish we could have a Beef Wellington. So one year, I mean, it's probably seven years ago now, I said, okay, I'll do it. I'll make it be Fallington. And I, you know, I was nervous about it. But it worked out pretty well. It worked out pretty well. So we've been doing it every year since then. Now, one of the first people we meet in this cookbook, Evie is your mother. And it begins the first recipe of these cheese biscuits. Right. Which you deliver on Christmas morning. Right. And the picture is just so beautiful with that single pecan on top. Is that a tradition that you still carry on? Yes, yes. I do it sometimes in New Jersey, but we spend every Christmas back down here in Charleston. So even after my mother was gone, my father, my sister and I would make them with my father and still take them around and deliver them to people on Christmas Eve. And the funny thing is, people want, they call them Patty's cheese biscuits. Are we going to get Patty's cheese biscuits? Are you still going to do it? You know, so I don't know, now the dad's gone. This Christmas, my sister and I'll have to decide what to do. But,

Last Christmas, we definitely did it with dad. I think he got to do it. You got to do it. You just can't stop, you know? Because it's interesting, right? Food holds so many memories. And mom's close friends and so many people who love both my parents, they take a bite of that and they think about my family and my parents.

And I don't want them to lose that. And I don't want to lose that. That's the first thing I had to eat in your family's house was a cheese biscuit. The night I came to pick up Evie for our first date on December 26, 1990. And I showed up to the door and I rang the doorbell and I heard these wingtipped shoes come to the door and I went, oh my gosh, it's your father. Oh my gosh, I haven't dealt with a father in a long since high school. Oh, boy, I've got to change my, got to change gears here. He opened the door and goes, she's not ready, son.

Come on in. And so he takes me back and he goes, can I get you drink? And I said, sure, what do you got? And he said, I've got bourbon and I've got vodka. And I knew, I knew because he's. He, by the way, probably had way more than that. He just probably was like, I'm just not going to mess with anything else. And he said, I'll take a bourbon.

And he goes, and bourbon and what? And I, you know, I was a 26-year-old man or boy, really kind of at the time. And I wanted a bourbon and ginger ale, but I knew that you couldn't say, give me my bourbon with something sweet to a middle-aged Southern man because he would judge me. And so I said, bourbon in something. And he goes, I have water and soda water. I said, okay, I'll take soda water. And so when Evie walked in the room, when my wife walked in the room, I was drinking bourbon and soda and I was having a cheese biscuit. And that'll always be there home to me.

That'll always be a happy thing. And at Christmas time, I have to have a bourbon and soda and I have to have a cheese biscuit. And I'm right back there in the room with Peter McGee and Patty McGee, who also came down before Evie did. Your mother beat you into the room, too. Well, you know, maybe I was just sitting up there twiddling my fingers. You'll never know, will you? No. You know, just making you wait a little bit.

Sure, sure. I have loved talking to both of you, and I will raise a toast in Charleston from our home in Washington, D.C. We always gift our listeners with a recipe, so we'll have the fudge recipe. I think we have to post all four versions of it. But only make mine. But just make mine. And people can decide which one they want to do. And I think we also have to share a few of the other things we mentioned, the cheese biscuits,

maybe and also the candied orange rins, the tangerine rins. Lovely, lovely. In fact, I might throw one of those in a little bit of that orange rind in my bourbon and soda. Highly recommend it. Yeah, very good. And the thing about the cheese biscuits? The thing about the cheese biscuits, mom was a woman who was a brand loyal, very brand loyal, and she swore by land of lakes, and she felt that one stick of butter and one stick of margarine

both land of lakes gave you the right sort of butter to saturated fat kind of like that the right balance because the thing about these is sometimes they can taste too short like a buttery biscuit or sometimes they taste too cheesy and not and don't set up enough so it's a delicate balance that was her her big and then she was always about king arthur self-rising flour now again when you write a cookbook they don't want you to say it has to be those ingredients but you did mention land of lakes and you're talking to a gal from the land of lakes so there you go there you go she that was that For me. Mom was Mazzola forever, and then Mazzola, I guess, either went out of business or you can't get Mazzola margarine or I don't know.

But I do find now that Landa Lakes Margarine is also hard to find. Really? Yeah, I don't know why. I don't know why. But I think it really has to do with the level of saturated fat in the margarine. Because if it's not, you know, if you don't have the right consistency, it just, I mean, it'll be good. It just won't be perfect. Well, and some of these new Kerry Gold and these new sort of fancy butters are taking up shelf space.

and they're really not the same for baking. That's so true. They're much better sliced on a piece of bread than they are for baking. Yeah, that's right. So hopefully your listeners can try to find Landlakes Margarine somewhere. I have faith in them. They will find it. I do too.

Or we just have to write Landau Lakes and make sure that it stays on the shelves. Exactly. I have loved talking to both you. You too. Thank you so much for this. It's been really fun. I loved that conversation. And am I the only one who's

starving right now after listening to that conversation about all that good food? Well, if you want to make some of that food, make sure to head to our website, Your Mama's Kitchen.com, because we are going to post the recipe for the cheese biscuits. We'll have the recipe for those candied tangerine rinds. Those sound delicious. And we will post all four versions of the CoBeer family fudge recipe. You can decide which one you want to make. Maybe you want to make all four. Again, you can find that at our website, your mom's kitchen.com. Now, as always, we're opening up our inbox so you can share stories about your mama's kitchen. Memories from your kitchen growing up, your thoughts on some of the stories you've heard on this show.

We want to hear all of it. Make sure to send us a voice memo at yMK at higher ground productions.com for a chance for your voice and your story to be featured on a future episode. Thanks for listening to us. We're glad you're here. We'll hope you come back next week because we are always serving up something special. And until then, be bountiful. Hmm. Your Mama's Kitchen is a production of Higher Ground, produced by Sonia Tun,

with production assistance by Camila Thurde Kuse. Sound design and engineering from Andrew Eepin, Ryan Kuzlowski, and Roy Baum, the dream team. Executive producers for Higher Ground are Mukta Mohan, Dan Fehrman, and me, Michelle Norris. The show's closing song is 504, but so long. Rebels. Editorial and web support from Melissa Bear and Say What Media, Talent Booker Angela Paluso. And that's it, everybody. Goodbye. Take care. See you soon. Copyright 2025 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC.

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