Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast - Dr. Sharon Malone

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

Nationally renowned women’s health advocate Dr. Sharon Malone takes us back to her childhood in Mobile, Alabama where she lived through a monumental moment in civil rights history led by her sister, Vivian Malone. Dr. Malone talks about how she views cooking together with family as an act of love, and what better way to show love than baking a decadent pound cake.Dr. Sharon Malone is an OB/GYN and Certified Menopause Practitioner who has been an active advocate for reproductive rights, women’s health and health education. She authored the book Grown Woman Talk for aging women whose healthcare needs are ignored or just less talked about. She is also the chief medical officer of Alloy Women’s Health. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Chris Morocco, food director of Bon Appetit and Epicurious, and this is Dinner SOS, a new podcast from Bon Appetit. On each episode, we'll take a call from a home cook facing a real dinner emergency. Then, I'll work with one of our editors or someone from our amazing test kitchen to try and solve it. Because cooking for the people you love should inspire joy without a side of stress. Make sure you're following Dinner SOS wherever you're listening now. Are you looking for ways to be happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative?

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I see cooking as the experience I want people to have and the experience that I get to have if I do it with someone. I must say I'm a little bit disappointed in the cooking situation that I've seen with my children. They have not inherited that gene, but I am hoping they will think of me and what I did the way I think of my mother because I didn't get to do it with my mother. Welcome to Your Mama's Kitchen, the podcast where we explore how the food and culinary traditions of our youth shape who we become as adults.

I'm Michelle Norris. Today our guest is Dr. Sharon Malone. She's a widely respected obstetrician and author of a highly anticipated book on health and wellness and glowing into middle age. It's called Grown Women Talk. Sharon lives in the nation's capital, but she was raised in the South, first in the Alabama Gulf town of Mobile, and later in her teenage years, she lived

in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Malone has been pulled into the spotlight almost all her life. She's married to Eric Holder. Yes, that Eric Holder, the 82nd Attorney General of the United States and the first African American to serve in that role. And years before, when she was just a kid, her entire family was pulled into the spotlight when another attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, was responsible for protecting her big sister, Vivian Malone, when Vivian was one of the first two black students to enroll at the University of Alabama.

Dr. Sharon Malone also happens to be one of my dearest friends. We live around the corner from each other, and she, like me, has family roots in Alabama. That's a place where they know how to make a pound cake, and let me tell you something, Sharon can make a killer pound cake. In our circle of friends, she is the queen of pound cakes. We will hear more about how she makes her delectable recipe and more about her history making family coming up next. So Sharon, we always begin these conversations by asking people to describe their mama's kitchen. Just if you can, go back to that space in your head and tell me about your mama's kitchen.

Actually, I'm going to tell you about two mama's kitchens because I had my mother until I was 12 years old. So it was a very different style of cooking with my mother. And then I lived with my older sister, who was my surrogate mama. And it was sort of a different experience with those two. So you have, this is a tale of two kitchens. Yes. These are sort of the pillars in your life.

And I want to begin with the kitchen in Mobile, Alabama. My mom had a bare minimum kitchen. Now my mom was old school and we had one of those white stoves, you know, the four burners that enamel white, you open and close the oven and it makes that loud clunk noise when you close it. I don't think anything in our kitchen had ever been calibrated, nothing. It was just you turn it on and it was gas. You were just cooking with gas. Oh, and a very good skillet, I'm sure. Oh, gotta have a cast iron skillet.

Uh-huh, uh-huh. And, oh, and my mom, this is funny thing, and I know you can relate to this too. We had a pressure cooker, you know? This was pre-microwave when you had to get whatever that was done and it used to scare me to death because you know, but she would put that pressure cooker on and you would hear that jingling of that. You always, you know, were living in fear of something exploding. I was so afraid of a pressure cooker when I was growing up.

I mean, it was like a nuclear, like an instrument of war on the kitchen counter. It looked like something that was going to start some sort of like nuclear situation right there on the counter. I don't even remember what my mom cooked in the pressure cooker. Like what was it that you needed to cook under pressure? Well, one thing was you generally didn't have very expensive cuts of meat. So you could put something in the pressure cooker and it would tenderize your meat. So if you had a big tough piece of beef or something like that, you put in

the pressure cooker, I don't know what happened in there, but it would end up being edible at the end of it. We had a very small kitchen. When I look back on it now, I'm thinking, how did she ever prep? Because it was so little counter space. I think that explains a lot of why she cooked the way she cooked. She cooked a lot of one pot cooking. We had a linoleum table, the kitchen table that everybody sat at with those vinyl chairs, four chairs around it. And that was the extent of her cooking paraphernalia. The only thing I think she had, she had mixers,

but everything else was done by hand. What did your parents do for a living? My mom was a maid. She worked for many years at Brooklyn Air Force Base in Mobile, Alabama. They had officer's quarters there. And so she was the maid for the officer's quarters. My dad, if you had asked him what his occupation was, he was a farmer. My dad and my mom did not move to

Mobile until World War II. So my mom and my dad had spent all of their lives on a farm. And my dad was 50 years old before he moved to the city and actually had a proper job. And that job, he was a janitor, he was a maintenance guy, he was that, but in his heart of hearts, he was a farmer. And we had a plot of land that was so small, it's hard to imagine that you could get that much produce out of a small plot of land, but he managed. So there was always a fresh supply of vegetables. When we had fruit trees, we had peach trees, we had pear trees, we had plum trees. And that was where I think his heart really was. And did that make its way to the kitchen table?

Absolutely. Your mom, you say, was in a simple kitchen, but she fed a whole lot of people in that kitchen. You're the youngest of eight kids. I cannot imagine how she cooked for that many people. Now, and in fairness, there were never all eight of us there at the same time. We kind of grew up in shifts. So the first shift of kids, she was probably cooking for six or six people at a time because my mom and my dad and at least four children at a time and three of those four children

were my brothers. So they were, you know, you had big dues that you had to cook for. But she was resourceful. And when you don't have a lot of money, you learn to be that way. You learn how to stretch things. I don't think my mother ever money, you learn to be that way. You learn how to stretch things. I don't think my mother ever in her life cooked more than one chicken. So whether you had 12 people or you had two people, one chicken. And you either cut it up and made stew and did all of that. You put chicken in dumplings or you put vegetables in it. But there was never going to be two chickens.

So she learned how to stretch that. Yes, she did. Mm-hmm. Chicken and rice, smothered chicken, chicken fricassee. A lot of smothering. A lot of smothering. So when people think about Alabama, they think usually about Birmingham or Montgomery because of, or Tuscaloosa maybe, because of the things that have happened historically. That's where your mind goes when you think about the state of Alabama a lot of People don't know a lot about mobile

Mobile that what makes it different from the rest of the state of Alabama is we're on the Gulf Coast and You know for all of Alabama. This is the only portion of the state There's only about 60 miles of coastline because 20 miles to the east you're in Florida, 20 miles to the west you're in Mississippi. So a lot of our culture in Mobile is more typical of the Gulf Coast, you know, Biloxi, Gulfport, New Orleans, than it is like the rest of the interior of the state of Alabama. So what does that mean in terms of culture and what does it mean in terms of culinary

traditions? Think New Orleans. I mean, we were occupied for a long time by the French. So we have a lot of the same architecture. We have a lot of the same foods. It was before the French, the Spanish were there. So it's a very Catholic town. So more if you think more about, I would say, a less sexy version of New Orleans, that

would be Mobile. Mobile has the original Mardi Gras, which for whatever reason, no one seems to know that. Wait, wait, wait. Say that again. That is worth noting. Mardi Gras did not start in New Orleans. It actually started in Mobile.

It did not. It started in Mobile some 150 years before it was started in New Orleans. All of that, the things that you think of with New Orleans, the gumbo, the shrimp creel, all of that is really more part of our cuisine than it is the rest of the interior of the state of Alabama. So it follows the traditions of New Orleans, or it's similar to New Orleans, but it was a place where when people would visit, it appeared that there was a lot of cross-pollination between black folks and white folks in New Orleans.

Even though that was a veneer that masked a good deal of segregation behind that, when you were growing up in Mobile, Alabama, was the city at that point moving toward integration or do you still remember a deeply segregated city growing up in Mobile? Well, Mobile, I grew up on the tail end of segregation. So things had just broken down. But for everyone in my family, save me, we lived in a city that was very much segregated.

We have, you know, public schools were all black or all white. The year that I started first grade, which was 1965, was the first year that I was the first person in our family that ever went to a school that was predominantly white. And that predominantly white school was across the street from my house. I mean, literally, I could stand on my front porch and throw a rock into the playground of that Catholic school across the street. But for almost a hundred years, that school had stood there in the neighborhood,

in the front yards of all these black people who lived around, and they could never go to that school. So I started school there in that Catholic school, the first person in my family to ever sit next to, you know, a white person in elementary school. Now that didn't stand because I think that the, the Catholic diocese at that point realized there was an inevitability of what was gonna happen

when you have a Catholic school and it's that close to black neighborhood. So the school only stayed open until I finished second grade and the school was closed. The church was decommissioned and then you had a choice. You could go to the black Catholic school or again, a white Catholic school that was farther away. And then I went to the black Catholic school. You are, you're a part of civil rights royalty. Your sister Vivian, who presided over the second kitchen in our story, was a pioneer

in that she was one of the first people to integrate and then graduate from the University of Alabama. She is a woman whose picture is emblazoned in many of our minds as she stood in the schoolhouse door standing face to face with George Wallace, who was trying to prevent her and James Hood from entering the University of Alabama. And when you look at what she did and you look at when she did it and you look at how she did it, you can't help but wonder where she came from. Did some of that come from what was served up at your kitchen table, not just the food that was served up, but the wisdom and the advice and all the things that parents do and using that time when you've got everybody hostage, you know,

what they're sitting at the table. What's the connection between the kitchen table and what we saw in those historic photographs? I think to understand where Vivian came from, you really have to understand my mother. And my mother was a woman who had a very strong, positive sense of herself. Needless to say, she couldn't define herself by what she did in life. I think education was always something that was incredibly important to her because that was the thing that was denied her. And she made a point that she wanted all of her children to get an education because that

was the only way out of a life that she and my dad lived. I mean, she never wanted her children to grow up to be maids and janitors. And that was our ticket. So I think having that sort of sense of self, that esteem that you get from being around people who refuse to be less than. Hold your head high. That was how my mother was. That's how my dad was.

And so when she went to the University of Alabama, I don't think that she went there thinking, oh my God, these people are better than me. I think she knew better. She took that with her. And I think there's a huge component of faith. And we grew up, we went to church, and you had to at some point, you know, as you say, give it to God. And I think that she carried that with her when she went and that calm that you see, there was inner strength, but there was also this

sense that someone was watching her and protecting her. And I really think that that's how she got through. Do you remember how your mom reacted to that? Because they weren't with her. No. And Tuscaloosa, they were watching from mobile. My parents weren't even watching. That is the hard part. They didn't watch on TV or anything? It wasn't on TV. I talked to my older brothers and sisters who were quite aware of what was going on at that time. And they said that they had really made a conscious decision in Mobile not to cover it and not to have it be in the newspaper because they didn't want to create any sort

of racial unrest in Mobile because we were there. And so the coverage that we got and seeing that really was only from the national news, the little clips that came up here and there, but there was no contemporaneous coverage in our hometown in Mobile. Coming up, while Sharon Malone is considered civil rights royalty, it's because her sister Vivian was one of the first two black students to enroll at the University of Alabama.

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ZipRecruiter.com slash YMK. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash YMK. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. I'm Chris Morocco, food director of Bon Appetit and Epicurious, and this is Dinner S.O.S., a new podcast from Bon Appetit. On each episode, we'll take a call from a home cook facing a real dinner emergency. Then, I'll work with one of our editors or someone from our amazing test kitchen to try and solve it.

Because cooking for the people you love should inspire joy, without a side of stress. Make sure you're following Dinner SOS wherever you're listening now. Hey, I'm Andi Mitchell, a New York Times bestselling author. And I'm Sabrina Kohlberg, a morning television producer. We're moms of toddlers and best friends of 20 years. And we both love to talk about being parents, yes, but also pop culture. So we're combining our two interests by talking to celebrities, writers, and fellow scholars of TV and movies.

Cinema really. About what we all can learn from the fictional moms we love to watch. From ABC Audio and Good Morning America, Pop Culture Moms is out now wherever you listen to podcasts. Join Hoda Kotb for a brand new season of her podcast, Making Space. For season five, I am making space to talk to people

who are providing a sense of hope and inspiration when life changes course. Uplifting conversations with inspiring individuals like NFL legend Drew Brees, singer-songwriter Ziggy Marley, and today's show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie as you have never heard her before. I found faith more viscerally, not because the bad thing

didn't happen, but because it did. I promise you, like me, will leave these conversations with some wisdom for your own journey, empowered and inspired to make space in your own life. New episodes of Making Space with Hoda Kotb are released every Wednesday. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Making Space with Hoda Kotb are released every Wednesday.

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Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get podcasts. The Malone family could not watch what was happening in June of 1963 when Vivian was trying to integrate the University of Alabama, but the rest of the country could see it on their TV sets. It was big news everywhere else in the country. All eyes were on Vivian Malone, including President John F. Kennedy and his brother, the Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy. Vivian was on the verge of making history, just as President Kennedy was facing pressure

to develop his administration's equal rights agenda. In the next 30 hours, John F. Kennedy will have to make a chain of decisions deeply affecting millions of Americans and the future of his own presidency. His decisions will also affect the immediate actions of four people. George Wallace, governor of the state of Alabama, determined to defy a federal court order by personally blocking the entrance of two Negro students

to the University of Alabama. Robert Kennedy, attorney general of the United States, responsible for enforcing the federal court order to gain admission of the two students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, Negro students determined to enter the university in spite of the governor's opposition. Vivian's attempt to enroll at the University of Alabama

is chronicled in the 1963 documentary called Crisis, Behind a Presidential Commitment. It's hard to overstate how much pressure Vivian and a second student, James Hood, were facing. Vivian was just shy of 21 years old, a student thrown into the center of that national storm.

Her ambitions made her a hero to some and a pariah to all those who wanted to maintain the status quo. Facing both death threats and constant media attention, Vivian Malone was a model of calm. Vivian is the daughter of a retired maintenance man, one of eight children in the family.

Twenty years old, she has spent the last two at an all-negro college. She was trying to make a better life for herself, but it was never just about her. She was trying to crack open a door that had been closed to black people all over the country at a time when customs and even laws dictated where people of color could live, see a doctor or get an education.

The hopes and dreams of an entire race of people were resting on her shoulders as she confronted Alabama Governor George Wallace. And because President Kennedy had federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect her, his agenda and his presumed authority rested on her shoulders too. Robert Kennedy's deputy, Nicholas Katzenbach, had traveled to Alabama to ask Wallace to step aside. But Wallace was a crafty politician. He refused and instead delivered a speech on states' rights.

When the National Guard finally stepped in, Wallace made another short statement, but ultimately stepped aside. In essence, he blinked. Vivian becomes the first black student to graduate from the University of Alabama, and the Malone family was there in the stands to celebrate. Mom had everybody dressed as if we were going to the White House.

That was how we showed up. Because, you know, and that was the same thing that Vivian had to take with her. You couldn't just be a regular college student. You know, you're the only black person there you represent. You know, you got to come in there and look like you belong there. Or, as is always the case, you have to look better than someone who is not black. Because at any point in time, someone might see you and you want them to always feel proud about how you look.

You are representing. Exactly. Before we even knew what that word was. That's it. Sharon has always had a special relationship with her big sister. Vivian was a style icon and a national hero. And at a very early stage in her life, Vivian Malone became like a second mom. Sharon, your mom was 57 when she passed away.

How old were you? I was 12. And that's how I ended up living with my sister Vivian because right after my mom died, I moved to Atlanta to live with my older sister. Now my dad was still in Mobile, but there was no one else really home to take care of me and my dad, I didn't tell you this crazy part, but my dad was 21 years older than my mother. So, you know, do the math.

My mom was 57. So he was old enough to be her father. So he was old enough to be my great-grandfather, if you imagine that. So he was, you know, too old to take care of a little girl and I wasn't old enough to really be left alone. So that's how I ended up in Atlanta with my older sister. When I moved in with her, I was 12. I would come home. I'm a latchkey kid. I come home from school. I got two hours before she gets home from work and she would have, if she was going to have, whatever it was that she had seasoned it, she had put the chicken or the roast or whatever she was doing to have whatever it was that she had seasoned it, she had put the chicken or the roast or whatever she was doing, it was in the refrigerator.

And she would call me when I got home from school and she would literally say, okay, go in there, put the oven on 350, take the dissolve, put it in the oven. And then she would tell me when to start. So she would do the prep and then I would actually do the cooking. Now think about this. I was 12. I don't know many 12 year olds that, you know, in my house that I would trust with all of this stuff.

But anyway, she, I was very good at following directions and she would tell me. So that's sort of how she got sort of a leg up on dinner. So by the time she came home from work, you know, we were already an hour and a half into whatever the cooking process was and she could just come in and do the finishing touches. So you transferred to a new school, new town. What was Vivian and her husband's name was Mac. What were they doing at that point? So she worked for the Environmental Protection Agency and my brother-in-law was a resident.

He was a medical resident then. So he was not around a lot because residents then, you know, we thought it was, we think it's bad now, it was way worse then. And they had two little kids. And I think about that and I said she was, I was 12, she was 29 years old. So all of a sudden you've got a career that you're trying to pursue. You have two little kids, her kids were like four and two. And then someone just plops this 12 year old in the mix and you haven't really gotten a chance to get used to that.

It's just like 12. Huh, well that's interesting. So it was an adjustment period for all of us, I think. But I'm certain that she wanted to have you close. She did. But I tell you what was difficult. And I think about it now from the perspective, you know, as being a mother and wondering what that was like. it was a lot on her. We were both grieving because, you know,

she lost her mother, I lost my mother, but we didn't really know how to help each other because there was no space in that time for grief counseling or how do I help ease this transition? And we were really kind of flying blind through that time. And it was good to be there. But imagine, you know, you just lost your mother and then you move. You're in a new town with a new family and a new school.

All of that in less than a week. Oh, it was that, that's how quickly you moved. That was how quickly it all happened. How did you get through that? I don't know. The only thing I can tell you, Michelle, is that, as you say, everything that doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I would not wish that experience on most because again, you know, the people that you needed around you

to sort of help you get through that process, other than the people in my house, they were all strangers. I think it was a lot like my sister's experience at the University of Alabama. I think about how much trauma she must and how fearful and how anxiety provoking all that may have been. But you're doing it without your family, without friends, and somehow, someway, you have to find some inner resolve and figure out how to get through it. It's not pleasant, but you do. You know, you use the word trauma, which is a word that we kind of throw around a lot now, justifiably, because trauma seems to be raining down from the sky, particularly

right now in, you know, 2023 in America. But for a long time, trauma was something that happened to other people. Trauma was something that happened when ships went down in the middle of the ocean or when people were in the middle of war. We didn't associate the setbacks and the gut wrenching milestones in our life as trauma. We didn't register them as trauma. We might have said, you know, setbacks use a word like that. But how important is it to be able to look back and recognize, yeah, that was trauma. What I went through was actually trauma. You're right.

I mean, we didn't have a name for it then, but whether or not you give it voice, the body registers that trauma, you know, and it stays with you. And I think about how long it took me to really process everything that happened during that tumultuous period. And it really, it was decades before I

was able to give that voice, to be able to be at peace with what happened. My mother's been gone for over 50 years. And there is not a day or a week that goes by that something doesn't remind me of her. But I can think of it now from a positive point of view and not having to relive that trauma. And that was not the case for a very long time. I mean, when something happens to you

that is so either frightening or anxiety provoking, you deal with it in the here and now, or you're gonna deal with it later. But you may choose, you may choose to not deal with it right now because that's the price you pay for living. For moving forward. Yeah, and that is the experience of black people

in this country. I mean, we have chosen to move on because to live in that space is too difficult and it's too painful. We've known each other a long time. I've watched you evolve as a parent. I've watched you evolve as a physician. I've watched you evolve as a physician. I've watched you evolve as a home cook because that's something that we have in common.

We're off, hey girl, what are you making for dinner tonight? You have become a really sophisticated cook with a stove that's very different than your mama's. You know, if there's one thing that the listening audience should know, if there's a gadget, Sharon's going to find it. A kitchen gadget. You have drawers of all kinds of gadgets and an appliance garage and everything. So you become a very sophisticated cook, but you also seem to be going home a lot in the

kitchen. You need to find yourself a friend like Dr. Sharon Malone, who can make a pound cake on demand. If anybody is going through some kind of thing, if there's a celebration, Sharon shows up with a beautifully glazed pound cake. And I'm just going to make an observation that I wonder if that's a way for you to access that thing that you've put away.

If in some ways you're going back to mobile, back to your mama's're going back to Mobile, back to your mama's kitchen, back to some of those memories, but doing it through food, because there's comfort in doing it through food. I think that is absolutely the case. Pound cake means so much to me. It's a throwback to my growing up in Mobile.

And my mother made pound cake and she made pound cake. It was a multi-dimensional food. You made pound cake on special occasions. You made pound cakes when whether it was something happy or you made pound cakes when it was something sad because if you were going to a repast or something, someone had needed something or they would sit, you would bring them a pound cake. And I didn't really understand that when I was a kid. And as a matter of fact, Michelle, you may not remember this, but really the first pound cake that I made

was when our friend Gwen died. That was my first pound cake. Really? I didn't know that was your first pound cake? My very first pound cake. We're talking about Gwen Ifill, by the way, the esteemed journalist and very dear friend to both of us. And I just remember wanting, you know, it's the quintessential comfort food. It's the quintessential comfort food. And I am certain that that thought to do that really came to me because I was channeling my mother. It's like, what could you bring

that would make someone feel better, even if it's just for the moment that they're having a slice of cake and a cup of coffee. And from that, you were there at the beginning beginning and now that's my thing, pound cakes. And I have to admit, I was a little insecure about it too, because I had never actually made one before. And I was hoping it was going to be what I wanted it to be, which was a comfort to them. I mean, when you think about it, when people are grieving, that's the one

thing you want to do is to give them, you know, put some arms around, either figuratively or literally. And a pound cake is like a hug. You bring it in, it's meant to be shared. You put it out and, you know, as people come and go, as they do. In our tradition, when people die, there is always company that comes in and out. And at the very least, you have that pound cake to share. And it's got a certain weight to it, right? It's not fancy, it's not frou-frou, it's not about the frosting, although you do do that nice glaze on top of it. But it has a certain weight to it. But see, and I think that's it. That's the symbolic nature of pound cake. It's heavy.

You know, you couldn't bring a lemon chiffon pie to a repast. Well, you could, but it just would be wrong. It would be wrong. You know, that's what you learn. You learn the significance of what these things are. That was a direct link to my mother. There is no question about that because my mother was the queen of pound cakes. She was a, she didn't do a lot of frosting because that would be frivolous. You know, that's my take on a pound cake.

My mother wouldn't dream of putting a drizzle on her pound cake. The pound cake had to speak for itself. And if it couldn't do that, it just needed to go home. All right. Now wait a minute. Do you have your mama's recipe for pound cake? You know what? I do not. My mother was an intuitive cook, so she didn't cook by recipe. There are, I'd say, very few things that she did. And the only thing she cooked by recipe were things that she didn't, you know, she cooked once a year perhaps. She used to make ice cream. My mom was to, you know, make the ice cream, custard, all that, put it in the freezer. But now the old electric

freezers that you have with the rock salt, we used to do that in the summer. So to have a written record of what she cooked, that doesn't exist. But what we did have, we had the visual, you know, you cooked by feel. You couldn't ask her how much, mom, is it a teaspoon or whatever. She's like, you know, till it tastes right. Yeah, a little something, throw a little of this in there, a little of that in there. But I cook that way. I cook intuitively most of the time. So my pound cakes are never fancy. You know, they don't have all the, you know, like, ooh, you know, those little designs that you can have.

Oh, that look like the Sistine Chapel because they have all the ooze on the inside of the bunt pan. Yeah. You're right. No, no. Mine is a tube pan. It's flat on the bottom. It's no, no embellishment because as I said, the pound cake needs to speak for itself. Still, pound cake is not easy. There must be a recipe that you started with. The recipe that I actually use, I got from my sister.

She and I were just kind of coming up with it, you know, because she made, I think that was the first time I had had that version of the pound cake I got from her. And I said, wow, Marge, that is delicious. What do you do? And she said, all right, I'm going to give you the recipe. And this is your sister Margie. My sister Margie, yes.

So every time I make it, I have to say it is a family recipe, but it came to me from my sister Margie. I have to give her credit every time I make the cake. What do we learn from watching our mothers or our mother figures in their kitchens? And what have your kids learned from you? Well, I'll tell you what I learned. I think of food as, I think of food as love. It really is. The fact that someone would take the time

and put in the effort to make something that would bring you joy is, I think, something to be commended. I also see food and cooking, that experience of cooking, and this is what I've had more with my sisters, is camaraderie. It did not matter whether or not we had cooked together two years ago or yesterday. We can get in the kitchen together, my sister Margie and I, and we take turns. Who's being the sous chef? Who's the chef today?

And we can move around, work together. We laugh, we talk. So it makes a chore for most. I think most people find cooking a chore. But when you do it with someone, it makes it fun. You learn a little bit something here and there. So I see cooking as not just the, oh, I'm trying to get something to eat.

I see. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. The Uthl is a free e-newsletter from AARP that champions the idea of women 55 and older owning their age.

They offer amazing stories related to sex, health, beauty, travel, and ageism every week. The Ethel celebrates and empowers mature women so they don't feel invisible as they grow older. And let's admit it, so many women do. Subscribe to the newsletter at AARPethel.com. That's AARP-E-T-H-E-L dot com. You can also join the Ethel Circle, a closed Facebook group and safe space in which women can talk honestly about the joys and challenges associated with growing older.

Once more, visit AARPFL.com. AARPFL.com AARPFL.com Get as the experience I want people to have and the experience that I get to have if I do it with someone. Now, I am, I must say, I'm a little bit disappointed in the cooking situation that I've seen with my children.

They have not inherited that gene, but I am hoping, I'm still hopeful, that one day they will think of me and what I did the way I think of my mother. Because I didn't get to do it with my mother, but boy, do I have vivid memories of what she did and how she did it. And I brought those forward. And so even though my girls aren't really interested or my son at this point doing it with me, I hope that in the not too distant future, that will be something that I get to share with them as well. Sharon, I've loved talking to you. Thanks for bringing us back to your mama's kitchen.

And you know I love talking to you. You know we can go on for days. We can. We can. We can. Thanks so much. Love you. There's something that Dr. Sharon Malone said that really bears repeating. She said, I think food is love, and I could not agree more. We get in the kitchen and bust those pots and pans because we need to keep our people fed. We need to make our children strong and keep them nourished.

And yes, fixing dinner or breakfast can feel like drudgery. And let's be honest, sometimes it is. But preparing food is often also an act of love. It's a way of saying, you are important to me. It's a way of serving up a big dose of your heart on a plate or in a bowl or in a pound cake tin. Sharon does that every time she makes one of her famous pound cakes.

And you too can try her recipe in your kitchen. You will find the full pound cake recipe at our website, yourmommaskitchen.com. And we, of course, want to know how it goes. Send us your pictures. If you have your own killer pound cake recipe, share that too. You can also find the recipe on my Instagram page

at Michelle underscore underscore Norris. That's two underscores. And before we go away, a reminder, we want to hear from you. We want to hear about your mama's kitchens, recipes, memories, the little things that still live in your heart decades later, maybe thoughts on some of the stories you've heard on this podcast. We'd love to hear all of it. Make sure and send us a voice memo at ymk at highergroundproductions.com and your voice might just be featured in a future episode. Thanks for joining us today.

Make sure you come back next week because we here are always serving up something special. Until then, be bountiful. This has been a Higher Ground, an Audible original produced by Higher Ground Studios. Senior producer Natalie Wren, producer Sonia Tunn. Additional production support by Misha Jones. Sound design and engineering from Andrew Eapen and Ryan Kozlowski. Higher Ground Audio's editorial assistant is Camilla Thurdekus. Executive producers for Higher Ground are Nick White, Mukta Mohan, Dan Fehrman, and me, Michelle Norris.

Executive producers for Audible are Nick D'Angelo and Anne Hepperman. The show's closing song is 504 by the Soul Rebels. Editorial and web support from Melissa Baer and Say What Media. Talent Booker Angela Paluso. Special thanks to Drew Associates for providing audio excerpts from their 1963 documentary, Crisis, Behind a Presidential Commitment. Chief Content Officer Rachel Giazza, and that's it. Goodbye, everybody. Copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio LLC. Sound recording copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio LLC. See.