Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, known to their vast National Public Radio (NPR) audience as the Kitchen Sisters, have devoted much of their lives to chronicling and celebrating voices, words, and traditions that might otherwise have been lost. Just in the last five years this broadcasting team has won two prestigious Peabody Awards, for their radio series Lost and Found Sound: An Aural History of the 20th Century, and for The Sonic Memorial Project.

For their most recent radio project, the Kitchen Sisters turned their attention to food, and to the ways in which food and the traditions and rituals surrounding it are windows into people, and into the relationships food helps to build among families, friends, communities, and entire cultures. The resulting broadcast series, which has become a critically acclaimed and wildly popular event on NPR, is called Hidden Kitchens: Stories of Land, Kitchen, and Community.

The book celebrates and expands on the astonishing material uncovered for the radio show. It consists of many of the stories they have uncovered over the years, often in the words of the subjects. The people populating the world of hidden kitchens are a diverse group, as diverse as the may people in the country who cherish their own unique relationships to food. The book introduces readers to neighborhood and home cooks, street vendors, foragers, writers, kitchen pioneers, and visionaries (such as George Foreman and Alice Waters), grandmothers, culinary historians and anthropologists and many more.

You will get a peek inside the many hidden kitchens that are responsible for creating and maintaining traditions, for feeding people, for keeping together families, friends, and in some cases entire communities. Featuring photos, artifacts, recipes and other illustrations and items that will bring to life these hidden kitchens, whether located in a shipyard in Michigan, fire pits in Kentucky, or outside a cabyard in San Francisco.