Niloufer Ichaporia King lives in a house with three kitchens. She prowls through six farmer’s markets a week in search of unusual greens, roots, seeds, and traditional food plants from every immigrant culture. She is an anthropologist, a kitchen botanist, a one-of-a-kind cook, a Parsi from Bombay living in San Francisco, and the author of My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking.
Niloufer is known for her ritual celebrations of Navroz, Parsi New Year, on the first day of Spring, when she creates an elaborate ceremonial meal based on the auspicious foods and traditions of her vanishing culture. The Parsi culture is some 3,000 years old and goes back from India to Persia. It’s estimated that there are now under 100,000 Parsis in the world.
Also featured in this Hidden Kitchens story are author Bharati Mukherjee, sharing her memories of the forbidden Bengali kitchen of her girlhood, with its four cooks and intricate rules of food preparation. And Harvard Professor Homi Bhabha, born in Mumbai to a Parsi family, who talks about auspicious lentils and the birth of his son.
The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. We are part of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network created specifically for independent podcasts—some of the best stories out there.
Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and contributors to the non profit Kitchen Sisters Productions .
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119 - Nancy Pearl—Librarian Action Figure
118 - The Nation's 10th Keeper—David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States
117 - Dieter Kosslick’s Last Red Carpet Ride
116 - The Bob Dylan Archive - A Curveball Comes To Tulsa
115 - You Too Can Barbecue - Stubb's Blues Cookbook Cassette & More
114 - Chamelecon—Below the Border in Honduras with Scott Carrier
113 - Filmmaker Agnés Varda — A Conversation
112 - Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Celebrating 100 years
111 - Palaces for the People—Author Eric Klinenberg from The Librarian Is In
110 - Filmmaker Wim Wenders - The Entire Caboodle
109 - Linda Spalding - A Reckoning
108 - The Dark Side of the Dewey Decimal System
107 - William Ferris—Keeper of Southern Folklife
106 - 21 Collections—Every Object has a Story
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105 - The Keepers: The Unrelenting Oral Histories of Eddie McCoy
104 - The Keepers: Emily Dickinson's Hidden Kitchen
103 - The Keepers: The Lenny Bruce Collection
102 - Archive Fever: Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française
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