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The Food Issue

CBS Sunday Morning / Jane Pauley
The Truth Network Radio
April 9, 2023 1:00 pm

The Food Issue

CBS Sunday Morning / Jane Pauley

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Hey, Prime members. You can listen to CBS Sunday Morning with Jane Pauley ad-free on Amazon Music.

Download the app today. Life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth?

And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short with Justin Long. Follow Life is Short wherever you get your podcasts.

You can also listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. The following is an encore presentation of a Sunday morning that originally aired on November 20th, 2022. Good morning.

I'm Jane Pauley and this is a special edition of Sunday Morning. It's the food issue. Our look ahead to the Thanksgiving holiday. A time to eat, drink, and be merry.

And to be thankful as well. There was a time we blamed turkey for making us drowsy after a big Thanksgiving meal. These days, Luke Burbank tells us, a new trend is making us feel mellow and very cutting edge. Call it weed, cannabis, or chronic. More and more, it's what's for dinner.

The Europe has so many different flavor profiles that the possibilities are endless. It's a whole new idea of eating your greens. Cannabis cuisine ahead on Sunday morning. Her glorious singing voice may have been stilled, but not her spirit.

Tracy Smith will be talking with Linda Ronstadt. There are many things Linda Ronstadt is known for, but cooking isn't one of them. You're not a cook. I don't cook now. I can boil an egg. So why is she in our food issue?

We'll explain ahead. As Ukrainians struggle for the survival of their country, Holly Williams tells us about the fight on an unlikely front. A Ukrainian chef does battle against Russia's invading army from the kitchen. You want to cook some borscht? I'd like to cook some borscht. Have you been doing this before?

Never before. A lesson in surviving war and making borscht coming up on Sunday morning. And there's plenty more on our menu. It's Sunday morning's food issue.

We'll be right back. It's all the buzz in the food world. Luke Burbank explores the expanding universe of cannabis cuisine. Welcome to high cuisine, the world's largest cooking competition show.

If you've turned on the TV lately or maybe found yourself in a certain high end kitchen somewhere in America, you might have noticed a new green on the menu, one you might even be able to smell before you taste it. Now that cannabis is legal in some form or another in more than half of the states, some of its top chefs are finding ways to integrate it into their recipes. Suffice it to say, the pot brownie has come a long way.

There is such a huge bridge from the brownie to where we are today. We're cooking racks of lamb, we're making intricate desserts. We're doing 10 course tasting menus that are strain specific. Now there's different levels of extractions and distillates that you can use in order to achieve the effect without the flavor or with the flavor. Chef Miguel Trinidad is known for his time on the Vice show Bong Appetit.

These days he hosts semi-clandestine, semi-legal pop-up dinners through his company 99th Floor. Dinners in which everything is infused. Where actually is the cannabis?

It's in many different stages. In the demi for the steak, we took some of the beef fat and infused that and then put that back into the demi. Here is some cannabis butter. This has been cooked extremely low temperature for a long time because I wanted to draw out a lot of the terpenes without making it taste too weedy. Terpenes are the chemical compounds in cannabis that give it that characteristic funky smell and taste and can make it a challenge to cook with. Even for noted Portland cookbook author Lori Wolf.

Learning how to cook with it is kind of learning how to cook with a really dreadful tasting spice. Wolf has written five cookbooks on the subject, earning her the title back in 2017 of the Martha Stewart of edibles. When Wolf and other chefs cook with cannabis, they say the key is to be extremely precise with the dosage going into, say, a butter board that's actually made with canna butter. Cheers.

Cheers. And Wolf says the key when eating infused food is to be very patient in waiting for the effects to set in, lest you go on a trip you didn't mean to buy a ticket for. Because it can take two, it can even take three hours on occasion, depending on when you've eaten, what your metabolism is like. For me, it's about the delicious meal and the cannabis is like extra. Back in Brooklyn, Tiffany Span is attending her second 99th floor cannabis dinner in two weeks, which she'd found out about on Instagram naturally. Can you feel the vibe shift as the night goes on and people are starting to enjoy themselves? Everyone started loosening up because I could see the whole table.

So yeah, people do start to get louder and happier. As the night wore on, Chef Trinidad's dinner moved into full swing. A parade of sumptuous plates were served, the music of Wu-Tang Clan bumped through the speakers. It truly was a meal for both the body and the soul. It's the food issue on Sunday morning on CBS News Radio.

And here again is Jane Pauley. As planet Earth is heating up, a growing number of farmers are pulling up stakes and moving north, chasing cooler temperatures their crops need for growth. Ben Tracy has a report on how climate change is changing where and what we plant. The most unusual thing about Joe Franklin's 78-acre citrus farm is that it really shouldn't be here. When I first started with it, people couldn't believe me when I told them it was grown right here in Georgia.

They didn't believe me. Oh, now you can't grow that here. But Franklin now has 12,000 trees growing fruit in the middle of Georgia.

Grapefruit, Meyer lemons, tangos, gold nuggets, satsumas, Georgia kisses, bingos. You'd normally expect to find hundreds of miles south in Florida. So I'm not going to find a Georgia peach anywhere on this land?

No, probably not. One of the main things that drove my decision to plant them was the fact that it is so much warmer now than it was 30 years ago, 40 years ago. I know when I was growing up, golly, in October you always had a couple of frosts and November you usually had a freeze.

That doesn't happen anymore. Did you think of that as climate change or did you just say something's different here? No, I thought it was climate change.

It's happening. There's no doubt about it. A month of rainless days and temperature above 100. Farmers have always dealt with the whims of Mother Nature. But now climate change is changing what they can grow and where they can grow it. Everyone knows, of course, there's global warming, but then what does it mean? Himanshu Gupta is the CEO of San Francisco-based startup Climate AI. Their platform uses machine learning to identify climate risks for food companies and farmers.

The stakes are high. Worldwide, its estimated crop yields could decline up to 30 percent by the year 2050, as the planet warms and climate change fuels more severe drought and flooding. A lot of crops, not just in the U.S., but also in Africa and India, are already seeing the impacts of climate change. If we move into the future, these areas will have a significant shift. Gupta showed us how the cranberries on our Thanksgiving tables will likely have to be grown significantly further north in the coming decades. It's going to be riskier in a lot of places to grow certain crops in the future, but this is helping mitigate some of that risk? Absolutely, and using that, you can tailor your recommendations for the food companies or seed companies or for farmers. Dramatic shifts are already happening.

There's now coffee from California and fine wines from England. But while warmer temperatures may benefit some crops, they can devastate others. In Georgia, the state's famed peach trees require significant winter chill in order to bloom come spring. So this is one of your weather stations?

Yes, we have 89 stations across the state. Pam Knox is an agricultural climatologist at the University of Georgia. She says winters here have warmed on average more than three and a half degrees since the 1800s, enough to put many varieties of peaches at risk. Researchers are racing to develop new warmer weather varieties to take their place. As warming continues, should we expect crops to kind of migrate north in some fashion, things that needed to be further south in the past? There will be some migration. There's some limitations to that.

The kind of soil you have, whether you have access to irrigation, what you've grown traditionally, because if you're a peach producer, you're probably not going to suddenly switch to cattle. Joe Franklin's bet is paying off, but he knows a changing climate likely means more losers than winners. For this to be working here means it's probably not working so well for somebody further south. Right, exactly. Do you think about those folks?

I do, and I feel for them. And it's a gamble. It's a risk you take, you know? It's one of them things. Ube, it's a yam native to the Philippines, deep purple in color that's suddenly all the rage.

Elaine Quijado tells us why. For the uninitiated, there's a growing purple phenomenon. Cakes, drinks, ice cream, you name it, and you'll find it in purple. It's called ube, a purple yam that's one of the rising exports and staples from the Philippines. It is a pretty photogenic ingredient, right? Is that purple?

That is so true. Oh my God, yes, ube is a photogenic ingredient for sure. Author and restaurateur Nicole Ponceca is a connoisseur of Filipino cuisine. Ube is one of the best ingredients that you'll find that is only found in the Philippines. It's a starchy root vegetable. It can be grown underground or even an aerial tuber.

You're going to find notes of vanilla and pistachio. Even the moment you cut it open, you'll know that it is ube by the smell. How easy is it to get fresh ube?

Oh, not easy at all. It's only really one harvesting time in the Philippines, around this time actually. But it's easier to find processed as dried powder, grated and frozen, or as an extract. I love people using the ingredient and curious about the culture, but even more so, I love that Filipino-Americans are getting more curious about themselves. How did you hear about us? I love ube, so my friend told me about this place. Ginger Lynn Dimapasuk and her husband run Cafe 86 in California. They've baked up over 50 ube-infused treats since 2014. For Filipinos, it's always, oh my gosh, I can't believe we have a cafe just focusing on ube. What is this? This one is the ube butter bar.

You have to try that one. But for non-Filipinos, it's always, what is this purple thing? It's always curiosity, but I believe that food is the gateway to one's culture. For Filipinos who first set foot on this continent in 1587, ube's growing popularity represents part of their heritage taking root.

Maybe to others it's a fad, but it's not going to go away like your normal fad because we're here to stay. And here again is Jane Folly. One of the most acclaimed restaurants in the world is celebrating a very special birthday. Martha Teichner has saved us a table at Le Bernardin. When you buy fish, what you're looking at is the eyes. Dinner at Le Bernardin starts here, at New York City's vast wholesale fish market. You can eat it like that.

At 4 a.m. That's like slime. That means the fish is super fresh. Eric Ripert, the restaurant's chef and co-owner, wants to show off the quality of the fish Le Bernardin has bought here for more than 30 years. Ever since the seafood restaurant's founder, Gilbert Lacaze, started showing up to hand-pick the best in the market.

Who is this crazy French guy? In 1972, brother and sister Gilbert and Maggie Lacaze opened their original 25-seat Le Bernardin in Paris. The opening day, it was a catastrophe. Things got better. By the time Le Bernardin left Paris for New York in 1986, it had two coveted Michelin stars.

Within three months of opening here, it received a really rare four-star review from the New York Times. I'm going to spread on it some foie gras. Raw fish dishes like the tuna carpaccio are part of Le Bernardin's DNA. I'm happy to do that. That's delicious.

Born in the south of France, Eric Ripert trained with some of Paris's most famous chefs before coming to the United States. Gilbert Lacaze lured him to Le Bernardin. I said, remember this time. This is very special in your life. And so it would prove.

Three years later, Lacaze died suddenly at 49. I was very emotional. Gilbert was a friend. And a couple of days later, after the shock, Maggie sat with me and she said, I would like for you to take the kitchen. I told him, Eric, I don't want to have the menu of my brother. You have to do your own menu with your style and your creation.

And he did. With spectacularly successful results, when Michelin began awarding stars in the United States in 2005, Le Bernardin got three, the maximum. It's never lost any.

As it celebrates its 50th birthday, it's on multiple lists of the best restaurants in the world. No pressure, right? But surprise? I'm driven about being content. That's what I want to do in my life. Be happy. Be content. And then if I am happy, I can make others happy. Ripert is a Buddhist.

Now 57, how he runs Le Bernardin is an extension of his approach to life. Cooking is a lot of craftsmanship and it's art when you are at the level of fine dining and when you are expressing something, expressing ideas that can have an impact on our society. Yes, a four-course dinner costs $198.

But the flip side is giving back. Unused food that otherwise would go to waste is collected and taken to City Harvest, New York City's massive food rescue program. Look, those are turkeys.

Eric Repaire is vice-chairman. The entire room is filled with turkeys. Last year, City Harvest distributed more than 100 million pounds of donated food to New York City's shelters and food pantries. I'm using the restaurant to try to make a difference.

As for Le Bernardin at 50. It's a work in progress. If I was satisfied and not think it's a work in progress, I'm behind. I'm bored. It's time to go. Mo Rocca is visiting a New York City institution that's no question a cut above. At the edge of Manhattan's Little Italy sits a butcher shop virtually frozen in time since it opened in 1923. I joke many times and I say it's half museum, half butcher shop.

I should like charge admission because so many people come in and they're just like, is this real? Jennifer Prezioso is the butcher, owner and fourth ever employee of Albanese Meats and Poultry, following in the footsteps of her grandpa Mo and before him, her great grandparents. This is my great grandma's handwriting. It's a very old book, I guess you could say, of orders.

This is from March 1, 1934. Back then, this is where you came for fresh meat. This whole block was full of butchers. They used to sell the cattle at Canal Street. Albanese's, which turns 100 next year, Enjoy.

Good to see you. Keep the rest. Oh, thank you. is the only butcher shop left on the block.

I could make franche's with the butter and lemon. Ann DeBonis has been coming here since she was a kid. Come here when you think of old times.

If this feels like the set of a TV show, it's eight pounds. Well, it has been. We got the rabbi! In fact, Prezioso was acting on stage when grandpa Mo started slowing down and she stepped in to help out. She was like, well, I thought you want to act. Like, that's what you love to do. And I was like, I do, but I also love to be here and tell our story every day. What started as driving her grandpa to work turned into an apprenticeship, and then Mo popped the question. He said, so when I die, are you going to take over the store? And I was like, yeah, yeah, I think I could do it. Had you been thinking about that or did it just suddenly come out of you? I think maybe a little of both. In April 2020, Mo Albanese, just shy of 96, died after contracting COVID.

You never feel like you have enough time with those kind of people that you love. And so Jennifer Prezioso is today manning the shop solo, sort of. I think he's up there very antsy like this, waiting. Like, let's go. Come on, Andiamo, what are we doing? What are we doing? I feel him excited for what's to come and we have a new lease on the store.

So we're going to be here for a few more years and I look forward to that too. It's one of the traditional dishes of Ukraine, a soulful soup providing a lot more than nourishment. Here's Holly Williams. Andrew, oh. We first met the ebullient Yevgen Klopotenko in Kiev in February before his country went to war. He's Ukraine's most famous chef, acclaimed for reviving old recipes from before the Soviet era and serving them up to a fashionable crowd in his award-winning restaurant, 100 Rockiv. His signature dish is borsh, the hearty vegetable soup that's enjoyed across eastern Europe and Russia, but which Klopotenko asserts originated in Ukraine. Ukrainians and Russians have a lot of shared history.

They have some shared culture. In recent years, you guys have gone in very, very different directions. Yeah, we are running.

You're running? Like we are running or we want to show to the world that we are Ukrainians, we are not Russians. You're different?

Yeah, we are different, totally different. But even as we slurped on our stew, over 100,000 Russian troops had massed menacingly along Ukraine's frontier. This is our territory and it's like they will never let us go.

Never let us go. Just nine days later, Vladimir Putin ordered his army across the border. Part of Putin's justification for the carnage was that Ukraine didn't really exist as a nation. 100 Rockiv closed for just three days before reopening as a military canteen. Good to see you. Good to see you too.

By July, Klopotenko's restaurant was back in business. Russia's army failed to capture Kiev and this past summer we found a strange peace in the Ukrainian capital. Life looked surprisingly normal. You don't know when you will be dead because rockets can fly in every second. So you have to live your life and you have to do the best that you can. Live for the moment.

So trust an army and do the best that you can. Klopotenko was just as frenetic as before and he'd kept busy with another project. He succeeded in lobbying the United Nations to list Ukrainian borscht as an endangered cultural tradition. This borscht means that we are fighting back, not more borscht of the Russian Federation. It's only ours, Ukrainian borscht. He gave us a lesson in how to make it, starting with blood-red beets. You have to have passion.

I've got passion for eating. One of the great ironies of Putin's invasion is that it's made many Ukrainians more certain of their national identity, more adamant that they are not Russian. And the wars made Yevgen Klopotenko a roving cultural ambassador, travelling the world to promote Ukrainian food, including at this international culinary fair in Paris. It's not a role he aspired to before, but he told us it's his way of defending his country. If soldiers will come back from the war and here are going to be nothing, for what they are fighting, they are fighting for a good life. You're fighting for your identity?

Yeah, that's it. You will feel that we are different, that we are strong, that we have our music, that we have our religion, and we have our food. And that means that we are Ukrainian.

As is so often said, ours is a nation of immigrants. Enriched by a mosaic of cultures, traditions, and on occasion, as Jim Axelrod finds out, a delicious slice of brisket. Deep in Brooklyn, at David's Brisket House, they know from Good Corn Beef and Pastrami.

Somewhere my grandmother is smiling. She'd be smiling, but quite surprised by one choice in particular of the deli's owner, Riyadh Ghazali. So you don't use kosher meat.

No. What kind of meat do you use? It's halal. Halal meat is prepared according to the laws of Riyadh's Islamic faith. Like kosher meat, the animals are raised and slaughtered ethically and humanely.

People who walk in here, they expect a certain quality of product. Absolutely. Do they get that with halal meat in the same way they would get with kosher meat? Absolutely.

Absolutely. But it's not just Brooklyn, where you'll now find halal meat where you didn't before. Those Halal Guys food trucks in Manhattan have grown into 94 Halal Guys storefronts in 17 states. You'll find halal meat at Poppy's Tacos in Los Angeles, at True Boys Barbecue in Texas, and at Angulo, an Italian spot in Washington, D.C. Chef Jamal Bouzid's latest. Whether it's Moroccan food or French food or Italian food...

I can do all. But it will always be halal. Halal. Always halal. If I choose to do Chinese, I will do halal meat. It went from 200 restaurants then to 10,000 today. No one's documented the explosion of halal meat's popularity with a sharper eye than halal food app developer Shahed Amanullah.

The vast majority of the new restaurants that are popping up on our site are, you know, Nashville Hot Chicken, gourmet burgers, Korean food, but with that halal touch. Sometimes, when it comes to an ethnic or religious group and intolerance, food walks point... Absolutely. Absolutely. ...in breaking down all the barriers.

This is the same path that Chinese restaurants, Italian restaurants, they were all formed in the same crucible. We're here. We're American. Not only are we not a threat, we're a benefit.

Wow. Exactly how Tahirah Baksh, Sameen Chaudhary, and Jania Azad describe their experience. It shows that we're kind of, we belong in the community. We fit, like, you know, we're here. Starting their own blog about halal restaurants. We called it Muslim Foodies, and we didn't think it would really go anywhere. Yeah. I guess again. Our food is here, so we have to take pictures.

They now have 55,000 followers on Instagram and 77,000 on TikTok. Have you ever been in a halal restaurant and recognized the power of halal? Yep. More than 600 Costcos and Walmarts now carry halal meat. Krogers, Wegmans, HEBs? None wants to miss out on a $20 billion a year market. You're selling all this in one day?

All that in one day. A market Riyadh Ghazali is proud to have even a tiny slice of. Brisket, corned beef, pastrami with halal meat. Should we maybe have a little hope about what's possible in the world if we can marry those cultures? Absolutely. You have a Muslim guy riding a Jewish Deli. This is the meaning of the United Nations.

Ooh, this is what brings people together. Time for a postcard from Italy. A real slice of life, served up by Seth Doan. This bustling city in the shadow of a volcano has a passion for food which explodes onto the street and has been exported around the world. Naples gave us pizza, cooked in about 90 seconds at an intense 800-degree heat. Pizza is the soul of Naples, says master pizza maker or pizzaiolo Antonio Starita. At 80 years old, he knows his wood-burning oven and whips up a margherita pizza, mozzarella, tomato and basil. One popular story says it was invented for Italy's Queen Margherita in the 1800s. Starita embraces tradition but did not like making pizza at first.

I liked it, he admitted, when I saw the money coming in. Pizza's popularity means big business, clear to anyone who's scrolled social media and seen the growing number of ads for those home pizza ovens. I shouldn't say so, but it's so easy to make. Chef Stefano Callegari, who has restaurants in New York and Rome, says far from being a threat, those home ovens may actually boost business. It helps?

Yes. How so? Because it makes you closer with pizza. And even people, they challenge, oh, it's better pizza I bake than this famous pizzaiolo, you know? The beauty of pizza is its simplicity, he says. You can eat it with your hands.

And there are few rules. You must know that pineapple on a pizza is something like devil for Italian pizzaiolo. Pizza cacio e pepe.

He uses an unusual ingredient, ice. It melts and he tops it with pecorino cheese and pepper, a twist on the dish cacio e pepe. We will see how actually it's made through Napolitano Pizza. For home pizza makers, the Verace Pizza Napolitano Association, which usually teaches pros, offers an online class with oven maker Unni, whose sales soared during the pandemic. Fior di latte is the ideal cheese. Joining from the U.S., a student in Virginia, and Stephanie and David Javier, who set up on their back deck, bringing a bit of Naples to Queens, New York. Isn't it easier just to go down the street and order a pizza?

I guess it is convenient, but there's a little bit of being able to eat what you mean, the satisfaction from that. It's not just beginners using these ovens. Pizza chef Salvatore Santucci, who has huge wood-burning ovens in his pizzeria in a suburb of Naples, showed us where he makes the dish when he's at home, his garage. And Neapolitan pizza cooks via heat, not flame, he said. Whether we have a gas, wood, or electric oven, if all three are at the right temperature, the pizza cooks exactly the same. But back at Starita Pizza...

It doesn't compare. This traditionalist was not convinced. He's made pizza for a pope and has an almost religious reverence for this.

As long as I'm alive, he said, I'll never let them take away my wood-burning oven. It's so easy to fall in love It's so easy to fall in love You might describe Linda Ronstadt's latest book as a love letter to her past, even as she faces a challenging present. Tracy Smith has food for thought from the queen of rock. Anything can get no poorer Cienes con todas los mares It seems Linda Ronstadt has always done the unexpected.

In the later part of her music career, the queen of rock started making albums of traditional mariachi music. And today, the woman who admits that she can't cook has put out a memoir that's focused, in part, on recipes, from the Ronstadt family meatballs to the perfect tortilla. Tortillas you're very particular about. Yeah, I don't think anybody I know can make them. You have to start when you're a kid and learn how to do it. I try to make them and they just look like amoebas.

Amoeba tortilla. But she can tell a good story. In Feels Like Home, Ronstadt talks about growing up on the family ranch near Tucson, Arizona. It seems to me, through this, there are two things that tie us to our past, to our family, music, and food. Yeah, our past is who we are. It doesn't have to define you.

If you have a bad past, you can make up for it. That's, you know, everybody's interested in where they came from. Both of her parents were musically inclined, so little Linda grew up with a taste for singing and just about everything that came out of her family's kitchen. So this is ranch food. It's for ranchers and farmers. It's very simple from beans and tortillas.

That's all right. Beans and tortillas are some of my favorite things. My favorite thing in the world. That's funny, yeah. I think I could survive solely on beans and tortillas.

Yeah, I could. Maybe a little bit of cheese. A little cheese.

Jinx. But her world has gotten smaller of late. It's so easy to fall in love It's so easy to fall in love It's been nearly 10 years since Linda Ronstadt could do this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah I knew you would A brain disorder called progressive super nuclear palsy robbed her of her ability to sing out loud.

So she's found other ways to say what's in her heart. Even though maybe your singing voice doesn't work, you still have a voice. Well, I still have brain cells. I think about end of life issues a lot. But we don't know when we're going to die. I might get hit by a bus tomorrow. I might die of this disease I've got.

It's slow moving, but it moves. But I just figure it's not up to me to worry about it. There are other things to worry about. And in the meantime? Like the cat peed on the rug or something.

Those are real issues. For a girl who grew up with Mexican music, it seems fitting that a Mexican song inspired her to sing again, if only for a moment. In the documentary, Linda Ronstadt, The Sound of My Voice, she joins in on a family sing-along. Did we get to eat? Yes. Oh good. So there's this beautiful moment from the 2019 documentary of you with your family.

I think it's your nephew and your cousin. And you're singing. I'm not singing. That's not singing. You don't think that's singing?

I was grunting along with him. She's also famous for being a perfectionist. But she says it is getting increasingly hard for her to hear her own music or anyone else's. So if we put on one of your songs like, Blue by You.

I go, who did that mix? It sounds terrible. And you can't hear those high notes? That's all gone. I can't either do it or hear it.

So I have to fill in for my imagination. So even if you can't hear it, you can still remember it? I can remember it, yeah.

Thankfully, so can we. Like Linda Ronstadt herself, some things are unforgettable. Pie is now served. And with it, thoughts on the common traditions that bring us together.

They're from Rishi K. Shearway, a musician and host of the show, Song Exploder. Before I was born, my parents didn't celebrate Thanksgiving. Not until my sister and I came into their lives. Suddenly, these Indian immigrants had Americans for kids. And in the early 80s, one day, after making turkeys out of construction paper in school, I asked if we could have a Thanksgiving dinner.

And they said yes. My dad learned how to cook a turkey, and we invited some of our family friends over, other Indian families. In addition to stuffing and mashed potatoes, we had a full Indian potluck. The next year, we did it again, and that was it.

It became a tradition. A couple years later, my mom introduced a special dessert into the menu, mango pie. It was made with Alfonso mango pulp, something you can really only find in Indian grocery stores. It's imported in these big aluminum cans, and it has a bright, punchy sweetness. She would mellow that flavor out by mixing it with Cool Whip and cream cheese to make a custard filling.

And then she'd pour that into a graham cracker crust. It was, and still is, the best dessert I've ever had. In 2020, the week before Thanksgiving, my mom passed away after years of illness.

We couldn't gather with others for a funeral. It was really hard, and Thanksgiving that year just didn't feel like Thanksgiving. But last year, my wife and I hosted Thanksgiving again at our house, and I made my mom's mango pie.

For me, it's a way to remember her and a way to share my upbringing with others. A wonderful thing that happened before my mom passed away was that my friend Samin Nasrat, the chef and author, wrote an article for the New York Times all about my mom's pie. She created a gourmet version of my mom's humble recipe, and it got published with my mom's name right there.

And suddenly, people everywhere started making mango pie. My mom, like so many moms, gave me a sense of who I am through food. She brought joy into my life and other people's lives through her cooking.

And I'll always be thankful for that. I'm Jane Pauley. Please join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning on the radio. Hey, Prime members! You can listen to CBS Sunday Morning with Jane Pauley ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-04-10 14:07:42 / 2023-04-10 14:22:47 / 15

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