♪ JO RADNER: In my Fryeburg, Maine, family, pie was the tangible sign of stern expectations.

(laughter) GAURI GUPTA: And I don't realize it, but there's flour all over the counter.

My mom has to come in and pry the dough off of my hands with a butter knife.

DAVID FILIPOV: Pretty much the only thing I could keep down was lamb kebab.

Lamb, lamb, lamb, morning, noon, and night.

(laughter) THERESA OKOKON: Tonight's theme is "Food for Thought."

>> This program is made possible in part by contributions from viewers like you-- thank you.

OKOKON: How many times have you heard about some hot new chef who's putting their signature stamp on a classic dish, or a really good baker who's able to knead love directly into the dough?

Food is our anchor.

It's our comfort.

It is a daily necessity.

And across the kitchen table is where we get to know our friends and family for who they truly are.

♪ RADNER: My name is Jo Radner.

I divide my time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Lovell in western Maine.

I taught at American University for 30 years in Washington.

And then I took early retirement, moved back to my family's area of northern New England, and I'm a freelance storyteller and oral historian.

I think I've spent most of my life collecting and studying and listening to and telling stories.

Can you tell me about what role storytelling plays in your life?

For me, it's the major artform in my life, I would say.

I love words.

I was raised in a family that loves words and feel strongly that they should not be wasted.

Considering the story that you're going to tell us tonight, what is important for you in this story?

Like, why is it special and significant that you tell it?

It's actually the first story I ever was able to tell about my mother's strength.

And this story lets me show my mother in a moment of strength, determination, and humor.

In my Fryeburg, Maine, family, pie was the tangible sign of stern expectations.

The stern expecter was my grandfather, Augustus Henry Smith.

He was born in 1880.

He believed in frugality and planning.

He believed women had roles.

Women should sew; it saved money.

Women, of course, cooked, but they had to plan their meals so there were no leftovers, because, for Grandpa, leftovers were a sign of profligacy.

(laughter) Meals had to be served on time-- breakfast at 7:30, dinner at noon, supper at 6:00.

And all meals must end with pie.

This was old New England.

Oh, my grandmother lived up to his expectations.

She loved to sew.

She cooked not just pies, but bread pudding, fried dough, doughnuts, brown sugar cookies-- all the crucial cultural carbohydrates.

(laughter) But only one of her two daughters inherited that skill.

My Aunt Beth, my mother's older sister, she was Grandpa's ideal daughter.

She sewed most of her clothes.

And cooking?

She could feed a dozen people on a half a pound of hamburger.

One of her favorite recipe clippings was for fried, stuffed bologna horns.

(laughter) Just imagine.

(laughter) Now, my mother, Martie, was the family's domestic black sheep.

She loved to dance.

She studied diplomatic history.

She wouldn't cook, so my father did the cooking.

She said she would sew only at gunpoint.

(laughter) My father asked her to sew only once, and on that occasion, she replaced the worn-out snaps on the fly of the trousers of his pajamas with safety pins.

(laughter) He never asked her to sew again.

(laughter) Well, it was when my mother was almost 50 that her mother, my grandmother, died.

So, all of us immediately converged on Fryeburg to be with Grandpa-- I, my mother and father, Aunt Beth, and Uncle Bob.

And simultaneously we realized we were going to have to serve Grandpa his dinner the next day at noon.

Before Aunt Beth could propose one of her frugal casseroles, my father said, "I'll make a steak dinner!"

And then, my mother said, "I'll bake the pie!"

(laughter) There was a stunned silence.

She looked so hopeful.

(laughter) Well, I helped.

The next morning, I sliced apples while she wrestled-- and that was the right word-- with the crust.

(laughter) She'd roll it out, scrape it off the rolling pin, add flour, knead it again, roll it again, scrape it off, add flour, knead it again.

Again and again, until finally she arrived at two acceptably round crusts.

Fitted one in the pan.

I added a mountain of apples.

And then, I read the recipe while she added the seasonings.

"Cloves," dump.

"Nutmeg," dump.

"Cinnamon," dump.

"Lemon juice."

(imitates squishing) (laughter) "Sugar," dump.

"Dot it with butter?"

(quietly): Dot.

(laughter) Dot.

Then, she fitted the second crust on, stabbed some vent holes, put it in the oven.

All this time, no one had dared come into the kitchen.

(laughter) But as soon as the pie started baking, the aroma filled the house, and people were smiling.

We served dinner almost at noon.

The steak was a little too pink for the New England sense of safety.

(laughter) And then, my mother brought out the pie and set it in front of Grandpa.

It was magnificent, a golden dome.

She looked so happy.

Grandpa lifted the pie server, pressed it on the top of the pie, and nothing happened.

(laughter) He tapped on it-- (imitates tapping) (laughter) It was like knocking on a hollow door.

(laughter) My mother was looking worried.

Grandpa took a clean steak knife and stabbed through the top of the mountain, carved out a piece... and then turned the pie pan so we all could see.

Under that sturdy dome was airspace down to a layer of very well-cooked apples.

(laughter) My mother was holding her heart in her hands.

Grandpa carved out six equal pieces, no leftovers, passed them around.

And we all took our first bites at the same moment.

Eyebrows flew up around the table.

(laughter) (coughing): "The cloves," Dad said.

"Nice!"

"I...

I've always liked cinnamon," I said.

(laughter) My father said, "The nutmeg is distinctive."

(laughter) Uncle Bob, never a slave to manners, burst out, "Has anybody tried the lemon yet?"

(laughter) My mother was rocking back and forth.

She didn't look up, even when Grandpa spoke.

"Martie... Martie, this is a memorable pie."

(laughter) I thank you."

(laughter) Their eyes met.

The corners of Grandpa's mouth started to twitch.

And then, in the midst of his bereavement, he burst out laughing.

My mother didn't crack a smile.

"You're welcome.

Tomorrow, I'll bake you another one."

(laughter) And she did.

And it was better.

And over time, she became the family's official apple pie baker.

But she could never serve one without someone's muttering, "Has anybody tried the lemon yet?"

(laughter) Thank you.

(cheers and applause) ♪ FILIPOV: My name's David Filipov.

I grew up in Massachusetts, studied Russian, went to the Soviet Union, became a journalist and worked at the "Boston Globe" and the "Washington Post" for 25 years.

I've been to all the conflict zones-- Russia, Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan.

Now I'm back in Massachusetts, working for Northeastern University as the editor of their news site.

After all of these years of writing about war and conflict, what do you feel like you have learned from experiencing and writing about those tragedies?

FILIPOV: Every single place, everybody-- minus the small percentage of people who are belligerents-- people want to hear your story.

They want to feed you.

They want you to listen to their story.

And they want to send you on your way happier than when you met them.

What elements do you find are present in the stories that you most like to tell?

Well, you get up in the morning and funny things happen, serious things happen.

Just as you're laughing, someone calls and said, "You lost something important."

- Mm-hmm.

That's what my stories, I try to do.

I want everything in there.

- Yeah.

I want you to laugh, and I want you to see.

Because the thing about war and conflict is that it's tragedy, right?

But everyday things still happen in it.

And so I want the stories to show that.

It's five weeks after 9/11, and that means 15 days after the memorial service for my father, who was on the first plane.

I'm in Khoja Bahauddin, Afghanistan, a northern Afghanistan forlorn outpost where a few rebels are holding out against the Taliban.

And I'm supposed to be an experienced "Boston Globe" war reporter who's come here to cover the conflict that America has entered in order to defeat the people who killed my father.

And I'm starting to realize that I might not be up to the task.

It first hits me when I crossed from Tajikistan-- where everybody speaks Russian, which is my second language-- to Afghanistan.

And at the border, our new Afghan friends greet me and put me into a taxi, and we go speeding off into the night.

Suddenly, we come screeching to a halt.

Two guys get out and start firing their rifles into the darkness.

And I'm like, "Okay, here we go!

"Get the notebook!

This is it, war with the Taliban!"

And then, one of the guys comes back and takes the bullet-ridden corpse of a dead fox and throws it on the seat next to me.

And I thought to myself, "Yeah, I'm not ready for this."

But, then, I realized I had a lot more in common than I thought.

Afghans would tell me, "Oh, you lost your father.

"I lost my father, and my sisters, and my home, and my uncle, and my farm."

Now, America had come, and we represented hope.

When the B-52s would circle overhead, dropping 500-pound bombs on the Taliban positions, Afghans would cheer and point at the planes and say, (speaking Dari) "The plane, the plane, the enemy is dead."

And they'd point at me and smile because I was the Americans.

One frontline commander took me to this wall where his men had done a primitive stick figure drawing of a plane flying into a building.

This, he told me, is how we know the rest of the world is with us.

But there was only so much camaraderie that, you know, could be derived.

I couldn't understand Dari without a translator, and, in this place where everybody had lost so much in 30 years of constant war, I had trouble putting my own grief behind me.

Then there was the problem of the food.

Northern Afghanistan was a hungry place, and it was very difficult for me to find something that wouldn't make me violently ill.

Pretty much the only thing I could keep down was this delicious bread and really delicious, ubiquitous lamb kebab.

Lamb, lamb, lamb, lamb, lamb, morning, noon, and night.

(laughter) It was killing me.

Till, suddenly, literally, salvation fell from the sky in the form of food parcels being dropped by the United States of America with the stamp on them: "People's food gift from the United States of America."

(laughter) Filled with 2,200-calorie rations of barley stew, rice, shortbread, peanut butter and jelly, and Pop-Tarts.

(laughter) Yeah, Pop-Tarts.

Now, dropped from 30, 000 feet, I want to tell you that those things don't look really very good.

They kind of crumble.

More importantly, this whole effort was under fire.

Relief agencies noted that Afghan militias were reselling the food parcels on the black market, and ordinary people would take the more unfamiliar items, like the peanut butter and jelly, and feed them to their livestock.

Nobody wanted the Pop-Tarts, which looked disgusting, all crushed like that and caked in the dust that everything covered in northern Afghanistan.

Except for me.

(laughter) These things represented not only a foodstuff I could keep down, but also packed with all that riboflavin and vitamin B-8 that they put in breakfast foods.

But it also evoked memories of my childhood, growing up in the '60s, as those of you who were there remember.

I lived on this stuff.

I remember when they first introduced the frosted strawberry Pop-Tart, and we loved that filling!

For many years, I thought that's what strawberries really taste like... (laughter) ...and I was so disappointed when I found that they don't.

We also remember the horror we felt when we realized if you leave a frosted strawberry Pop-Tart in the toaster for too long, it bursts into foot-high flames.

(laughter) Yeah, and then there was the dismal day when I discovered that my father's favorite flavor was the revolting and disgusting brown sugar cinnamon.

I'm sure you all agree.

(crowd groans, laughs) So, anyway, in those days of loss and discovery of 2001, I learned to distinguish the packages on the ground that I could eat from the revolting and disgusting one that I could not.

And, in a way, you could argue that those Pop-Tarts kept me alive.

Time went on, and, over the years, I got to where I was almost able to talk about my father's violent death the way that I'm doing now, kind of keeping it together and not breaking down.

I got to the point where I could watch all those movies about 9/11, and there are more than you think.

And I could almost watch the TV news without averting my eyes every time they showed that grainy video of the plane flying into the first tower and exploding into flames.

You've all seen it.

So, I thought, you know, what about Afghans?

You know, it's ten years after 9/11.

How are they feeling about this, you know, odyssey?

What has war done for them?

So, I decided to go back to the places where I'd been in 2001 and catch up with the people I'd met.

But the problem was that the Taliban had come back to many of these places that I'd seen liberated.

To do this story, I was going to have to take a couple of risks.

I could only dress in Afghan clothes.

I had to speak only Dari in public.

I had to stay out of places where I might be picked out, do my interviews inside, never go to the same place twice, never stay in the same place for longer than a few minutes.

Because an American traveling alone could attract kidnappers and people who would kill me.

So, I did all that, and I met with people who were in the villages, trying to hold out against the Taliban.

And I found that actually some things had improved.

Everybody had smartphones, cheap data plans.

Even women who had been cut off from the world in their burkas, now you can see them tapping away on the glowing screens.

But there were also bad things.

The Taliban had come back, in part, because people feared them less than they feared the drug-dealing militias and warlords who had taken over in their place.

Yeah, so, my last stop on that trip was at a U.S. military outpost whose job was to keep peace in the region.

But actually the Americans very rarely ventured out of their heavily guarded compound, and we spent a lot of time lolling in the 180-degree... 120-degree heat.

But it feltlike 180!

(laughter) 120-degree heat, you know, sitting there, steaming in front of this big table covered in food parcels from the United States, from people who wanted to support the troops.

And among them were more Pop-Tarts than anybody could ever want to eat.

(laughter) Roasting in the... what did I say?

120?

Let's make it 180!

(laughter) Once again, I called upon my Pop-Tart-wistering ways, and I was able to discern the delicious flavors that I loved and avoid the revolting one that I hated.

Yeah, I won't say that Pop-Tarts kept me alive this time, but they definitely kept me sane, as did the memory they evoked.

You close your eyes.

You take a bite.

Home.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) ♪ GUPTA: My name is Gauri Gupta.

I was born in Michigan, but I've partly grown up in Michigan and in New Delhi, India.

I moved back to Michigan for college, and I studied economics and French at the University of Michigan.

So, tonight's theme is all about food.

Can you tell me about what your relationship is like with food?

I definitely believe that food is a great connector, and it brings people together.

- Mm-hmm.

And there's no better way to get to know people than... than over a shared meal.

I really view it as... it's, it's something that gave me the strength to look for new possibilities in my own life.

So, has storytelling always been a part of your life?

Yes, I have always loved stories.

I was brought up with stories from both my parents.

And I used to write a lot when I was a kid.

- Mm-hmm.

- I used to want to become a children's storyteller.

(chuckling): Mm-hmm.

So, I've always loved writing stories and journaling.

And this is one of the first times that I will be speaking in front of an audience, and I'm very excited to do that.

I'm driving down the Pacific Coast Highway.

The wind is blowing in my hair.

It's a beautiful day.

I can feel the Californian sunshine, warm on my skin.

My cell phone's ringing, and I have to take this because it's my mom, and she's calling me from India.

So, I pull over on the side of the road, and I take the call.

My mom asks me, "So, how are those job applications going?"

(chuckling) And I tell her things are going great.

"I have three interviews lined up for next week.

"All those hours I've spent "working on my résumés in coffee shops is finally paying off."

And I hang up the phone, and I realized, no, things are not that great.

I do not have three interviews lined up next week.

(laughter) Everything I own is in my trunk.

I have no idea where I'm going.

I have no idea what I'm doing with my life.

One week later, I'm halfway across the world.

I'm at my parents' doorstep.

They had no idea I was coming home and what I was doing there.

My mom almost faints when she sees me.

I tell my parents, "Everything's fine.

I'm just here for a little while while I figure things out."

A week goes by.

Now, it's two.

Now, it's been a month.

Now, I've been there for an entire summer.

I'm finding things to do.

I'm volunteering in my community.

I'm teaching English.

I'm even taking some yoga classes, for good measure.

But I really don't have a plan.

So, one day, a box shows up on our doorstep.

I open it.

It's a box with glistening steel and a bunch of knobs and dials, and a dark glass in the center.

As I watched the delivery men carry it into our kitchen and slide it into the little nook that was made for it, I see that we have a new oven now.

I walked past the oven to go to the fridge.

Every time I pass it, I feel like it's staring at me somehow, but I can't understand why.

I have never been a cook.

All my life, the only times I've stepped inside a kitchen have been to either eat something my mom was making for me, or maybe to warm up leftovers in the microwave.

So, one morning, I have this sudden craving for English muffins.

It's been a while since I've been in the States.

So, I go to the grocery store, and I ask for English muffins.

Big surprise, they don't exist.

(laughter) So, I come home.

I'm exasperated.

I can't believe you can't buy an English muffin in India.

So, I'm walking past my kitchen, and a glint from that oven catches my eye.

And I get a crazy idea: What if Imake my own English muffin?

(laughter) My parents somehow overhear this idea, and they're shaking their heads.

They're laughing at me.

They're like, "Good luck with that."

(laughter) I am confident.

I find a book on my dad's old bookshelf.

I dust off the covers-- he used to bake-- and I find a recipe for English muffins.

"How hard can this be?

"All you need is flour, water, something called yeast?

I'm sure I can figure this out."

So, I go to the grocery store.

I got the book in my hand.

I walked past the bread aisle and I'm going straight for the flour section.

I have never bought flour in my life.

With a lot of help from a very sweet salesgirl, I'm coming back home with a bag of flour in one hand and a packet of this mysterious yeast in the other, and I'm ready to whip up a batch of English muffins.

I'm in my kitchen.

I'm mixing flour and water and making my own dough, and I don't realize it, but there's flour all over the counter.

There's raw dough.

The dough is sticking to my hands.

My mom has to come in and pry the dough off of my hands with a butter knife.

(laughter) But I tell her, "I got this."

I'm rolling the dough into balls and putting it on a baking sheet, throwing it on the griddle.

And then, I'm sliding it into oven for that final bake.

And I open the oven door.

I'm so excited.

I can't even remember, I don't think I put oven mitts on.

I was-- I-I pulled an, I pulled an English muffin out, and I can't wait to tear into it.

And there's steam still coming out of the middle, and it's just so beautiful.

As soon as I bite into that first muffin and it's melting in my mouth, I knew I'd fallen in love.

From there, I was spending my entire days in the kitchen from morning until night.

I couldn't stop recreating breads from all kinds of places, including the south of France, where I'd spent some time during college.

I was making brioche and fougasse, and learning how to make breads from all around the world.

I even found a recipe for an Icelandic bread that is baked in a geothermal spring.

So, I thought, "I can make a geothermal spring in my oven, why not?"

(laughter) So, my sister starts putting up pictures on social media, and all my friends are shocked to see that I'm making these breads.

And I'm shocked to see that people are actually liking these posts.

Suddenly, everyone wants to come over for dinner.

I'm getting calls for catering requests.

I have fans now.

(laughter) Bread was like magic to me.

I would see dough rising in the oven, and it was as though my spirits were rising with it.

Bread showed me that anything was possible.

I felt like I could do anything in the world.

That I could go back into time, and I could recreate breads from places I'd been to, or from places I'd never been before.

So, it led me back to the United States and to my first true love, international relations.

I'm still taking crazy road trips, and I don't always know where I'm going, but I'm always thankful for that road trip in California, the drive that gave me the drive to push on and find meaning in my life.

And who would have thought that an English muffin would give me the confidence and passion to see possibility again?

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) >> This program is made possible in part by contributions from viewers like you-- thank you.

♪