Melissa Harris-Perry: All right folks, we've got one yummy delicious story for you here at the end of the hour.

Maya-Camille Broussard: I am Maya-Camille Broussard, owner and Chef of Justice of the Pies and the author of the book of the same name.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Maya-Camille Broussard discovered her love for baking at a young age. Her late father, Stephen Broussard, The Pie Master, dazzled in the kitchen with one-of-a-kind quiches. Her cookbook Justice of the Pies dazzles as well and she shares the love with The Takeaway Holiday Book Club.

Maya-Camille Broussard: I've always loved food but the reason why I love to eat really good food is because whenever my dad and I went out to eat or whenever he cooked, I never-- and to this day, I can't eat a lot in one sitting. I'm known for saving half of my food for later. I love leftovers but my dad would always eat my leftovers. Whether it's right there at the restaurant or at the kitchen table or the next day, he always ate my food. That would frustrate me so much because I knew that the food that he had at home was not good, and it wasn't healthy, it wasn't delicious.

He had a lot of what I call hood snacks, whether it was cheeses crackers or packages of ramen noodle soup, it wasn't the delicious meal that I had been waiting to come back to. When I was able to feed my own self, we're talking about this generational trauma being passed down, when I was able to feed my own self, I wanted to eat and make really good food that I truly enjoyed because I felt like so often it was robbed from me where my dad would inhale not only his food but mine as well.

The experience of cooking and baking and starting a bakery in memory of my dad is also a form of forgiveness for what he put me through in terms of my journey of food. Had I not gone on that journey or had he not put me through that journey, I might not have been a chef. I'm grateful for what I've experienced, but at the same time, it is my form of forgiving him because his actions were a product of his own childhood that he could not control. He couldn't control my grandfather being an alcoholic. My grandfather could not control the childhood trauma that he experienced that drove him to alcoholism.

My dad, even if he had hood snacks at home, he would always wake up on a Saturday morning to make quiche because he loved anything baked in a crust. When he passed away in 2009, my cousin Stephanie came up to me at the repast and said, "You know what, we should start a foundation in which we start baking pies in memory of Uncle Steve and we should call it something like The Pie Master," because that was my dad's self-imposed nickname. At the time, I was really stressed and of course, I was grieving. It was not something that I even had in mind, but a couple of years later I decided to embark on creating the bakery in his memory.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love the language you're using of the cooking and the baking as a form of forgiveness, of reconciliation. I have to say that German chocolate pecan pie in the cookbook, I don't know if it's reconciliation, forgiveness, joy, love, but it feels like it could be all of those things, and that's just looking at it, not even eating it

Maya-Camille Broussard: One thing that I always try to do, I always want to set myself apart from everyone else. I've always been in that other group. As a person growing up with a disability, I've always been that person who was an outsider. When you are young and you're a pre-teen or a teenager or even in middle school, you want so much to fit in with your peers and I never truly fit in. Now, as an adult, I like my otherness. Aside from the fact that I have an invisible disability, I like my otherness in that I can stand out. One way that I always aim to stand out as a chef is through the types of pie varieties that I make.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right y'all, time for a quick break, more of this conversation in just a moment.

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Announcer: This is The Takeaway from WNYC and PRX in collaboration with GBH News in Boston.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Hi, chef extraordinaire, Maya-Camille Broussard. Can you talk a bit more about being a member of the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, and what that has meant relative to your otherness?

Maya-Camille Broussard: I have about 75% hearing loss. Most people that I encounter don't know that I am a member of the deaf and hard-of-hearing community and my friends often forget. Let me go back just one quick second. I didn't start talking until I was four years old. My mother, of course, was beside herself with trying to figure out what was wrong and how she could help me. When she took me to the doctor, there was a doctor's assistant who told her, "You know what, you need to just give up because she's deaf and dumb."

What we were experiencing at the time that she didn't have the phrase for was the healthcare disparity. I had been written off because I'm this little Black girl who didn't talk, but my mom didn't let up and she read to me every single night. We would read books upon books upon the books. When I finally started talking at the age of four, I had the reading level of a third grader. What that story is really important for me to share because it is an indication of how I operate now. A lot of people who have disabilities operate in the same way that I do and that is we are fueled by a desire to prove to others that we are just as good if not better and we are capable.

Melissa Harris-Perry: And you're a Black woman chef. That space, being in the kitchen of top restaurants, that's not a place where a lot of Black women are, whether they have disabilities, visible or invisible. Can you speak to that as well?

Maya-Camille Broussard: One of the things that I've always talked about, and I'm talking more and more about it is wanting to see, not just Black women or women of color but just women in general in the culinary space, I want to see them be more prominent. I always say that when you hear a male chef talk about his inspirations and his first memories of cooking in the kitchen, it’s always him pulling up a stool to where his grandmother is shelling peas. He's five years old and he helps his grandma make her very popular marinara sauce. His first memories of being in the kitchen are always with his grandmother or his mother. When it comes to the culinary arts as a profession, it is men that are often lauded more so than women are.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love your language of standing out, being unique, being comfortable with your otherness. You also ask yourself, is someone, and especially someone's Black grandmamma, going to like this? Tell me about your Black grandma's standard for a recipe.

Maya-Camille Broussard: Often when I'm thinking about somebody's Black grandma, I'm thinking about when I am tackling a traditional southern recipe, for example, sweet potato pie. If you are making a sweet potato pie and it has strings in it, by strings I mean the fibers that you find in a sweet potato, somebody's Black grandma is going to cuss you out. [laughs] When I'm making a classic sweet potato pie, my number one goal is to make sure I don't have any strings in my pie.

Melissa Harris-Perry: [laughs] This is so real.

Maya-Camille Broussard: It is a real thing.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Pie chef extraordinaire, Maya-Camille Broussard, owner of Justice of the Pies, thank you so much.

Maya-Camille Broussard: Thank you.

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