This week's episode of The Sporkful podcast is up! Listen through the player, Stitcher, or Apple Podcasts. (And please subscribe!)

Patti LaBelle isn't just a music icon -- she's also a food icon.

She has several bestselling cookbooks (including a new book out this spring), a Cooking Channel show, and a line of desserts at Walmart that caused quite a stir when her sweet potato pie went viral a few years back.

In fact, Patti says she cooks better than she sings. Take one of her favorite dishes, liver and onions:

"People overcook liver like rocks, and most people say they hate it because they've never had mine," she says. "My liver and onions slams, it's really good."

This week on The Sporkful, Patti tells us why she always cooks for herself when she's out on tour.

"Room service can be a little shady, so I don't give them a chance," she says. "I cook in the hotel suite. I bring my electric fry pan -- usually two."

And she recalls meals on the road much earlier in her career -- when she was touring the segregated South in the 1960s.

"We would go to restaurants and, of course, we couldn't get in," she says. "Sometimes we would go to the back, and that back food was like garbage. But we had to take what we could get. Those are awful memories."

Plus, writer Adrian Miller helps us explore the racial implications of that viral video, which remains a classic to this day:

Listen in to the full episode for Patti's take on navigating race in the food world and to hear what she really thinks of pumpkin pie.

This week's episode of The Sporkful podcast is up! Listen through the player, Stitcher, or Apple Podcasts. (And please subscribe!)

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Photos: FlickrCC/Sandra Alphonse; courtesy of Patti LaBelle