Kamala Harris mixes cooking and politics to her advantage in campaigning and her personal life
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A cooking video with US Vice-President Kamala Harris (right) in actress Mindy Kaling’s kitchen drew six million views.
PHOTO: COOKING WITH KAMALA/YOUTUBE
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WASHINGTON – Only a handful of US presidents have had a keen interest in cooking.
The 34th US president Dwight Eisenhower popularised a method for grilling steaks directly on coals. The 39th US president Jimmy Carter considered himself a good country cook. The 16th US president Abraham Lincoln was known to put on an apron.
But no candidate this close to the White House has the kitchen skills of US Vice-President Kamala Harris, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for the presidency
“I don’t think there has been anybody who understands the power of cooking quite like Kamala,” said Mr Alex Prud’homme, who wrote Dinner With The President: Food, Politics And A History Of Breaking Bread At The White House.
Ms Harris has turned cooking videos into campaign assets and has taken a particular interest in food issues like hunger and farm labour. But she also turns to cooking as a form of meditation.
“Everything else can be crazy, I can be on six planes in one week, and what makes me feel normal is making Sunday-night family dinner,” she told The Cut in 2018, when she was a senator. “If I’m cooking, I feel like I’m in control of my life.”
Food has long been a political prop, as anyone who has seen a candidate eat a favourite regional dish can attest.
The food sensibility of the US president can affect both diplomatic efforts and agricultural policy, and even helps define a president’s persona.
Former US president Ronald Reagan made jelly beans a status symbol. Mr Trump embraced fast food
In a 90-second video from 2019 that recently resurfaced on social media, she tells a reporter how to prepare a Thanksgiving turkey as she is getting a sound check before a spot on MSNBC. (Ms Harris advises that a dry brine is easier than a wet one. “Do the salt and pepper all over,” she said. “Like, just like lather that baby up on the outside, in the cavity.”)
Ms Harris learnt to cook from her mother, Ms Shyamala Gopalan.
“My mother used to tell me, ‘Kamala, you clearly like to eat good food’,” she told Glamour magazine when she sought the 2020 nomination. “‘You better learn how to cook.’”
Ms Harris scrolls through cooking sites and relaxes at the end of the day by reading cookbooks. (Her favourites are by Italian cook Marcella Hazan and California chef Alice Waters.) When she was a guest on singer-actress Jennifer Hudson’s talk show in 2023, Ms Harris said she wanted to write her own one day.
Her culinary skills are evident in the YouTube show, Cooking With Kamala, a short series filmed during the 2020 campaign.
She cracked an egg with one hand and executed an onion chopping hack so good, even American celebrity chef Tom Colicchio approved.
Her home kitchen has enamel skillets, a gas range and a crock next to the stove overflowing with spatulas and spoons – the arsenal of any competent home cook.
For women, mixing cooking and politics has been fraught.
In 1992, when Mrs Hillary Clinton’s husband, Democrat Bill Clinton, was running for president, she defended her career by saying: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfil my profession.”
That led to a cookie bake-off between her and Mrs Barbara Bush – the mother of Republican former US president George W. Bush, and the wife of former US president George H.W. Bush – and a lot of backpedalling to appease women who chose to stay at home.
Mrs Clinton reclaimed the line to make a point when she ran for the presidency against Mr Trump in 2016.
By 2020, Ms Amy Klobuchar, the senator from Minnesota who vied for the Democratic presidential nomination, used a family hot dish recipe as a way to win over voters in New Hampshire and Iowa.
Ms Harris took the marriage of cooking and politics even further during her first run at the presidency.
In one YouTube video posted in 2019, which has garnered six million views, she visited American actress Mindy Kaling’s kitchen. The two compared notes on growing up in South Indian families, made masala dosa and marvelled that their parents stored spices in empty Taster’s Choice jars.
Other cooking segments were more directly political.
Ms Harris baked monster cookies with a teenage supporter who planned to caucus for her in Iowa, and visited her Iowa campaign chair’s kitchen to prepare apples and bacon, making sure to point out that both the ingredients were from Iowa.
During the pandemic, she took to Instagram Live, where she got a lesson in egg cooking from Spanish-American chef Jose Andres and showed Colicchio how to prepare Moroccan-style meatballs while discussing the impact of the shutdown on restaurants.
She poked fun at Senator Mark Warner, a fellow Democrat, for his viral microwaved tuna melt sandwich video by demonstrating her elevated version. (He poked back when he saw her jar of Dijon mustard: “You fancy Northern California people.”)
Of course, if she does make it to the White House, there will most likely be little time to cook, said Mr Sam Kass, who was the White House chef during the Barack Obama administration. But that does not mean she will not find time.
“If the president wants to cook dinner on Sunday, you best believe the president will cook dinner on Sunday,” he said. “But she will have a lot of talented cooks to prep, and she won’t have to do the dishes.” NYTIMES
