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PORTSIDE CULTURE

AN ENTIRELY SERIOUS INVESTIGATION INTO KAMALA HARRIS’S COOKBOOKS  
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Joshua David Stein
July 29, 2024
Esquire Magazine
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_ Harris’s passion for cooking is well-documented; the cookbook
titles tell about the contours and range of her interest in the
culinary arts. She values the restorative powers of cooking as part of
a community; and she understands food as identity. _

The Vice President's passion for cooking is well-documented, but her
collection of cookbooks still surprised us. Here's what her titles
reveal., Getty, Amazon

 

It has been only a week since Kamala Harris stepped up to replace Joe
Biden as the (presumptive) Democratic nominee for president. Already,
every choice the vice president has ever made—what she wears, what
she listens to, what she likes to drink—is being mined for meme
potential and semiotic relevance. It’s not Kremlinology; it’s
Kamalalogy. And so far the signs have been, I have to say, positive.
Coconut trees. Beyoncé. Brat. But nothing has instilled more,
well—to use a historically freighted word—hope than a recently
surfaced photograph of a stack of Kamala’s cookbooks. Because this
image comes not from her official campaign but rather from a private
citizen's shelfie snapping, it seems like an intimate glimpse that
demands instant analysis. They’re cookbooks, but they’re more than
cookbooks. So can we dissect them? Yes, we can.

Harris’s passion for cooking is well-documented, by herself and
others. She religiously makes Sunday dinner. (Bolognese is her
specialty.) She has a cooking show on YouTube. So the height of that
kitchen stack shouldn’t surprise us. It’s the titles themselves
that tell you—us, as in we the people—about the contours and
catholicity of her interest in the culinary arts. Here is a person
whose horizons are broad but whose focus is pragmatic. What is
immediately clear is that, if these cookbooks are indicators of an
overall umwelt, Harris values the restorative powers of cooking—not
individually but as part of a community. In other words, she cooks not
just for herself but for others. She understands food not simply as
caloric intake but as identity.

It would be a stretch to think that anyone could glean a lot about a
candidate from a pile of books, so let’s give it a try. Her library,
at least as much as is visible here, can be neatly divided into a few
discrete categories. Each tells us something about where Kamala Harris
is coming from.

The first show a real curiosity and interest in the cuisine of the
African diaspora, curving up from its cradle in the American South.
Among these books we find culinary historian Michael Twitty’s
searing 2017 memoir The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African
American Culinary History in the Old South, and My America by Kwame
Onwuachi with Joshua David Stein (hey, that’s me!). We spy the 1984
classic Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen. Taken together, the
recipes in these texts tell a story about the passage of West African
dishes through the Caribbean to the ports of Louisiana and points
north. (As Onwuachi told Esquire in an email, “I can smell the
oxtails from this photo.”) They trace the way identity and history,
and heartbreak and perseverance, are coded into what many of us simply
take for granted as “American food.”

Obviously for Harris, whose own family hails from Jamaica and India,
two brutally colonized countries, these histories aren't abstract.
They are her own stories. Harris seems to want to understand as much
as possible the context of what she’s cooking, because she is not
just making recipes but making sense of her own stories too. That
connection between food and healing extends beyond her own biography.
The presence of Together, a little-known cookbook published by a group
of West London women from recipes they developed in the aftermath of
the Grenfell Tower fire, and We Are La Cocina: Recipes in Pursuit of
the American Dream, a collection of recipes from immigrant women from
a San Francisco kitchen incubator, points to a broader sense of
compassion.

This is also a stack of books by someone who actually cooks. I can
tell. You can imagine what a performative collection might look
like—each tome meant, like a coffee table book about cabin chic, to
act as an indicator of taste rather than as a genuine resource. Such
is not the case in the Harris house. When you really cook, you need
books for when you just need food on the table. Among the works
focusing on the practical aspects of cooking are Tom Colicchio’s
technique-driven Craft of Cooking: Notes and Recipes from a
Restaurant’s Kitchen—the Top Chef star appeared on her show
Cooking with Kamala; the Northern Irish journalist Diana Henry’s
latest, From the Oven to the Table, which focuses on no-nonsense
weeknight meals; and 2018’s Season: Big Flavors, Beautiful Food by
Nik Sharma, which features Indian recipes engineered for ease. This
group also includes a deep cut from the library of Marcella Hazan:
Marcella Cucina, which focuses on regional cooking from Italy. So
it’s not just that Harris likes looking at cookbooks—which,
let’s face it, is the case for 75% of people who buy them—but she
gets into the nuts and bolts of cooking, too.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that Harris is a long-time political
operator. There’s a tranche of these books that nod to previous
occupants of the White House, D.C. dining institutions, and her home
state, California, where she served as district attorney (in San
Francisco); attorney general and senator. California, particularly Los
Angeles, is represented by the 2021 cookbook of Bavel, one of our Best
New Restaurants in 2018. The District of Columbia gets a nod via the
2017 cookbook from Rasika, a Penn Quarter modern Indian restaurant
where Harris dined in May 2023. The Obama era surfaces in Eat a Little
Better: Great Flavor, Good Health, Better World: A Cookbook by former
White House chef Sam Kass, as well as Red Truck Bakery, a cookbook by
one of Obama’s favorite piemakers, Brian Noyes.

Look, let’s levelset a little bit. That we’re even presented with
a stack of cookbooks to decode from a presidential candidate feels
like a win. It’s good news. Like, finally, we have a real human
being—a real cooking human being—who might be the President.
(Nothing against Biden but that man has never been in a kitchen except
to steal ice cream at midnight.). That the authors, recipes,
traditions, and stories represented in Harris’s collection comprise
an international, diverse, underrepresented, community-minded cast who
make delicious food is certainly a hopeful portent. At least one of
the authors, Diana Henry, agrees: “Harris is obviously thoroughly
engaged in what food is about,” she wrote in an email to me. “It
isn’t just about donning an apron and making a quick dish on a
Wednesday night, it’s about geography, history, farming, politics
and what connects us.” The books are at once global and granular.
These are the cookbooks of a world leader who knows how to sauté, how
to stew pollo guisado, how to use peppa sauce and green seasoning and
get the meal on the damn table. All we have to do is let her cook.

* cookbooks
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* cooking
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* Kamala Harris
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