Only a handful of presidents have had a keen interest in cooking. Dwight Eisenhower popularized a method for grilling steaks directly on the coals. Jimmy Carter considered himself a good country cook. Abraham Lincoln was known to put on an apron.
But no candidate this close to the White House has the kitchen skills of Vice President Kamala Harris, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for the presidency. In the way Donald Trump uses the golf course as both a source of relaxation and a political backdrop, Ms. Harris uses the kitchen.
“I don’t think there has been anybody who understands the power of cooking quite like Kamala,” said 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 labor. But she also turns to cooking as a 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 favorite regional dish can attest. The food sensibility of the president can impact both diplomatic efforts and agricultural policy, and even helps define a president’s persona. Ronald Reagan made jelly beans a status symbol. Mr. Trump embraced fast food. Joe Biden leaned into his love of ice cream. If Ms. Harris becomes president, it might be her Bolognese.
In a 90-second video from 2019 that recently resurfaced on social media, she tells a reporter how to prep a Thanksgiving turkey as she’s 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 first learned to cook from her mother, Shyamala Gopalan. “My mother used to tell me, ‘Kamala, you clearly like to eat good food,” she told Glamour magazine when she first sought the nomination in 2020. “You better learn how to cook.’”
Ms. Harris scrolls cooking sites and relaxes at the end of the day by reading cookbooks. (Her favorites are by the Italian cook Marcella Hazan and the California chef Alice Waters.) When she was a guest on Jennifer Hudson’s talk show last year, Ms. Harris said she wants 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 cracks an egg with one hand and executes an onion chopping hack so good even the 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 her husband was running for president, Hillary Clinton 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 fulfill my profession.” That led to a cookie bake-off between her and Barbara Bush and a lot of backpedaling to appease women who chose to stay at home.
Ms. Clinton reclaimed the line to make a point when she ran for the presidency against Mr. Trump in 2016. By 2020, 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 with six million views, she visited the actor Mindy Kaling’s kitchen. The two compared notes on growing up in South Indian families, made masala dosa and marveled 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 apples and the bacon were from Iowa.
During the pandemic she took to Instagram Live, where she got a lesson in egg cookery from José Andrés and showed Mr. Colicchio how to prepare Moroccan-style meatballs while discussing the impact of the shut down on restaurants. She poked fun at Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, 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 Sam Kass, who was the White House chef during the Obama administration. But that doesn’t mean she won’t 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.”
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