VP Kamala Harris

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2:03We met at a wedding last summer, drinking our pre-dinner cocktails. She turned to me and said, Ruthie, you know what I'd really like to do? I'd like to meet the chefs. Walking in with her to the kitchen was something I will always remember. Everyone put down their knives, their pots, their pans, amazed at seeing her there. She spoke seriously about cooking, praising them for delicious food, asking them genuine and respectful questions. I'm often asked who would be my dream guest on Ruthie's Table 4. Well, she's sitting right next to me here in the River Cafe. Oh my goodness. Thank you. Would you like to tell everybody what you had for breakfast when you came to the River Cafe this morning?

2:48I had the most exquisite breakfast. A beautiful slice of home-baked bread that was toasted just to perfection with burrata, just a nice slice that was melting and just kind of just being. And then the most exquisite slices of cured anchovy. with slices on the side of heirloom tomato. I was in heaven. I was in heaven. You're here in London, and you're here for my book tour. First of all, thank you for writing this book. I think that the way that you did this with the diary, with the ups and the downs and the ins and the outs and the excitement, it takes, I really urge everyone to read this because it's knowledge.

3:48And as you say, for young people who want to go into this world and understand more, I think it's a textbook as well. I wrote the book in a way that I was very honest and forthright and candid. And not in the interest of shocking anyone, but just being factual. I think there's so much about all these processes, but in particular running for president, where it's very opaque. And unless you're in the inside as a part of it, you can't really see or understand all the nuance and variables that are at play. So I decided to write the book to really give people a behind the scenes look. in fact like the tour of your kitchen just now I say people always want to know how does you know the sea bass come out the same time as the lamb how does it all work you see the process but we don't I don't know how a campaign works I don't know how you produce a television show I don't know how the taxi driver knows how to get from it you know it's a process we all want to know and that's what I love and the corner right and the choreography which is and and the other reason I wrote the book is it is those 107 days are a part of Americans history and it was very important to me that my voice is present in the way that history tells the story of those days.

5:22Think about it it was unprecedented Ruthie we had sitting president United States running for re-election he decides to drop out three and a half months before the election the sitting vice president takes up the mantle against a former president who had been running for 10 years with 107 days to go. And so I wrote the books stylistically like a journal. Most of the 107 days are chapters, each of them a chapter, based on the extraordinary experience that I had and meeting people around the country who expect and want to be seen and heard, whose stories must be known and told. And then all of the palace intrigue that is a part of politics and all of that.

6:18Part of what I've been doing in the tour is people write me from all over the world. And I've been pulling out letters from the various cities where we're in the book tour of people who live in that place and inviting them to come on my friends and family list. And it's been really great because these are people with no expectation of, I mean, half the time they'll write, I'm sure you're never going to read this, but I do. And one of those individuals, a young man, what he said to me about the book, which was very helpful to me, he said, you know, he followed the election very closely, those 107 days and he said he needed closure and the book going through it the intensity of each day helped him process it in a way that gives him and I hope that this is part of my attention gives anyone who reads it, an ability to be reminded of the light that everyone has and that no election can take away, that sense of optimism and, dare I say, joy that we each have.

7:39And we can't forget it, even though we are seeing so much that is, I mean, you know, the words can go on and on about how awful it is. But in the midst of this darkness of this moment, I hope that reading the book also reminds people of the light that they carry that cannot be dampened or diminished by any one person or election.

8:40We'll see you next time. apartment by December 31st, 2025 and save. Discover more at brightviewseniorliving.com. Equal housing opportunity. I was going to ask you how being on a book tour does, feels different to you from being on a campaign. When you stop off in a city, as you did in this book, and describe what it was like to arrive in a town and do, an event, a speech, a rally, and the difference between going to Festival Hall or to Birmingham, Alabama, and talking about now when you're not campaigning, what is that like? Well, part of what I'm enjoying about this moment is I'm not, because I'm also pulling, I'm out doing meetings with groups of people in the cities where I'm doing the book tour.

9:39And what I'm enjoying about it is I am there not to talk but to listen. That's why I'm convening these groups. A lot of them are under the age of 40 because I also think that if we're thinking about how we are going to understand and articulate the stakes of this moment, we have to be intentional about seeing it through the eyes of people who are going to be living with this for decades to come yeah and so what i'm enjoying about it is that unlike the campaign i also have the the luxury of being able to sit down with people i think they they know that if they're invited to come it's going to be a real conversation and a safe place yeah and people are talking about their fears and their hopes and their frustrations their anger their joy and that i mean ruthie that's been so helpful to me because i just feel right now we're all carrying an incredible amount of distrust.

10:53Yeah. And we have to work on the relationships of trust and also understand that the nature of the relationship of trust is that it's reciprocal. You give and you receive trust. And I think that's some of the deep and important work that we all have to do. We were talking about Denmark. Yes, right. We were talking about the happiness factor. And in the study, it was actually a conversation about a woman who left her, a Danish woman who came to New York and left her baby outside the cafe and she could see the pram and she was arrested because you want to protect a baby being left outside but from her town in Denmark she described that that's kind of what you do.

11:36You trust somebody not to take your baby but you also trust education to provide good school lunches. You trust an immigrant coming to your country to be housed you have a health care system and do you think that trust has in in our country in the united states have you finding that people not only not trust their neighbor not to have a gun or to be there for them if they have an accident but to trust government to take care of them yeah but i yes and but i think that um it's not a new phenomena yeah for populations of people and I'll speak for the American people, to have a healthy level of skepticism about whether the government is working in a way that works for them, the people, to be frustrated with the bureaucracy of government, with the politics.

12:39That's not new. But I do think that in particular since the pandemic, we've seen it increase at a pretty significant level. I actually think that part of the challenge we have is we are not talking enough about the trauma that so many people experienced because of the pandemic. People lost family members to COVID. They lost their livelihood. They lost some people lost their homes, small business owners lost their businesses our children lost significant phases of not only their education but socialization and it was as though the the rug got pulled out from under people and and whereas you thought that there were some basic things about the system however you define it that would always exist the pandemic upended it all and I think left people with a greater level of skepticism and skepticism I think is a symptom of distrust and so some people then say well how is it that more people aren't taking to the streets about what we're seeing happen in the last nine months I mean I think that there are many people who are feeling like yeah we know that the system doesn't always work for us so why is anybody surprised now and so if we're going to deal with the the reality of where we are beyond that one election i think this is this is part of the work we have to do which is to encourage these difficult conversations about issues like trust yeah and to address issues like trauma to exact to address of course issues that are about whether government is actually working for the people and do we need to re-examine, especially in the aftermath that there will be of this current administration, and while then we are looking at a big pile of debris, maybe it's not about rebuilding.

14:52Oh, I see. Maybe it's transformative, and it's not, because I actually, I write about this in the book, I think that when that day comes, we cannot afford and let us make sure we do not think about what to do in a way that is burdened by some nostalgia to recreate a system that was flawed and instead let's have some honest conversations about what was not working and then see the opportunity we might have to actually and sadly start from scratch with some stuff you grew up in a family of trust you know reading about your your family about your mother and your father and your grandmothers. Incredible people.

15:35I mean, you know, I feel very blessed in terms of how I grew up and in particular my childhood because every signal, every message that was sent and that I received was, you are important, you are loved. you know i grew up in an environment where people told us we were special we weren't particularly special but we believed them you're special you know and you should have believed but well but you told that we were saying this right like we like we we we can and should do more of that as a society in terms of the signals we send to the children right um i grew up, and this is what I talked about at the convention, where I had a family by blood, and I had a family by love, where my mother created a family that included people who were not blood relatives, but they were our family.

16:41I mean, walking through your kitchen, I was reminded of my Uncle Freddy, who was not my uncle by blood, but he was my uncle in every way. he had a basement apartment in Harlem he used to work with the Studio Museum in Harlem and we'd go visit Uncle Freddy in his basement apartment in Harlem and Uncle Freddy loved to cook but his kitchen was maybe the size of this table and so Uncle Freddy would wash everything as soon as he used it if he used a spoon it could wash literally because there was no room Yeah, yeah. This is great. Would you like to go and tell the chefs that? No, so let me tell you for our kids.

17:23You know, I love to cook Sunday family dinner. It's like non-negotiable. And the kids have now coined the term after dinner, let's Uncle Freddy to the kitchen. I love it. Right? Yeah. But people like my Uncle Freddy, people like my Uncle Sherman, who taught us. Was Uncle Sherman an uncle or is he also not an uncle? He was not an uncle by blood, but he was an uncle. And Uncle Sherman sat us down. my sister Maya and me when we were like I don't know six seven and he said you guys are going to learn how to play chess because the chess board is like life and they're going to be many different pieces on the board that move differently and they're all on the same board and part of learning how to play chess is you will learn that you have to think about any step you take the ramifications of it three steps out this is the family that raised me you know both of them passed away it's i actually write about that in the book too it's uh it's so many of them died far too young far too You also have kind of multicultural cooking family.

18:37So you had a mother from southern India. And southern India is very regional. You're absolutely right. There's a difference between southern India and northern India. Huge difference in food and culture. So you had southern India. You had Jamaica. And you had, well, later on, your husband. My husband, who is Jewish. And also my second mother, who is from Louisiana. Yeah. And part of that whole migration of black folks from the south who went west and the midwest. And that's a regional. I always say that in our country, the regional food is from the south. If you're in Vermont, you might have maple syrup, which you might not find in Idaho.

19:15But basically, it is kind of the same. But southern cooking has such a regionality to it, doesn't it? Here's one of the things I learned early on about the universality of it all through food. Yeah. Miss Shelton, who was our second mother. The neighbor. The neighbor. And my mother both loved to cook okra. Okra. My mother would cook it with mustard seeds and turmeric. Southern Indian. Miss Shelton would cook it with dried shrimp and hot sausages and bell peppers and tomatoes. And I have all those recipes. And did you prefer one to the other? I love them both. You love them both. Did you make your own?

19:57How do you make okra? Or do you want to think? You know what? Here's the thing I have to deal with is that my husband does not like what he calls slimy food. Yeah, he doesn't like zucchini. He doesn't like zucchini. He doesn't like eggplant. Although I've been starting to sneak it into moussaka. He didn't know that moussaka had, but there's one ingredient, which is eggplant. You know, eggplant is tricky. You have to cook it the right way. Otherwise, it will be rubbery. You know, when I came to this country, I went into a green grocer and I asked for eggplant. They brought me a dozen eggs. So if anybody's listening, we're talking eggplant and a machine.

20:29So you had people who were passionate about food and food identity. And like my mother, she was a scientist. She loved to cook. She loved the chemistry of food. So, for example, and she was, you know, unlike this guy in the White House, she understood that scientific research is obviously a passion that is about improving the human condition, that scientific research in its best is going to be peer-reviewed. It will be a collaborative effort among nations. So my mother, for example, had colleagues from all over the world. And I remember in particular the Brescianis from Italy. Oh, from Italy. Yeah, she's the best.

21:16And Franco Bresciani and his kids, Marco and Paolo and Megan. And we used to go and visit with the Brescianis. And Tira. You mean you go to Italy? No, we go to, they lived in Toronto. Okay. And my mother would take my sister and me and we'd go visit with them. And they, and Tira, the mother, the wife, this long table where we would sit for hours. and just course after course after course and conversation and passionate conversation and good arguments and people would get up and walk away and come back for hours. So my mother actually, she would cook with Tira and my mother was a great Italian cook in addition to South Indian food.

22:06She got on this kick for quite some time about us making Chinese food Like we would sit on the floor and make bows. Yeah. And then we would do wontons. So she loved cooking and loved food. What was the kitchen like in your house? It was the center of all activity. Was it a big room? It was a, it felt big to me. Would you eat in there? We would eat in there. Yeah. And my mother said to me when I was young, and you can tell the kids that like to eat good food right and my mother said to me I'll never forget she said you like to eat good food you better learn how to cook yeah I agree yeah because people ask me why why did I start cooking there's a point either if you you know have enough the money to go out to a restaurant every night no and you want to eat well well then you learn to you know, you learn to cook.

23:06I have the apron. I got it from a friend. And it says, I like to cook the food people like to eat. Yeah. Yeah.

23:55So when did you start cooking? When I was a kid. Well, I remember one of the first things that I would make, we would wake up early, Mommy's sleeping. And I would make scrambled eggs, and I'd make it into a circle on a plate, and then I would cut Monterey Jack or cheddar cheese to make a smiley face melted on top of the scrambled eggs. What age are we talking about? That's so sweet. Like six, seven. Yeah, and you bring it to your mother. And I bring it to her, and here's the thing about it. My mother did not like eating breakfast. Oh, right. But she was always kind of, I was like, don't talk to mommy before she had her cup of coffee, right?

24:37But tell me about a day in your house. Would you all have breakfast? How many were you in the house? It was the three of us, my mother and my sister and me, because my parents divorced when I was five. And it was usually my mother would start cooking like Saturday morning. For the week. For the week. Oh, wow. and I'd wake up kind of just smelling the food and just kind of just half asleep going into the kitchen. And, you know, that's the thing about cooking, right? It really is all the senses. It's literally all the senses. It includes the sense of sound. Sound and smell. And, of course, smell and sight and flavor and taste.

25:22It's all of those things. Would she repeat? Did you know that Monday was lasagna and Tuesday was Chinese dumplings? She would never, no. She would just make the food. She would, sometimes she would, because she worked. She worked long days. She did Saturdays because she had to work. And we always had fresh baked cookies or a cake in the house. Yeah. She was phenomenal. And she loved to cook. She probably loved it, too. So it was, she loved to cook. And sometimes she would look at us and she'd say, okay, girls, tonight we are having smogus board. We get so damn excited about smogus board. Do you know what smogus board was?

25:54That's a Danish buffet, isn't it? Well. Open sandwiches or something. What it was growing up is that she would take cookie cutters and cut the bread into heart and flower shapes. She'd get those toothpicks with the little colors on them, and she'd put little mayonnaise in a thing, mustard in a thing, and pull out all the leftovers. And we were having smog as poor. Whatever, yeah. All the leftovers. but it was fun. It was fun. She sounds amazing. She was a scientist. She was a breast cancer researcher and she actually was responsible for breakthroughs in breast cancer. So would you come home from school and would the cookies be there?

26:41The cookies would be there. We were so-called latch kid kids but then Miss Shelton was tutoring. And so if mommy was working late we would go and have dinner at Miss Shelton's. And what would she cook? Oh, everything from okra to, oh my gosh, she made the most incredible gumbo. That was on special occasions. She used to do a cabbage in like a Dutch oven, a heavy-bottomed pot, and she would just cook it down, and it was just so good. It's that thing of vegetables being cooked for a little. That's very Italian, you know, the difference between. We always say that Italians, French blanche, we don't blanche anymore.

27:23No, right. that we never plant. You sort of cook it and then it absorbs the olive oil and it takes a longer, And that's exactly what happened with the cabbage. A longer taste. And it was so delicious. It's just full of flavor. I mean, she cooked with, and I still retain. I have, I love my spices, but there are certain things that I just still hold on to and you can't take it away from me. One of them, Lowry's seasoning salt. Oh, Lowry, as in the brand. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I only pull it out for some stuff, but it's, it's that. But if you, You grew up in this home where you had your mother cooking and telling you how much you were loved and having dinners and having Miss Shelton and having Freddie.

28:03And what was it like to leave this? I mean, when you suddenly became 17 or 18 and went to university, and you went to Howard, didn't you? I went to Howard. And had it prepared you? All of my friends, in particular my girlfriends in college, they also liked to cook. My first roommate was Cape Verdian. And there was a whole dish, you know, and there's a huge Cape Verdian. I thought that was her name. Her name was Kate Verdian. I thought, who's Cape Verdian? Cape Verdian. There's, you know, a whole population of Cape Verdians outside of Massachusetts. I didn't know that. Yes. And that's where she was from.

28:41Yeah. And so she would make this dish, and I don't remember the name of it, but with like lima beans and all that, and it was delicious. Where? Where did you have a department? We had a little kitchen. In the dorm. Yes, in our dorm. And then another of my girlfriends, Gwen, who was from Detroit, she had a different version of making collard greens than I did. That's very American, collard greens. You know what collard greens are? Southern. It's a big leaf green, and it's very sturdy. And then you have to cook it down. In fact, someone recently told a story. when I was campaigning in Iowa in 2019, our family, we decided we needed to stay in Iowa for Thanksgiving to campaign.

29:29But I was in South Carolina the day before, and I always make greens, collard greens, for Thanksgiving. There was no collard greens to be found in Iowa. So I, like a good country woman, bought bags of fresh collard greens in South Carolina and walked through the airport. That's pretty amazing. I did not care who saw me. And when I got on the plane, some of the people on the plane who were from South Carolina nodded in approval.

30:03Two votes in South Carolina. That's amazing. So you cook collard greens. You're in college. you made your own meals, you brought that with you. I was on the meal plan. We haven't talked about restaurants. I couldn't afford to eat out in restaurants, in school. I mean, we did growing up. We would go from time to special occasions. And it was always an adventure in terms of where we would go, right, and what kind of, you know, what we would choose. And so working, what was that like when you were suddenly working? Well, you know, then, I mean, in my 20s, going out, it was, you know, socializing.

30:43It was so, you know, fun meeting friends in San Francisco. Yeah. Which has an incredible food scene. It does. It was the Bay Area all together. What year was that? So Oakland and San Francisco. Okay. So the 90s. 90s. And incredible food scene. Yeah. And again, eclectic by some people's standards, right? and I mean everything from you know the best barbecue you can imagine to incredible sushi we would go on like Sundays or Saturdays for dim sum all of those yeah and the farm to table and Alice Walters her cookbook was probably early on and we started so my bolognese my world famous bolognese according to me is a hybrid of Alice and Marcella.

31:36Ah, yeah. So I do, for example, I do the pancetta. Okay, this could be your recipe read. Yeah. All right, we're going to now hear a recipe for, what's the title? Tomala Harris' World Famous Bolognese. Okay, I like the low key. Why not? If I'm going to give it, it's kind of fun. Okay, so tell us how to make this. Okay, so I start with my Dutch oven, Le Crusette. Yeah. Just nice, and I have had it forever. What color is orange? I have two, actually, because when I was back and forth, one is white and one is blue. Oh, okay. But the oval, right? Pancetta. Yeah. So then I do my mirepoise. So I do very small chopping of onion, of celery, of carrot there.

32:28then I do garlic after but you know because I don't want it to burn then I do a combination of beef and pork then I do you know there's a theory about whether you should do the wine first or the milk first I am of the school that you should do the milk first okay so I do the milk then I and also I sage and thyme and I have a beautiful bay leaf oh yeah I do I have an herb garden and my bay leaf tree is just it's just the most beautiful thing you have ever seen I bring bay leaf to people as gifts I just put a nice fancy ribbon on it and then I let it reduce around the milk and then I do pretty much a whole bottle of wine white I describe the wine I do a white and I usually do I mean you know not super expensive I know you're supposed to do whatever you drink but I you know um and this would be for how many people I do often three times the recipe so I can freeze some of it okay then I do a combination of a little bit of tomato paste and San Marzano tomatoes and then I cook it for hours and hours how many hours I usually about five okay are you stirring it every half an hour okay so very low heat yeah no it's very low heat It just did very light simmer until the oil starts to write.

33:47And then it's just, it's fantastic. And then I will freeze like two-thirds of it because it's such a production. What pasta do you use? I usually do like a linguine. I don't do spaghetti. I like a flat pasta. Yeah, I like flat pasta. You know, I do penne a lot too. Yeah, that's nice too. Does Doug like this? Well, this is the thing. So I actually talk about it in the books. So having been the first woman vice president of the United States, part of what I never talked about publicly but do kind of reveal in the book is 48 vice presidents of the United States were men. We lived in the vice president's residence and were supported by naval enlisted aides.

34:35And if I was on a trip to come, I came to the U.K. to talk about the future safety of A.I., I went to the Indo-Pacific many times to so on and so on. If I was out of the house, they all left to travel with me. And nobody would cook for Doug. So as vice president of the United States, I made a few times a big pot of bolognese to freeze containers so that my husband could eat when I was doing the business of the United States of America. Okay, we can absorb that. Yeah, we can channel that. So that was one of the occasions in which I would freeze-ball and ACA. I would tell you only one more story than that, is that when we talked to Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell, we had two podcasts, one with Alistair, they described that if you were at Downing Street and you wanted lunch, somebody had to go down to Pret-a-Marche and bring back the sandwiches.