Portside

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.