You're listening to Ruthie's table for in collaboration with me and em intelligent style for busy women.

On the very first page of Vice President Carmela Harris's dramatic and compelling book A hundred and Seven Days, she mentions food four times.

I often say that I look at life and art through the lens of food, and I think this is one of the many things she and I share.

We 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 with something I will always remember, every one put down their knives, their pots, their pants, 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.

Well, she's sitting right next to me here in the River Cafe.

Oh my goodness, thank you.

We would you like to tell everybody what you had for breakfast when you came to the River Cafe this morning?

I have the most exquisite breakfast, a beautiful slice of home baked bread that was toasted just to perfection with Brada, 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.

Think that the the way that you did this, with the diary, with the ups and the downs and the inns and the outs and the excitement and the it takes you really urge everyone to read this because it's it's a it's knowledge, it's you know, and as you say, for young people who want to, you know, go into this world and understand more.

I think it's, uh, it's a textbook as well.

I wrote the book in a way that I was very honest and forthright and handed.

Yeah, and I am 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 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 at the same time as the lamb?

How does how does it all work?

And 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 and the choreography, which is and and the other reason I wrote the book is it is those one hundred and seven days are a part of American's history, and it was very important to me that my voice is present in the way that history tells the story of those days.

Think about it.

It was unprecedented, Ruthie.

We had sitting president of the United States running for reelection.

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 ten years, with one hundred and seven days to go, And so I wrote the books stylistically like a journal.

Most of the one hundred and seven days our chapters, each of them a chapter based on the extraordinary experience that I had 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.

Part 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 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, 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 one hundred and seven 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 and 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.

I was going to ask you how being on a book tour does is 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 a you know, a an event of speech, a raw you know, rallies, and the difference between going to the 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, and 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 forty.

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.

And so what I'm enjoying about it is that, unlike the campaign, I also have the luxury of being able to sit down with people.

I think they know that if they're invited to come, it's going to be a real conversation and a safe place, 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 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, Yeah, 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.

You trust somebody not to take your baby, but you also trust education to provide good school lunches.

You trusted coming to your country to be how's you have a health care system?

And do you think that trust has in our country in the United States?

Do 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 yes, but I think that it's not a new phenomena 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.

That'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 home, small business owners lost their businesses.

Our children lost significant phases of not only their education but socialization.

And it was as though the rug got pulled out from under people.

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 saying 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 does dollars work for us, So why is anybody surprised now?

And so if we're going to deal with 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 and to address issues like trauma, 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.

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 family and father, your grandmother's incredible people.

I mean, you know which, 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, what we believed them.

Special, doll.

Like we we can and should do more of that as a society in terms of the signals we send to the children.

Right.

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.

I mean, walking through your kitchen, I was reminding my uncle Freddie, 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 Freddie loved to cook.

But his kitchen was maybe the size of this table.

And and so Uncle Freddy would wash everything as soon as he used it.

If he used his books, it could washed it literally because there was.

It's great, but you're about to go and tell the chefs.

But you know I love to cook, send family dinner.

It's like non negotiables.

And the kids have now coined the term after dinner.

Let's Uncle Freddy's kitchen, right.

But people like my uncle Freddy, people like my uncle Sherman who taught us.

Was Uncle Sherman an uncle or.

He was not an uncle by blood, but he has 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 moved 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.

You know.

Both of them passed away.

It's I actually write about that in the book too.

It's so many of them died far too young, far too young.

Yeah, you also have kind of multi cultural cooking family.

So you have a mother, my mother from Indian India and southern and South Indiana.

There's a difference between your absolutely right India northern huf food and culture in India.

Yeah, you had Jamaica and you had your well later on, your.

Husband, my husband who is Jewish, and also my second mother who was from Louisiana.

Yea, and part of that whole migration of black folks from the South who went west.

And and that's a regional I always say in our country, the regional food is from the South.

I mean, if you're in Vermont, you might have maple syrup, which you might not find in Idaho.

But basically it is kind of the same.

But Southern cooking has such a regionality too.

But see here's here's one of the things I learned early on about the universality of it all through food.

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?

How do you make up?

You know what?

I Here's the thing I have to deal with is that my husband does not like what he calls slimy food.

It doesn't like zucchini, he doesn't like he doesn't like egg plant.

Although I've been starting to sneak it into asaka.

You didn't know that Musaka.

Had well trick.

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 egg plan.

They brought me a dozen eggs.

So, if everybody listening, we're talking.

So you had people who were passionate about food and food identity and and and.

And like my mother was, she was a scientist.

She loved to cook.

She loved the chemistry 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 pure 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 and Franco Breciani and his kids, Marco and Paolo and Megan, and we used to go and visit with the Brescianis, and no we go to the they lived in Toronto, 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.

She got on this kick for quite some time about us making Chinese food, like we would sit on the floor and make bows and then we would do wan tons and we would So she loved cooking in the kitchen.

It was the center of all activity.

Was it big?

It was?

It was?

It was, it was.

It felt big to me.

Yeah, it wasn't in there.

We would eat in there and and 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.

I agree, because I can't ask me why why do I start cooking?

There's a point either.

If you don't have the money to go out to a restaurant every night and you want to eat, well, well, then you learned to you know, you learn to cook.

I have apron I got it from a friend, and it says I like to cook the food people like to eat.

So when did you start cooking when I was from the beginning?

Well, I remember one of the first things that I would make where 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 this.

What age are we talking about?

Six.

And here's the thing about that.

My mother did not like eating breakfast.

I was like, don't talk about it.

Of course you had a cup of coffee, right, But.

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 they make for the week, and I'd wake up kind of just smelling the food and just kind of just half asleep going into the kitchen.

And 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 of course smell and sight and flavor and taste.

It's all of those things.

Would she repeat, did you know that Monday was lasagna on Tuesday?

Would she not?

She would?

Sometimes she would because she worked long day.

She always fresh bake cookies, cake in the house.

She was phenomenal and and she loved she loved to cook.

And sometimes she would look at us and she'd say, okay, girls, tonight we are having smogashboard.

We get so damn excited about smogast board.

Do you know what smogt board was?

That's a Danish well open sandwiches or some of what it was.

What it was.

Is that she would take cookie cutters and cut the bread into heart and flower shapes.

She'd get those 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 smallest.

All the leftovers.

But it was fun.

It was fun, sounds amazing.

She was a scientist.

She was a breast cancer research and she actually was responsible for breakthroughs and breast cancers.

So would you come home from school and would the cookies be there?

The cookies would be there.

Why we're so called latch kid kids.

But then Miss Shelton two doors and so if mommy was working late, we would go and have dinner and Miss Shelton's and she cooked oh everything from okra to oh my god.

She made the most incredible gumbo.

That was on special occasions.

She used to do a cabbage in like a Dutch of a heavy bottomed pot and she would just cook it, cook it down and it.

Was just so good.

It's that thing of vegetables being cooked for that's very Italian.

Yeah, yes, we always say that Italians, right, No, right, we never you sort of cook it and then as olive oil.

And that's exactly what happened with the cabbage.

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 Yes, yeah, I only pull it out for some stuff, but it's it's that.

But if you you grew up in this where you had, you know, your mother cooking and being you know, telling you how much you would loved and having dinners and having Miss Shelton and having Freddy, And what was it like to leave this?

I mean when you suddenly became seventeen or eighteen and went to university and you you went to Howard?

Did I went to Howard?

And what was that?

Was that?

Ed?

It prepared you.

All of my friends, in particular my girlfriends in college, they also like to cook My first roommate was Cape Verdian and there was there was a whole dish, you know, and there's a.

Was Kate Virgianot, who's.

There's you know, the whole population of Cape Verdian's outside of Massachusetts.

I didn't know that, Yes, and that's where she was from.

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 very it was delicious.

Where did you have a fun We we had a little kitchen in the dorm in our yes, in our dorm.

And then another of my girlfriends, Gwen, who was from Detroit, she had a different version of making collar greens than I did.

Yeah, that's very American colored greens.

You know, colored 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 the story.

When I was campaigning in Iowa in twenty nineteen, our family we decided we needed to stay in Iowa for Thanksgiving to campaign.

But I was in South Carolina the day before and I always make greens, collared greens for Thanksgiving.

There was no call of greens to be found in Iowa.

So I like a good country woman, but bags of fresh call of greens in South Carolina and walk through the airport.

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.

Two boats in South Carolina.

So you could call a greens.

You're in college, you major own meals?

You well, sometimes I was on the meal plan.

We haven't talked about restaurants.

Did you for to eat out in restaurants in school?

I mean we did growing up.

We would go from 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 twenties, going out it was you know, socialism, So it was you know, fun meeting with friends in San Francisco, which it has an incredible foods It was the Bayry altogether, so open in San Francisco, so the nineties nineties and incredible food scene 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 like Sundays or Saturdays for dim sum, all of those.

Yeah, and the farm to table and.

We had the fact and Alice ad her cookbook was probably early on the artisty started.

Yeah, I have so my bowlin aisy, my world famous bolan is, according to me, is hybrid of Alice and Marcella.

Yeah, so I do for example, I do the panchetta.

Okay, this could be your recipe read yeah, all right, we're gonna now hear a recipe.

For okay's title Tla Harrison's world Famous bowlin.

Okay, I like the I like the low key why not?

Okay, so tell us how to make this?

Okay, So I start with my Dutch oven little crusette, just nice and I have had it forever.

Color is orange.

I have two actually because when I was back and forth, one is white and one is blue.

But the oval right, panchetta.

So then I do my mare past.

So I do very small chopping of onion, of celery, of carrot there.

Then I do garlic after, 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.

And also I sage and time.

And I have a beautiful oh 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, and.

This would be for how many people?

I do often three times the recipe so I can freeze some, okay.

Then I do a combination of a little bit of tomato paste and Saint 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 or so?

Very low heat?

Yeah, no, it's very low heat.

It just did very light summer rental.

The oil starts to write and then it's just it's fantastic, and then I will freeze like two thirds of it because it's such a production, and I usually do I usually do like a linguine era.

I don't do spaghetti.

I'd like a flat pond.

Yea, I like it.

You know.

I do painting a lot too.

Yeah, that's nice too.

Yeah.

Well, this is the thing so I actually talk about in the book.

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 forty eight vice president of the United States were men.

We lived in the Vice President's residence, and we're supported by naval enlisted AIDS.

And if I was on a trip to come, I came to the UK to talk about the future safety of AI.

I went to the Indo Pacific many times, 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 bowlin aisy to freeze containers so that my husband could eat.

When I was doing the business of the United States of America.

Okay, we can preserve that, so you can channel that.

So that was that was That was one of the occasions in which I would freeze out.

Only one more story than that is that when we talked to Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell too.

We had two podcasts.

One with Alistair, they described that if you were Downing Street and you wanted lunch, somebody had to get down to Predamache and bring back the sandwiches.

You know that that you know, and I just think you see behind the.

Cross.

I just keeps holding France up as a as.

The best, one of the best dinners ever.

Going to ask you, was.

There the cheese, of course, Oh the cheese.

It was so just yeah, everything everything was just exquisite, just the detail and the beauty of it.

No, it's true.

Mark Carney told me the other day that they were on a train.

If you go to Ukraine, you absolutely have to take the train on a trip.

And Canadians had a car, the British had a car, the French had a car.

And he said that, you know, the Canadians just brought some stuff in Poland and put on the train.

The British had nothing, and then they went into the French car and they had cheese and wine, and there was a incredible fox gras and he said, it's just each each train carriage was so specifically clear about the country's attitude to culture and food.

Culture.

Yes, and state dinners.

Because I was going to ask you about when you were actually vice president.

The schedule.

I can only imagine.

Would you stop flunch?

Would you have working lunches?

Did it very I.

Almost always ate lunch at my desk.

What would that be?

It would be a combination of maybe like fish and vegetables or a salad, or.

Was it like the West Wing.

Did you do dinner formal dinners?

We did diners, which I unless it was family.

Yeah, yeah, we did.

We did a lot of formal dinners.

I would go down to the kitchen, to the industrial kitchen and cook with them and also share with them technique.

Really uh huh.

The first person and I actually talked about in the book that I hosted for a meal was then Chancellor Angle and Merkel.

Would you do the menus?

Would you say this is what we.

Would I would work with my yeah, social secretary and plan the menus every one of them, though pretty much I participated in planning State dinners were just magnificent and beautiful.

And you know, this was a beautiful aspect of the power of diplomacy, which we call soft power.

And sadly, the current occupant of the White House, I think does not appreciate the significance of that power.

We goes back to a childhood they getting together over food, meeting over food.

This morning, media to the house.

And that's something on your plate.

And you said, the act of actually putting something on somebody else's plate.

Try this beautiful.

It is an act of love, it truly is.

It is a gesture of of kindness.

It is a gesture of caring.

You know, there's nothing like and I told you, like just there is nothing like sitting at a table and someone prepares a plate for you and puts it in front of you from the kitchen that you can see.

There is nothing like that.

We have to do more of that.

Yes, we are going, yes, yea.

My last question always on these conversations is is there a food that you would go for when you need comfort?

Pasta pasta all day long, pasta all day long.

And I have in my garden a lot of beautiful basil.

And sometimes I just make a big, big batch of pesto, and but I freeze it without the cheese.

And I have this thing almost like an ice tray.

Each slot is a cup worth of liquid.

And so I make a big batch of pesto one cup, and then I freeze these bricks and then you just defrosted, and then I.

Do, and then you have the cheese.

You are such a good cook.

Well, you really are a good cook.

I am in awe.

You're getting you are?

You know?

The little it's you know, you know people who are good cooks because they love food.

But your detail, you know, it's like the way you are in this book.

It's the way you run a campaign.

It's the way you talk to my granddaughter.

It's a way you come on this podcast.

There's a rigor, there's a passion, but there is knowledge and generosity.

So you are great cooks and we're going to cook together.

I'm so looking forward to that.

Are you kidding me?

Let's go do it with you.

Thank you.

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