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In August, after the Democratic National Convention, I was at a breakfast meeting in Los Angeles when James Carville suddenly joined our table. James is a legendary political analyst, a spokesman for the Democratic Party, and a former campaign manager to President Bill Clinton. The title of his new documentary says it all winning is Everything stupid. James and I might seem very different. After all, He's from Louisiana and
I'm from upstate New York. He cooks cumbo, I cook Glagurian fish stew, but were also pretty much the same passionate about people, passionate about food, passionate about politics. With the inauguration approaching on January twentieth, there couldn't be a better time to hear what James has to say, and for this episode we have a special edition. Emily Maglis and John Sopel, hosts of The news Agent's podcast, joined us for what was a really interesting discussion.
Thank you, I'm just delighted to be here. Yeah, I think you and I maybe born in the same homb We certainly think a lot about a lot of things, I think.
So we have a lot to talk about, but before we do, you know the drill, right, So the recipe that just was Ligurian fish stew. Laguria is on the coast, it's apart between Genoa and Pisa. And this came from our first cookbook. It's pretty simple. But I thought you might like to read that, and you can read it anywhere you want.
And let me preface it. But I said, I think my favorite foods in the world, or these fish based things like you know, gumbo, bully based for sure, Belengorian fish stew for sure, any of these kinds of things that really capture the sea. All of it is a little bit of the same. I mean, it's a little different cooking techniques. But let's go ahead. Let's get started here. Want three red mullet filet scaled and clean. You got
of scale and clean and it's true. Five hundred grams of monkfish or turbo filets one point five kilograms and mussels, twelve langue steams like a little shrip scampy one and fifty millimeters of white wine. One fresh chili seated and chopped, one point two leaders of fish stock. Yeah, okay, that's that's the key ingredients in all of these kind of seafood things. Twelve small new potatoes, peeled and ball, one lead of tomato sauce and one hundred and seventy five
millimeters olliveball. Put muscles in a large sauce fan with olive ball, white wine and chili coven steam over high heat. Shaken until all shells open. WINKU remove half the muscles from their shells and grain juices into the fish stock. Okay, I want to make an editorial combat here. This is important because you're adding flavor to flavor. You already major fish stock. Never throw away oyster liquor or bacon grease because anytime you get into trouble, bacon grease is gonna
save you. Now, then we bring the fishtock to a ball and the lango sines poach. Add the fish stock. Now when you poaching this or you're reducing a little bit too. Reduction is a big thing when you're doing things because you want to the fish track more flavor out of it. Add the fish stock and a tomato sauce and bring to a ball. Add the mullet, monk fish or turbo and scallons, stirring cooked potatoes, mussels and
langosteins to make christini. Toast the bread on both sides in rubber garlic, Place on top of the soup and serve. But it's simple, but we have fresh ingredients. You want to enhance, not overwhelm the ingredients. So if you're going into trouble to getting fresh fish, shall fish, you want that flavor to come through and you want to I think what's brillian about this recipe? It accentuates the flavors more than anything else.
Of course, we all know you as the political strategists for you know, you won the election for President Clinton. Did you want to go into politics yourself?
Since I was a kid, I've always loved politics. I've never really wanted to run for office. Why not? I don't know. I always wanted to be the man, the man for the man, Okay I was. I said, maybe one day I'd like Noah governor and work for I mean then I didn't have my first electoral village victory. Tell's forty two.
Your first major campaign was Clinton?
Or what did you do well? Major being described as like statewide races. I said, I was in Louisia, My first statewide was a Senate race in Texas. We lost. That was in nineteen eighty four. I did a Senate race in Virginia nineteen eighty two and we lost. So I was a loser. And there was a guy I
ran for governor of Pennsylvania. He lost three times before the three times he went to holy Cross College, and Matt Excuse called the three times I lost from holy Cross, and he couldn't find anybody in wanting to run his campaign, so they ended up calling me, and I didn't have to they had to send the money for the plane ticket. Well ultimately won. Then I won a race in Kentucky and New Jersey and Georgia, and so I became noticed
by President Clinton. So I became his chief strategist. And then this is for the first selection, first election nineteen ninety two, nineteen ninety two, and then after that I started doing foreign consulting.
Did you go with him to the convention? Did you know him before the convention? Yeah, so you were part of the strategy right for him, but to get the domination right to nominate, yeah, yeah, which was quite incredible, wasn't it, Because he came from from Arkansas. Nobody really knew who this person was.
Yeah, he was so unbelievably talented, and then he was when you just look at him. Man, I was with him a week ago. He is people. When people say he's smart, you don't have any idea. You think you think you're smart, You have no idea your empathetic understanding explaining things.
And what about the food. Let's go back to food. So when you were with Clinton, he liked, he's a food person, isn't he did he care about food or not?
So he was so intense. So one time we were on a campaign plane and he would do the New York Times Crossford puzzle and he literally would never take his fence law. And so they bought him salad and the coffee, and I asked had to wash him, put the thousand hours dress in the coffee and the cream on the salad. And he didn't know the difference.
But you always knew you want to be a Democrat.
Yes, I was always because all related to civil rights and race. I just thought black people were getting a terrible deal. And I probably grew up with some element of white guilt. Okay, we didn't obsess on it, but I knew that I had one life and they had another life, and I just thought that was kind of unfair.
Let's start at the beginning. Where were you born?
So? I was actually born in Fort Betting, George, because my daddy was an army during the war. I grew up in Louisiana, which is called the River Parishes, which is more black than the other parts of out of Louisiana. And my grandmother was from New Orleans and my mother was from of Alls, which is way north, and they are very distinct differences in Louisiana cooking. It is not one thing. It's like Italian cooking.
Your father's mother was from New Orleans and.
My mother was from Boyles Parish, which is probably one hundred and fifty miles from New Organs. It's very far north. Both Catholics, both French dominated, but very different cuisine. If you think of New Orleans as being kind of Parisian and the rest being provincially it's a good shorthand it's a little different day in New Orleans. They put tomato in the gumbo, which is heresy to my much just couldn't believe that. I mean little things like that when you.
Were growing up, did your grandmother live near you, so you had these two.
Yes, eat paternal grandmother lived a mile exactly one point six miles me and I would stay with her all the time. Why is that because she spoiled me?
Are you a grandfather?
I'm a grandfather. I have a.
Completely different relationship with our grandchildren.
Someone said, the reason that grandparents and grandchildren get along so well they have a common enemy.
Always take the side of your grandkid, always absolutely, I said. You know, I often say that people who come here and talk about food, they talk sometimes more about their grandparents cooking than their mother's cooking. They'll talk about their grandmother's food more than their mother's, especially people who've emigrated from other countries, they'll do that.
How many we have brothers? Eight children? Eight? Eight? Yes, yes, you have seven brothers and sisters. We do. We'd have gumbo in the winter time on the sew, and she she do this delicious a shrimp and corn soup and the corn was fresh. And you know, we'd have that sometimes in the summer months, but we all we came home from school, we always had a pot on the sew.
Did she work?
Did she have a job, or she did she sold in cycle. She did not, but we had too many kids and eight children. So she sold encyclopedias and she was quite.
Good at door to door type of thing.
Yeah, well she would, she would prospect. So she taught me like targeting customers and said, we want to see two things, a bass boat in a bicycle, because that's going to tell us that these people have children and they have some income. And so that's how we target out.
You would target those target out house. What's the bass boat?
It's like a fishing boat, but you have to have some influence and be in the yard. It would be like on a thing, a trailer. And so she would go in and that was like twelve or thirteen years old, and she didn't it was you know, this was a couple was out of coach in the late fifties and sixties, and she started talking to the lady at the house and she'd say, your son, what's the capital of her? Miners?
My pitia? To god? Oh god, he said, God, damn genius, you know, And then she'd gone she said, what's the capital of Oregon? Salem? Oh? My god? How hockeld anybody be that? Some mort And then she'd say, well, what's the capital of Finland, I'd say, hell Sinki. And he got this knowledge by having these encyclopedias. And so the lady at the house and said, well, this sounds terrific, and let me get my husband there. And so they inevit to be bring the husband in, and he was
kind of polite. He said, well, miss called he. I know you've got a great product here. But you know when school, when we're just a little short, now one, don't you come back maybe after the first year, we'll take another look at it. You know something, Sara, I find something about you that's interesting. You could afford a bass boat for yourself, but you can't afford educational workarios for your children. God was done. He was signing anything.
That you and would every night you'd sit down to have a dinner or would everybody kind of she.
Encouraged it, but you know, with kids that she was, I think she thought of losing battle. She thought that people should that meals were a communal thing. And you know, she had dementia and the only thing that they she would remember is my sister who was or and who took care of her, would say, Mama, would Grandma say at dinner time, and she would saying aposh, which is approached that until Grandma said approach, you couldn't approach the table, all right, And that was that was the last thing
that I wone remember a prush. She was a pretty sophisticated cook. Actually there was. She made something called crawfish bisc sort of recipes and that I'll single it out for you, but it's one of these dishes that it's really hard to make alone. So she would make it with like three of my sisters. Okay, no one should ever shell beans alone. That's a communal thing where you get together on the table and everybody's talking, you know.
Or no one should feel shrimp by themselves. That it should be done with a cold beer and newspaper and you feeling the shrimp. And you said, and there's certain things in home cooking or crawfish bisk because they had to make a stuffing and then they would like it was very complex undertaken, very good though, but you wouldn't. It's really labor intention.
You grew up in this household, seven brothers and sisters. Your mother was cooking for you when she wasn't selling encyclopedias, and your father was.
He was a postmaster, and we had a country store, a general store, so if you wanted a tenpenny nail, a pair of boots, a dozen eggs, slice lunch meat or something like that with the can. So we were to kind of central point of a rural place, and you know, old guys would come and they'd sit out and drink beer. And of course it was no I grew up. Everything was segregated except for us because we didn't have anything. There were no public facilities. There was
one when I was a little boy. They had a movie theater because the ballerina and the whites had to sit in the balcony. Because it was so few, they had to be segregated. But in most places the blacks had to sit in the balcony and the whites got to sit in the bottom of the theater. I was it was so overwhelmingly black, we had to sit in the in the balcony. And that was when I was at public clothes, when I was five or six years old. Okay, it was. It didn't last, but it was a uh.
And then what really made us international is we were the location of the most sophisticated and best place for the treatment of Hanson's disease, which you know of his leprosy. So that really in public health service ran as so medical people from all over the world would come to Carville. So I had this window on the wall that you would not get anywhere else in the Royal South. And I think that very much shape I became very much morning to be a citizen of the world, as much
as I wanted to be anything else. I came to love the whole world. It sounds kind of like the r but it's true.
And so that journey from going from being a citizen of this small small town to being where you are now concluded them. When you left home and then you went to university, did you know then that politics was what you.
And I wasn't. It went a very diligent, a good student, and I did go to law school.
And he went to the Marines.
Did you say, yeah, I got I got funked out, honest expression on it.
Where were you when Martin Luther Week?
I was in the Marine Corps. It was in April nineteen six.
Question is where were you when Martin Luther King was killed?
I had a friend, sounds try to say, but the black friend Okay, of course you were in the military. You did. And he said, the news came off that the king was killed. He said, man, I gotta I'm depressed. I got to go back to the barracks. I said, I'll cover for you or worry about it. No, forget it, don't forget it. And in the day I got out of the Marines, Bobby Kennedy was shot. So I mean a new turmoil in the Vietnam War was or a disaster. People think that they're living in the most turbulent times
you can imagine, Well, they are turbulent. It's terrible, But I lived in turbulent time.
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Excuse me from not getting up, but I'm your biggest friend. Oh, come on a terrible noise.
For this episode, Emily mac List and John Sopel, host of The Newsagent's podcast, joined our table.
Ruthie is like the greatest connector in the world, and so we talked.
About We've been to New Orleans, We've been to the Marines, We've been through Clinton. We've been everywhere, haven't we been? We were just we were just beginning to talk about the movie.
It's called Carville. Winning is everything stupid based on the economy? Stupid? Okay? In my belief that political campaigns exist to do one thing, and that's to win. If you don't win, you haven't done anything. It's kind of useless.
Where can people see this? It's only films in CNN.
It's on HBO X okay, it's we were live on CNN twice. We've been to all of the big film fashions.
Your Success was the idea that it had to come out after the election, so you you do it all.
Notice very interesting because we were trying to figure out when do you release it, and then all of the events that happened. He had to change the ending four times because once Biden got out. I'd been He had me on tape years before saying this guy can't run for reelection.
He's to Oh, people just say, are we worried about his age? And I was one of the people who'd say, I'd rather have that glass of water than Trump, and you're talking about him being old. I'm just a citizen. I didn't know the inside story. I wasn't the person, but I thought anybody who said we're worried about Biden's age was really a trumpest. I thought they wanted to for Trump, and they just wouldn't say it until the debate. You said, if he got out in twenty three in the summer twenty three.
Would have one going away, the implication.
Being that it would not have been her. You think there was somebody better.
Than Yes, I know. Well, I hate to give names because somebody's going to say them, going to exclude them. Andy Bushier, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, Gretchen Ritt, mur Or, fl Warnock, JB. Pritskou, Jared Polish, all these people and I've left some out. All these people are Miss Landry. Miss Landrew might be as good as communicator as Bill Clinton. In politics, the most underrated. I think attribute is drum roll, please charm, charm count people. White people who can charm people, they just do.
Isn't there a saying, you know, never play golf with the president, because if you're a journalist and the president asked you to play golf, he could come away and say, you know what, he had a sense of humor. You know what, he's kind of charming, you know and maybe again as a citizen, we're talking about policies. Maybe or Richard used to say that in his office. He said, if somebody was lovable, they could get away with so much, and if they weren't, they couldn't.
Yeah, you have no people. Okay, so once you're president, but there's some people that walk into a room, in the room changes. Did Kamalo have that chol not overly? No, that doesn't make you don't understand. Harris never ran for office outside of California, Okay, so she never had to walk into the lines. Yet it was a demo heavily democratic state. So she did never to cultivate hustle audiences. That are politicians able to do that? Could she have
won it? If Biden would have gotten out in the summer of twenty twenty three, we would have won easily, so could she have won? So Biden gets out on July to twenty first, all right, the deal gray condition starts on August seventeen, so she has to take his campaign manager, his campaign staff, his campaign headquarters, and everything the country. For whatever reason, I disagree with it. Wanted something different than by She refused to be different. They
will ask her, what would you do different? She says, I can't think of anything, so we would have definitely wanted Joe Biden stands over this disaster like a colossus. And I like him, Okay, And it's unfortunate because he's had a really remarkable life life in political career, but he's just going to be remembered for this for a long time. And it's really a shame. We have not had an inspirational candidate since twenty twelve. Most people in politics,
it's an emotional business. You see somebody, Hey I love John Kennedy, Hey I love Bill Clinton, Hey I love Obama. Hey I love Ronald Reagan. Hey I love Margaret Thatcher. So whatever, Okay, it's very much not a rational business, but an emotional business.
I was going to ask you about your domestic life when you created a home with Mary. So did you meet at the White House?
No, there was a story about me. She worked for Lee Atwater, who's she was the chief of staff at the Public Nation Committee, and Lee said go out and date this guy. Basically, go see what you can find out.
About the spy.
Yeah, she was shut out as a spy.
Romantic.
Yeah, no, literally that's what happened.
Did you have suspicions that she was spying on you?
Well, fourfol she's really nice looking, well dressed, and we were spying. But an hour and a half and four drinks later.
That's a very cinematic thing, isn't it. Where you find out the person that you think you love it that it turns out that.
She's very kind of open about it. She was spyed me.
Yeah, that's very romantic, I'd say. Yeah. So this was when you were with Clinton in the White House. Where is it?
Yeah? I started We started dating from January to first nineteen ninety one.
So he won the election.
In ninety two. She was head of all field operations, the coordinator for the Bush campaign, and then in November of nineteen ninety one, and she talked about movie and I went to work for Clinton, so she was the top Bush person. I was the top Clinton person, and God help us we survive.
The River Cafe Winter said Lunch is now running from Monday to Thursday. Reserve a booking on www. Rivercafe dot co dot UK or give us a call. You've been all over the United States and your work and your travels. Do you think that the food of the South is
the only really regional food we have in America? If you went to Vermont, you wouldn't find somebody living in northern Vermont eating something different than southern Vermont, or western Wisconsin from eastern Wisconsin, or even northern California from southern But the South is so defined by where you are and what you're eating.
Do you agree, Well, I think that's particularly true, and I'll tell you why I think that because New Orleans at one time the second largest ethnic group in New Orleans are Italians. So a lot of like gumbo oak crow was kind of African and order, and so we had African influences. We had Italian influences, but obviously had French influences. What we call the German Coast. There's a lot of German names in Louisiana, people just yes and and they have.
I've never been to Louisiana.
From the guy that I want you to meet is Chef John Folks, who is like a culinary historian, and he would love to cook for you, but he's very much into its true Louisiana cooking is comes in a lot of places in you it's a meld of different cultures. Jambalaya, you know, jambone am ya ya. Yeah. So when you listen to John explained the history in how these dishes came about.
So we still have we determined why Southern cooking is it because.
I think it's more. I think Louisiana cooking is a coastal Southern cooking is quite good.
So if you went to Mississippi, would it be different from the coast to Belieza not.
The Mississippi coast would be fine. There's a lot of really good rest but if you go to the interior, much less once you go beyond occasion. But if you go to Chelton, a Mobile or Savannah, the food is quite good, okay, but it's very different. The coastal South is very much different than the upland south Port cities tend to have all of these influence and these melding of cultures, and these people tend to adapt. There's no
two people that make the same gumbo. It's rue stock and aaramatics and then it's anything you want to put in it. One of the best gumbos Paul put them used to make it called a seven steak gumbo, which is the really cheapest part of beef cow. Which is that really kind of well, throw it away, but the bone marriage just delivers and delivers and delivers. But I mean, you could do anything with it. You can put anything you want it.
But is there one ingredient that you have to have in order to be a gumbo? It's like this, is there something you us?
I would have shared a roue, but there's just exciting. Your chef in New Orleans named Melissa Martin and she has some colored mosquito show club and she really grew up disappearing land and she makes a numbo without a roue and it's quite good. It tastes but mostly it following oil.
No butter. It's it's butter.
When you could use the neutral of all you can use butter, you can use canola, could do a folleyball. You probably not a rule against it. My mother she would you would stir it in a cast iron skillet with a wooden spoon for twenty minutes and not. The color is everything. And so if you you have a dark room or you have a light room, and Paul Pudo, and he's right. Paul said, you just get all really hot. You have a flans plan and a whisk and you
just add the flower in. When it gets within ten percent of the color, you wannt take the take the heat off because the heat's going to give you in a darker root is actually gonna chose a little bit thinner gumbo, but a lighter room. And you know, people say, if you do seafood, it should be I don't. I like. I tend to go for a darker room. But it's all in what you like. But basically it has what we call trinity celery pepper's onions, celery pepper and what
is the pepper? Green pepper just great, but they call it trinity because very Catholic culture. So the mirror POI I think has different tagts. I think they have Most cuisines have this basic aromatics in the stock.
Is everything well, you know, there's soups in Tuscany, like we believe to always start with it with the sofriito they call it. Yeah, And so you cook it down till it becomes one herb of us. You cook the celery, the onion, the garlic, the time, and you just cook it down till it disappears. But it's one herb. I always say, it's a bit like architecture. It's a foundation, isn't it foundation.
The build on. And the better chefs are building a flavor based you know, they don't stalt all at one time. They build it, then they don't put And the biggest mistake people make about Louisiana cooking is they think it's spicy. It is not. It is season. You get one thing that dominates. That's not good food. I mean, you know, I see these people putting hot pepper. Leah Chase was a famous black restaurant sew in New Orleans and her restaurant was a kind of focal point for civil rights.
Dookie Chase who chold him he'll run And she and I got an honorary degree at Tulane, And she said, you know, Obama came in my restaurant and he put hot sauce in my gumbo, and it really said James and aggravated me. He just sees took hot sauce and put it in my gumbo. I said, well, you know, it's chasing. You know, he's I couldn't get over that he put hot sauce in my gumbo. Didn't tell him. So I saw President Obama and I said, you know
it's President. I gotta tell you. It's Leah Chase. She's still mad at to because she put in a gumbo.
I said that there are I think there are some restaurants in Paris that don't put salt and pepper on the table because they feel that they've seen and that you know, and therefore, you know, it's like Matista doing a painting and saying it needs a bit more red. So I might just you know, sometimes you have a piece of fish and it's covered in a burb block sauce and it has a lot of you know, sauce over it, and you have the spinach next to it and this and that, and you don't taste the fish,
you know. But when you have something like this, or you have the food that you were talking about, the quality of the ingredient that doesn't need much. You know it needs it needs to taste the ingredient and know that you're and you can't get away with anything. If you have a piece of fish that isn't very good, they're going to know it right away. If you have olive oil that isn't strong, you're going to know it right Yeah.
It's a place in Parish, Okay think and they do the fish and they do it in like an oven, and they bring it to you would live in and use lemon olive ball and it's utterly delicious. I mean, if you get it's really good fish. I mean if you if you get a kind of bony fish, you're not it's not going to work. But you know, like my favorite fish from the Gulf of Mexico.
Tell me about the fish.
The red snapper to me is the best when you can get fresh red snapper. And there's a place in the Orleans that that has a kind of charcoal oven and it went and they do the whole fish and I love that. Speckled trout. Triple tail is another really good fish. Yeah. If everybody has a different words, somebody called sea bass. Every every fish coaching or all has sea bass. I don't know what the hell they all have in common, sea.
Bass, black bass. Even here they call Brenzi and they sometimes in France they call it bar and sometimes they call it lou de mare for the sea bass. It's different if it's in the Mediterranean or the Atlantic.
Right, something tells me they might be different fish and different things. And a lot of what I've come to learn, I've done work with to lose on seafood promotion people, and a fish sounds bad, but it's good. You got to give it a good name. You just call it sea bass, because well, everybody knows that mass is so ill said, well, gee, that sea bass, So I'm going to like that. I mean a lot of a lot
of seafood is nomenclature. How do you describe it? An ice is an oyster and the muscles a muscle, and we kind of know that, but uh, you know, a different shrimp all over the world.
If you had to think about your comfort food, the food you would go to, not when you're hungry, not when you want to impress somebody, but when you actually need comfort, Is there a food that you would go to.
I am kind of a big fan of soups. Okay, gumbo is I just love gombo. I've been I'm home by but four times a week. It's not really a comfort food, but the food that I really like and not have yet to master's guspacho. But in the summertime, you know, when you have when you you should be able to again smell what you're eating. My comfort food would definitely be gumbo, and but red beans and rice. You know, beans and rice are very stable and blat and cooking, and I'm Talian cooking.
I love.
Just what they call them Cataloni beans of the big white beans. You give me that and a little garlic and olive ball and a good piece of bread. How can you beat that? What are a pot of beans and a good bread and a good olive all you? I call that simple and unsophisticated. I call it good.
I call it good too. Let's thank you, jas, thank
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