Kerry Washington opens up about her new memoir, "Thicker than Water," the importance of a kitchen in the Catskills, and how a pit stop in India changed her life and career.
Audible Originals Presents Your Mama's Kitchen, hosted by Michele: Norris.
WARNING: This episode contains discussions of eating disorders, so please take care while listening.
Kerry: Now, when I was in elementary school, my parents bought a lake house in the Catskills, this little cabin. And that kitchen was different. Those tables were filled with really rich intellectual discourse because it was my mom's professor friends and my dad's work friends and I always remember having one ear on like whatever game we were playing, Battleship, Monopoly, Sorry, and one ear in the adult conversation.
Michele: Welcome to Your Mama's Kitchen, the podcast that explores how we are shaped as adults by the kitchens we grew up in as kids.
I'm Michele Norris.
Today, we are joined by the actress Kerry Washington, who has starred in series like Little Fires Everywhere and films such as Django Unchained and Confirmation, where she portrayed Anita Hill.
You probably know her best from her Peabody award-winning TV show Scandal, where she played Olivia Pope—the complicated, sometimes conniving but always compelling crisis manager who dominated every space she entered.
We could spend an eternity talking about Kerry Washington’s career in Hollywood as an actor, director, thespian and activist but we wanted to know more about her beyond the stage, and the way that her family’s kitchens have left an imprint on her life.
It turns out that Kerry: is an enthusiastic cook herself. She loves to prepare big spreads for her friends and family and in many ways that’s not surprising.
She has played some hard-charging characters on stage and on screen but in real life she is warm and funny, easy-going and gregarious, and very open-hearted. She laughs easily and often laughs at herself. You see a glimpse of that on social media where she is often cueing up corny Dad jokes with her father.
Kerry has always projected a Family Strong persona but in a new memoir called , she details the struggles that sometimes roiled beneath that perfect veneer.
Today you will hear a candid conversation about Kerry’s relationships with her family and with food. We learn how she handled an eating disorder and survived the turbulence of her childhood, how a trip to India changed her life forever, and how a whopper of a lifelong secret upended her sense of self and sent her on a journey of soul searching and self-discovery.
Michele: I'm so glad that we're catching you at an interesting moment because this is a moment of introspection for you in your life in lots of different ways. Your parents are getting older. Your kids are getting older. Your marriage has settled into that interesting space where you've been at it for a little bit.
Kerry: Ten years!
Michele: And you're doing interesting things in your career. You are an entrepreneur and you just wrote a book where you really opened your heart and your life in a way that is commendable and also vulnerable. So I'm really honored and glad that we caught you at this particular moment.
So this is a podcast where we talk about, you know, we talk about people's lives, we look back at their life. But it all begins with a really simple question: Tell me about your mama's kitchen.
Kerry: Mmhmm. So my parents lived in the same apartment that my mother lived in with her first husband. That apartment is really such a big part of who she is, who they are, and who I am, because they still live in that apartment, part of the year.
Michele: And what's the name of that apartment?
Kerry: So it's Jamie Towers in the Bronx. And it was one of the Mitchell Lama buildings that was built in New York City for mixed-income housing. And that kitchen was, it was not a big kitchen, right. Like, we didn't have a big kitchen. It was just like a little hallway of the apartment where you when you walked in through our front door to the right was the kitchen. And if you kept going straight, you'd get into the rest of the apartment. But if you went to the right, you would walk through the kitchen, then to a small dining room table and a small terrace outside that. And the kitchen was always neat with, like, strategic clutter. We had a junk drawer that I feel like most people have in their kitchens—
Michele: Everybody has a junk drawer.
Kerry: Yes, we have a junk drawer in my kitchen. But it was a place where stuff happened. I think the kitchen was a place of pride in my family because we were the first people that I knew of in my neighborhood to have a microwave. And we were one of very few families in the building who had a dishwasher. My dad is a gadget guy, so we always had cool gadgets in the kitchen and there were always interesting thought provoking things on the refrigerator, whether they were, you know, comics cut out of the Sunday funnies that were meant to make you think, or postcards or posters about museum exhibits or schedules for schools and rehearsals. There were always snacks in the kitchen and lots of spices. And—
Michele: And your parents, Valerie and Earl?
Kerry: Yes.
Michele: Your mom has Jamaican roots and your father is from South Carolina.
Kerry: Mmhmm. Yeah.
Michele: And—
Kerry: Well, he grew up in Brooklyn, but his people, his folks were from South Carolina, so—
Michele: So he has roots.
Kerry: Yes, the Sea Islands. Yes.
Michele: Yes. And then sort of Gullah region.
Kerry: The Geechee. Yes.
Michele: And those are both strong culinary traditions.
Kerry: Yes.
Michele: Were those both reflected in the kitchen that you grew up in?
Kerry: No.
Michele: Oh, okay. Not the answer I was expecting.
Kerry: I mean, I would say in some ways there was, there was a lot of tension around those culinary roots. So on my mother's side, the tension was born of the fact that both of my mother's parents were from Jamaica, from Saint Elizabeth. They came to this country through Ellis Island, and they, like a lot of immigrants in the twenties, and their names are both on the wall at the Ellis Island Museum, but when my grandparents came to this country, like a lot of the Italians and the Polish and the Irish, they wanted their kids to be American. And the focus was on being American and assimilation. And so my grandmother did not infuse her seven children with a whole lot of Caribbean culture. They didn't eat Jamaican meals. My mother wasn't raised eating Caribbean food or there was Caribbean food around the house. But most of it was for my grandfather and the kids, ate kind of American stuff, whatever that was, you know, potatoes and meat and whatever they could get their hands on. And there weren't a lot of specialty markets in the way that there are now in terms of finding plantain and that kind of stuff. And my grandmother just didn't put a high premium on maintaining those culinary traditions. So my mom has done a lot of work since then trying to learn more Jamaican tradition in the kitchen. But growing up, the meals that she cooked were again, kind of American. You know, like roast chicken, frozen vegetables warmed up a lot of pasta, a lot of rice. So rice is big. I think both cultures, both, you know, in the Caribbean and in and obviously in the Carolinas, there's a lot of rice. So I would say rice was a big part of our meal. And then the tension on my dad's side is that my dad did love a lot of what we think of as soul food, but my mother didn't like to cook that stuff. So, it turns out like my mother makes great chitlins, but she doesn't like to make them. So he would like, beg her. They're smelly, they're smelly.
Michele: Well, you know, you have to commit, you’re just gonna have to commit if you’re gonna make chitlins.
Kerry: Yeah. And it's intense. Right? So, like pigs feet and chitlins and cows tongue. You know, there was a lot of humor in my family around, like, you know, my, I remember my mom saying, like, you know, Earl, we can eat the other parts of the cow now, like, you know, we free now so we can we can eat things other than the intestines and the tongue and the feet, like there are other parts of these animals available to us. But he really loved that Southern tradition of how we made culinary art out of the parts that were tossed away. But again, I was not encouraged to eat those foods. So it was kind of like everybody had their own food agenda. Even though we were a small family of three, there wasn't a ton of rich culinary tradition.
Michele: What was dinnertime like in your family? Your mom worked. Dad worked.
Kerry: Yeah.
Michele: You were busy. You were one of those kids who raised your hand to join every club possible. So when you all sat down to dinner, what was a typical Washington family meal like?
Kerry: So a lot of meals we didn't have together because I had two working parents. My mom used to wake up early in the morning before I got up for school. So 6 a.m. a lot of times when I would wake up to start getting ready for school, she was cooking dinner for me and she would cook dinner and put it in one of those beautiful, like those Pyrex dishes with the flowers on the side, she would put—
Michele: Oh. Corningware.
Kerry: The Corningware. Yes. So she would put the roast chicken in one side and the vegetables and the rice on the other side. And she would cover it with saran wrap and put it in the fridge with a little Post-it note that said, you know, “Warm up for 2 minutes on medium heat, love you.” A lot of my meals were on my own at home or with the cousins that I was sort of we all were latchkey kids together during some periods and some periods I was on my own. So we didn't have a lot of meals together. When we did have meals together, my dad is a big lima bean fan, so I remember having a lot of those, like the frozen mixed vegetables that were like corn and carrots and lima beans and peas. But they would be zhuzhed up by my mom with all kinds of…
Michele: She'd make a succotash or something.
Kerry: Yes. I don't even think I knew that that's what it was called. But it was just like her little riff, turning that frozen bag of goodness into something really special.
Michele: During the summers in Kerry’s childhood, her family would escape to upstate New York where she experienced a different kind of kitchen. The tight little kitchen in New York was usually just occupied by Kerry and her parents. But at the lake house, the kitchen was filled with friends and relatives and her parent’s colleagues. It was place where she was nourished by conversation as much as food.
Kerry: Now, when I was in elementary school, my parents bought a lake house in the Catskills, this little cabin on a lake in upstate New York. And that kitchen was different. It was similar in shape, except that it was a little hallway and it had a table at the end where we kept all the desserts and things. But that kitchen, that house was a place where we had meals together, and often not just us, but extended family, cousins, friends that came up for the week or for the weekend, you know, for the week during the summer or the weekend during the school year. And that table was very different. That table was a table where there was no TV. There was no TV at all, upstate New York. Sometimes the radio, we'd listen to something on the radio, like the oldies, but mostly we just talked and around those tables, and sometimes our tables in the city of my parents were having a dinner party, but those tables were filled with really rich intellectual discourse because it was my mom's professor friends and my dad's work friends, and I always remember having one ear on like whatever game we were playing Battleship, Monopoly, Sorry, and one ear in the adult conversation. Like, I think about that kitchen and that dinner table a lot... When I think when people ask me my interest in politics, it stemmed from me kind of overhearing those really rich conversations in the late eighties and early nineties around academia and racism and sexism and identity and socioeconomics and all this stuff. You know, the AIDS epidemic, like all the stuff that was going on in the world, I could hear the grownups talking and about art and literature and film. And that kitchen may have been the more impactful kitchen in my life.
Michele: We understand our parents marriages in a different way when we look over our shoulder over decades and often when we become partners ourselves, in committed relationships. You just sort of understand the tensions and the speed bumps and, you know, all the stuff that they go through.
Kerry: Yeah.
Michele: And you describe a period, an extended period. And it's a longer chapter where there were a lot of tensions between your parents. And I'm surprised to read it because I've met your parents Valerie and Earl, and you know, you wouldn't know any of this, but there was this long period where your dad would get home late. You said that your mom sometimes would be doing your hair and you could sense her jaw getting tight when she'd hear the keys and when he'd walk in the room and you were supposed to be sleeping, but you were hearing an extended conversation. It sounded like that conversation was often in the kitchen.
Kerry: Yeah.
Michele: And they were battling it out. A period where they had different expectations of what they thought marriage was going to be. That must have been tremendously difficult for you to go back to that period that you'd probably locked away somewhere. And revisit that and then share it with the world.
Kerry: It's interesting because even as I'm talking to you, I have the impulse to do that, you know, comparative trauma thing where I'm like, well, it wasn't as hard as a lot of people, right. Like, I know how lucky I was. I had two parents who were married, which was really unique, in my community and my neighborhood. They were committed to each other. They were committed to me. I knew how wanted I was. I didn't even know how truly wanted I was. But I felt wanted. I felt loved. So I understand how lucky I was. I want to say that first, right? That being the reality, it was scary to, to be navigating the volatile nights that were happening when they thought that I was asleep and to try to grapple with cultivating a sense of safety when it seemed that there was so much upheaval and they wanted to keep it from me, you know, they wanted like so many things in my childhood, they really wanted to protect me from it. And I think in some way that that effort of secrecy of all of us pretending that things were fine in some ways doubled down on the pain of it, because I felt that much more alone. And like, I couldn't talk about it. There was more. There was like, shame around it.
Michele: You write in the book that you were all actors. Someone asked if you were the first actor in your family. And you said, well, the first one who gets compensated for it.
Kerry: Yeah.
Michele: And I laughed at that. But I didn't know how deep that answer really was because you said that you were all a family of performers. You said your mom and dad were the magicians and you were the assistant.
Kerry: I was. I felt like I was serving their performance. I knew that they had an act that they were presenting to our community, to our family. I didn't always know exactly how deep that act was or the secret that was being kept from me and from others. But I knew I knew that there was a performance. I knew that we had to be something other than what we just were. Something more, something better, something more, more perfect. And so I was always leaning into how to support their performance and kind of figure out how to join in their dance so that I wouldn't disappoint them, so that I wouldn't disappoint our audience. And I feel really, really lucky that that despite how debilitating that was in the sort of evolution of me understanding myself as a person, as Kerry Washington, like I was able to cultivate these skills that led me to a lifetime of performance, right? That I was able to find a career where I could take this survival skill and put it to practice in ways that have really benefited me and transformed my life and allowed me to experience, endless blessings and opportunity and privilege. Like, thank God I have found an appropriate place to utilize those skills because for most of my life and still sometimes today, you know that I still struggle with it. And there's remnants of that. But for most of my life, I thought that life itself had to be a performance, you know? And Shakespeare said it right. All the world's a stage, so this must be how we're all supposed to live. We're not supposed to be authentic. We're not supposed to be true. We're not supposed to be interdependent and vulnerable. We're supposed to be perfect and performed and self-sufficient and self-reliant and alone, in a way. Right. Like alone in our realness. Because no one should see it.
Michele: You said something there I got to follow up on. It's interesting. You said you didn't want to let the audience down. Who was the audience?
Kerry: Anybody. You know, the audience growing up was our family or the people at the dinner party or the neighbors or the folks around the lake or the teachers, The other students at school. It was anybody who was looking at this family, the Washingtons, and perceiving us as this perfect triad of, you know, middle class mobility and success. And, you know, we were smart, we were pretty, we had two cars and a microwave and a dishwasher and a cabin in upstate New York. And we had good jobs. And they were still married. And I was, you know, there was a lot of performance at play and a lot of it was real. You know, my mother was a brilliant professor and my dad did have great suits. And I was not a dumb kid, you know, and there was a lot of laughter and there was a tremendous amount of love. But there was also this sense that we had to be on.
Michele: Well, were your parents doing that for someone else or were they doing it for themselves? Because that was the narrative that they committed to and they were going to present it no matter what.
Kerry: Yeah, well, I think both. I want to talk about the book without giving away too much to the listener. But there was basically, you know, a lie about, you know, how our family came to be and maintaining that lie in itself, I think set up the dynamic that we had to maintain appearances.
Michele: A protective fallacy.
Kerry: I think so. But some of it's cultural, too, don't you think, right? Like there's a dynamic for us in the black community of like, you don't air your dirty laundry, right? We don't tell our secrets.
Michele: Because success was denied us so we had to serve it when we could to our own community.
Kerry: That's right. And I think they also I think there was a performance for me. You know, they didn't want me to ever think that something might be amiss. Right. So there was a constant performance. I think as my dad struggled with professional success, he didn't ever want anybody to know that. So my mother and I participated in that dance of, you know, whatever it took to keep up the appearances of his success. There just was always t the sense that we had to, that there was an appropriate mask in, you know, an appropriate room. And I think about that now. I think, you know, I apply that now when it comes to fashion and my red carpet dressing, you know, like when I'm picking a look for the red carpet, I'm like, well, what is the event? Is it...I think about that. I think I know a lot about how to meet the moment of being appropriate for a given event or circumstance. And I think that comes from the hypervigilance of growing up in a family where we were performing for ourselves, for each other and for our community.
Michele: If the kitchen was a place where the emotions boiled over, was the kitchen a place of comfort in that sense? Because even though it got a little bit ugly and maybe a little bit loud, at least it was real.
Kerry: I found comfort in the food itself, because the food that was there, When I was alone, was like having some bit of my mother that I could have access to. And so when I came home and I was by myself, if I felt alone or scared, there came to be this ritual of eating the food to feel loved and feel less alone and numb some of the discomfort of the loneliness. You know, every time I pulled out one of those dishes from my mother, it had a little love note on it. And so to engage with the food felt like even though she wasn't home, those pork chops were, right. And so I started to go to the food and additional food and kind of binging and using food, more food than I need as comfort just to fill those spaces. It was like a god-sized hole or a mommy-sized hole that I thought if I if I stuff enough snacks in there, maybe I won't feel the feelings.
You know, that behavior early on, kind of being alone in the apartment and looking for comfort, seeking comfort in the snacks, that it became a coping mechanism that I used a lot. And as a, you know, a high functioning, perfectionistic kid. Drug addiction and alcoholism were not options, right? There was no way to stay on the dean's list and maintain the scholarship and be the lead in the play if you're high all the time or and so um so food became the thing that I could use and remain high functioning, that I could hide, I would like stop at the bagel store on the way to school and buy two bagels covered in butter and sugar and eat one on the way and then arrive at school and pretend I hadn't eaten and have another one. And, you know, it started out in sort of small ways. And by the way, like, if you're hungry for two bagels, that's great. That's a wonderful thing to do, to listen to your body. But I wasn't listening to my body. I was self-medicating, playing with food and with the manipulation of my body. Just trying to manage my emotions through food, through sort of abusing food and abusing my body, honestly.
Michele: I'm not going to ask you how you got over the mountain, because I don't know that you get on the other side of that, but how did you... cope with food in a different way? How did you learn how to make peace and to fill that hole in a different way?
Kerry: Well, that was the beginning for me. You know, in college, when I really hit my bottom with the food and body behavior, with the body dysmorphia and the abuse with food and the abuse with exercise and starvation and that was when I really found two important things. It's when I first found a personal relationship with God, like, that's the first thing that got me on my knees in life, to be like, Help. Right. Like, the first time I really asked God for some help was around that, which was really transformative for me. And it began my kind of spiritual exploration and spiritual practice. And it's also the first time that I got mental health support. It was when I first went into therapy and group therapy situations and really started to... think about the health of my mind. And how to change the channel in my unhealthy thinking.
Michele: Is this when you went to India?
Kerry: Yeah. So right after college.
Michele: That was a surprise for me. I didn't know that there was an India chapter for Kerry Washington.
Kerry: Yes. It's one of my favorite chapters of my life and of the book. Yeah, I really loved my time in India.
Michele: You went to India to study yoga?
Kerry: I did. I went to study yoga and traditional Indian performing arts.
Michele: How long did you stay and how did it transform you? And were you able to become the success? A lot of questions here. How long did you stay, how did it transform you and were you able to create a successful career as an actor in Hollywood, in part because of the serenity and the strength that you found in India?
Kerry: I went as part of a postgraduate program, a program that was run through the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and they have this tremendous program where every summer they I don't know if it still happens, but there was a group of students and we all lived in this house. It was like the real world, Kerala. We all lived in this house. American students all studying different art forms. Some of us were studying instruments, said. Some of us were studying traditional Indian dance, Bharatanatyam, and I was studying cutlery palette, which is a martial art, and also Kathakali, which is traditional Indian theater. But I was taught that in order to study any movement art, I had to first understand yoga. That yoga was the beginning of all Indian movement art forms. And so I spent a lot of time studying yoga there and actually got certified to teach, which was one of my many hustles as a starving artist in New York City when I got back. And the program was, I think three months, and then I spent several months after that traveling around South India for the most part by myself, some of it with one of the other students in the program path and then some of it on my own.
It was a very, very rich experience for me. And in a lot of ways that's why I wanted to do it, because I had this sense about halfway through college that I was going to come back to New York because I went to college in DC at GW, that I was going to come back to New York and I was going to hit the ground running and I was going to do whatever it took to have a career as an artist. I wanted to make sure that I could root myself in a place where performance art was about more than like trying to book a commercial to sell hamburgers. Right? Like, I wanted to go somewhere that wasn't just the business of show business, but where performance was rooted in culture and tradition and history. It was a very transformative experience for me.
Michele: What have you done to create the kitchen that fills the right kind of holes for your little people right now? In the kitchen that you and Nnamdi created together.
Kerry: The pandemic was a devastating time for a lot of us, for a lot of reasons. But one of the things that I found was a reconnection with cooking for me. You know, I have been a working mom my whole life as a mother, and I haven't spent as much time in the kitchen as I could have maybe. Or I just, you know, that's not fair. I shouldn't say that. I just didn't have as much time to spend in the kitchen during the years when I was, you know, working as the number one on a network drama, which, you know, that's when I became a mom was in those circumstances.
Michele: Both times, right?
Kerry: Yeah. Yeah. You know, my third, my oldest, was already a kid when that show started. But COVID allowed me time to, out of necessity, rediscover my kitchen. And we joke about it was like kind of in the beginning of COVID when nobody was going to the grocery store, you know, and everybody was terrified to leave the house, period, and we started getting one of those boxes that that we would sort of pay a farm that was about an hour and a half outside of L.A. to ship us this box of whatever produce was available from the farm. My parents would actually drive the hour and a half to the farm and get two boxes and bring them back. And they would come back with these boxes full of vegetables that half the time I was like, I don't even know what this is like. I have no idea what this thing is like.
Michele: Why do they always give you kohlrabi leaves or something? Like something that you've never heard of!
Kerry: Crazy. And so I started doing these deep dives on the Internet, you know, and all the cooking websites, and suddenly we were making kale chips. And I was like You know, you can do stuff with carrot greens. You don't have to throw the carrot greens away. I was making like a pesto. I was doing carrot green pesto and, and I started to just like, have more time in the kitchen, spend more time in the kitchen. And I love to cook. I did some cooking early on and, you know, as I was learning to take better care of myself early on in my food recovery, I started to cook. And then as I got busy writing didn’t cook as much. When I first met Nnamdi, I cooked because, you know, I knew I wanted him to think that I couldn’t cook maybe. So I was doing some cooking early on in our relationship before, before I got really busy as an actor, when I had a little more free time, windows of freedom as an actor. But this period in COVID, really my love for cooking kind of exploded. And I love it. You know, recently my kids gave me one of those books for my birthday of like, all the things they love about me, you know, like fill in different pages with different answers. And I couldn't believe how much of it was about cooking, really, how much of it was about, you know, the there's a recipe for chicken that I make that's an Easter chicken, really, just because it's a recipe that I made when you're in Easter that they were like, we're calling this Easter chicken or there's a tangy chicken that they like, ore my short ribs, I make like a ten hour short rib recipe or the cheesy pasta, like whatever it is, the cornbread. Like they're very... you know, that is now a big part of how I parent. But it wasn't I mean, before the pandemic it was not. So I'm that is one of those things that I'm really grateful for discovering or rediscovering or expanding and growing.
Michele: So when you wrote about your parents and the difficulties of their lives, Earl and Valerie are still together.
Kerry: They are.
Michele: And you and your dad are crack and corny jokes on social media. I adore him. And, is there a message in that about getting to the other side? About just hanging in there even, you know, Michelle Obama talks about this. She says that if you've been married for 20 years or more, there probably was a good six, seven, eight, maybe ten years where you, you know, maybe didn't like that person that much.
Kerry: Uh huh.
Michele: But sometimes you just, you know, you stick with it, you hang in there and there are dividends when you do. Is that one of the reasons you could tell this story? Is because your parents seem to be reaping those dividends, seem to have found something special having climbed up the rough side of the mountain together.
Kerry: That lesson is there about them as a couple, and it's also there about us as a family. Like, I think that when you read the book, you really see how they have struggled, but you witness how together they are, how they've chosen each other, and you see them on my social media and we just did a photo shoot, all three of us for People magazine, for the book. And it I just was like, so just pouring over with love. Because the reality is that in the telling of this truth, that they were kind of forced to tell me against their will to reveal to me the way that our family came to be. But in doing that, we have grown so much closer as a family that that truth has allowed us to drop those masks and to drop those shields and the arm length that that we had from each other because we were maintaining these facades and these secrets and these performances, right, like, there's no more performance in my family. With us. We're now real. I mean, now, if we are performing, we really are, like, joyously entertaining others in our truth. But we're not needing to pretend to be somebody other than who we are. And that is just in the last five years, you know, and not even all of those five years, like when the revelation happened five years ago, we went through family therapy. We did a lot. We did counseling. We've done real heart to heart. We've done the work to move toward each other and be in this kind of radical acceptance. And so I guess there is you know, for me, it's like when you see those dad jokes, it means so much to me that now when you see my dad and I salsa dancing on the Internet or telling dad jokes or, you know, whatever it is that we're doing or see us in People magazine together, that that's not easy. That stuff is not easy. Family is not always easy, but it's worth it. And I believe that phrase, we are as sick as our secrets. I think that I think there is some truth to that. And so I feel like our family is healthier than we've ever been because they're not keeping a secret from me and I'm keeping fewer secrets from them, because the culture of our family is no longer a culture of secrets.
Michele: And what a gift to the next generation to now see, you know, this happy, cohesive family living in their truth.
Though your mother didn't do a lot of cooking in front of you, there were times where you were in the kitchen all together. And that's often for holidays. And the recipe that you wanted to share with our listeners, because we always leave with a recipe that is cherished by someone that they know and love. And so what is the recipe that Kerry Washington is sharing with our listeners?
Kerry: So I'm sharing a Jamaican black cake recipe, and it is basically a fruitcake, but I don't call it fruitcake because people don't like fruitcake. And this is…
Michele: Not a fruitcake. When you say fruitcake, people, this door closes. And locks.
Kerry: Yes, exactly. Exactly. No, my dad calls it fruitcake because he always will say to somebody, Do you want some of my wife's fruitcake? And they say, no. And then he says, Great, I'll keep it for myself.
Michele: Dad joke!
Kerry: Oh, yes, exactly. We call it either black cake or rum cake. So this is like a very moist, dark, rich, baked treat that is filled with fruit that has been soaking in rum for months. My mother used to collect this fruit for months and months and keep it in a giant jar in our kitchen where she would pour in this Jamaican rum. And then you blend up the fruits and it's a slow cook at a low temperature, you put a pan of water in the oven so that it stays moist and soft and rich—
Michele: Wait when you bake it, you put a second pan under to hold that moisture—
Kerry: Uh huh, under the cake, yes. So that the moisture stays in. It's just delectable. I mean, I think as a kid, we probably got drunk on it because it's also like after you bake it with the rum, then you pour the rum into it. I mean, it's so rich.
Michele: I'm getting woozy just listening to this. Whoa.
Kerry: It's amazing. It's amazing.
Michele: So this big jar with all the fruit, is it all kinds of fruit? Is it, you know, winter fruit?
Kerry: Dark raisins, dark raisins, light raisins, apricots, prunes.
Michele: So summer fruit too, peach fruit. I mean, stone fruit from the summer.
Kerry: Yes. And it's dried, mostly dried fruit. So it’s the dried fruits that that will soak up the moisture.
Michele: And do you do it in in sort of a dense, large round cake pan or do you do these as in—because I've seen black cake in little individual little pots, also.
Kerry: We do them in loafs. Okay. Generally in loaf pans. Yeah. Sometimes she'll do one round one if it's to have at the sort of Christmas dinner, or at my wedding, I think we had a round band kind of a situation but mostly it's in loaves.
Michele: Okay. And the rum that you put over the top of that, is it like a glaze?
Kerry: So you bake it with rum, but then you also just pour the rum into it when it comes out of the oven. What people would do is as the cake was getting older, because the rum evaporates, you want to freshen up your rum cake, you can just pour some more rum in, right? And that's how you keep it fresh.
Michele: And then you take a very good nap after that.
Kerry: Yes, exactly. You have it with your eggnog, your rum cake and you’re good for the night.
Michele: Kerry Washington, I have loved talking to you.
Kerry: Thank you.
Michele: Thanks for being with us. We have to cook together one day.
Kerry: Yes.
Michele: So let's make that happen.
Kerry: OK, I love that. And your children in that book they gave you, I think they may have been saying, Mommy, it's time for you to do a cookbook, because it sounds like you really threw down. You know, with the Easter chicken and the tangy chicken and the short. Ribs that take 10 hours. I mean, I'm seeing the next book might be a cookbook, so.
Kerry: Okay. I like that idea. Thank you.
Michele: Love you. Thanks so much for being with us.
Michele: I LOVED talking to Kerry Washington. It’s rare to find someone who is so consistently jovial, despite the many hardships life has thrown at them.
Even rarer, to find someone like Kerry that does the work to better themselves with so much unbridled joy. In fact, joy is the word that comes to mind when I think about Kerry Washington because of the way she presents in the world. Commitment is the other word and our conversation confirmed that. I have always known that she is dedicated to her craft as an actor and to using her voice as an activist—but in this conversation and in her book, I also learned that she is committed to her relationships over the long haul. Even when things get tough....and perhaps especially when things get tough. It’s kind of like that Jamaican black cake. Some things just take time.
You can find Kerry Washington’s Family recipe for their Jamaican “Don’t Call It A Fruitcake” Black Cake on my Instagram page. And if you try it in your own kitchen, you might want to try to take it easy on the rum ... it’s a delight. Thanks for listening, come back next week.
This has been a Higher Ground and Audible Original. Produced by Higher Ground Studios.
Senior producer - Natalie Rinn
Producer - Sonia Htoon
Associate producer - Angel Carreras
Sound design and engineering from Andrew Eapen and Ryo Baum.
Higher Ground Audio's editorial assistants are Jenna Levin and Camila Thur de Koos.
Executive producers for Higher Ground are Nick White, Mukta Mohan, Dan Fierman, and me, Michele Norris.
Executive producers for Audible are Zola Mashariki, Nick D’Angelo, and Ann Heppermann.
The show’s closing song is 504 by The Soul Rebels.
Editorial and web support from Melissa Bear and Say What Media.
Talent booker - Angela Peluso
Special thanks this week to Clean Cuts in Washington DC.
Head of Audible Studios: Zola Mashariki
Chief Content Officer Rachel Ghiazza
Copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC.
Sound Recording copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC.
That’s it for this week, be bountiful and make sure to come back next time.
