December 9, 2024 • 36 mins
Adam Gopnik is a brilliant mind. An acclaimed writer, essayist and commentator; he's authored nine books, and has written for The New Yorker for nearly forty years, to which he's contributed non-fiction, fiction, memoir and criticism.
I've been lucky enough to share 34 years of friendship with Adam, and in that time, we've never stopped cooking, and sharing our passion for food. Today, we're talking about family, the world, and of course, eating.
Ruthie's Table 4, made in partnership with Me+Em
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode is brought to you by Me and M,
the British modern luxury clothing label designed for busy women.
Founded and designed in London. Me and M is about
intelligence style. Much thought and care are put into the
design process, so every piece is flattering, functional and made
to last forever. Me and M is well known for
its trousers and how I got to know the brand.
(00:22):
It's my go to for styles that are comfortable enough
to wear in the kitchen or the restaurant, also polished
enough for meetings. Me and M is available online and
its stores across London, Edinburgh, New York. If you're in London,
I'd really recommend heading to their beautiful, brand new flagship
store in Marlevin, which opens on the twenty ninth of October.
(00:44):
In the thirty four years at Adam Gopnik and I
have been friends. We have lived in the same city, Paris,
where he wrote his beautiful book Paris to the Moon.
We have loved and then lost our best friend, the
art historian and curator Kirk Varnado. We've taken care of
each other's children as if they were our own, and
sung show tunes together from every Broadway musical Because we know.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
All the lyrics.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Most of all, we have never stopped cooking, eating, and
talking about our passion for food. We may be separated
by an ocean, but we are always minutes and inches
away all the while. Adam leads a terrific life in writing,
staff writer for The New Yorker and author of nine
books of non fiction, fiction and memoir. Next year he
(01:29):
will perform his one man show Talk Therapy in New
York City. Adam is here now with me in London.
In four days, He's eaten in the River Cafe four times.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
This morning we sang You've.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Got to be taught from South Pacific, Rainbow Connection, from
the Muppets, and I've never been in love before from
Guys and Dolls. Tonight, after seeing Giant at the Royal Court,
we will go home and cook to Btapasta my definition
of a good friend. Thank you, sir Adam. You've chosen
the recipe and it was from the very first cookbook
(02:03):
we ever did, the River Cafe Cookbook, and the recipe
you chose was Penny with quick sausage sauce.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Would you like to read it?
Speaker 4 (02:11):
I would love to read it, and I should ad
that this is part of a diptick, as our historians
would say, with a penny with a slow sausage sauce,
So that is why it's quick. Two hundred fifty grams
of penny regatta, two tablespoons of olive oil, two red onions,
peeled and chopped, five sausages, meat crumbled, half a tablespoon
(02:31):
of fresh rosemary, two small dried chilis, eight hundred grams
of peeled plum tomatoes, one hundred and fifty mili liters
of cream, and one hundred and twenty grams of parmesan,
freshly grated. You heat the olive oil in the saucepan
and you fry the onion lightly. You add the sausage, rosemary,
bay leaves and chili all together, frying them over a
(02:53):
high heat, stirring to mash the sausages. You remove all
but one tablespoon of the fat and continue you to
cook for twenty minutes. Add the tomatoes, stir and return.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
To the boil.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
Then remove from the heat. Cook the penne in boiling
salted water, then drain and add directly to the sauce.
Stir the cream into the sauce with the penny and
half the parmesan, and then you serve the pustup with
the remaining parmesan grated on top.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
When I asked you for a recipe that you'd like
to read Ruthie's Table four, you immediately said, I know
exactly what I.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Want to do.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
I want to do the penne with quick sausage sauce.
And I was wondering why.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
Well, because it was nineteen ninety four, we had just
moved to Paris, my wife Martha and our little son
Luke had just moved to Paris then, and we got
your book, and by the strangest kind of syncopated cooking beat,
I started cooking your food in our Parisian kitchen, although
I had been raised on French food, and there was
(03:55):
something about the logic and grammar of this recipe that
was inspiring and explained so much. In other words, you
were taking the pungent things, the sweet onions, and then
the pungent sausages, and the hot pepper which I had
never cooked with before, the dried parakeet peppers, and making
all of that. Then you were reducing it with the
(04:18):
wine and then adding the tomatoes, and that basic pattern, right,
you have and it can be anchovies and.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Garblic, get the flavor tomato right, then cook.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
It down with wine until it's almost dry, and then
adding tomatoes, and then doing that. How many times in
a lifetime do we do that? And that basic grammar,
the savory flavors, the wine reduction, the addition of tomato
or cream or whatever it might be, is somehow so fundamental.
(04:53):
It was like this for me was a foundational recipe.
Once I knew how to do this, I felt that
I could do almost anything. So that's why I love
it so much, even though, to be honest with you,
I probably couldn't, so to speak, sell it at my
dining table today because the ladies I cook for, Martha
and Olivia are both pescatarians at this point.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
Yeah, so I couldn't. But do you ever have it?
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Make it for yourself?
Speaker 3 (05:14):
I always make it for myself.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
When I'm alone, I either make this or the matriciana
as Mike.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Can you get the Lucunega sausages in New York?
Speaker 3 (05:21):
You can get good sausages.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
You get good Italian sausages in New York, But those
are when I'm home alone.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
That's what I make for myself.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
So you've written just written a brilliant piece about the election.
You've written about the politics of our country. You've written
about Paris, You've written and yet you are uniquely interested,
I think, in writing and writing about food, and so
food comes into your musical. I mean, there aren't very
many musicals about a restaurant. There aren't very many articles
(05:52):
in the New Yorker. Well, now there are a few
more about food. Tell us about one of your books
that you've written where food has come into your book.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
I wrote an entire book just about the philosophy of
eating called The Table Comes First, which was the title
was given to me by our friend Burkus of Saint
John because we were having elevenses once and he said,
genuine he was genuinely perturbed. He said, there is this
young couple I know, he said, and they just getting
married and they want to buy a bed. Said, don't
(06:21):
they know the table comes first. They're having a bed
but no table. And I thought, oh, what a beautiful thought.
The table comes first. It's the altar in the raft
of human existence. So for me, my fascination with food
I think comes from two you know, sharply opposed places.
On the one end, just pure read I love to eat,
and I.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
See funny that greed comes into food. I have a
friend who had a nanny and she overheard her child
who said, I'd want, you know, a biscuit. She'd eaten
like five biscuits, and she heard the nanny saying, you know,
you're a greedy.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Little girl, and she fired her good.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
She fired it right on the spot.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
She said, you know what, I don't want somebody telling
my child that because they want more food, that they're greedy.
And for me, as an American and maybe that's something different,
is that greediness always meant that you want more money.
So I think it's interesting the idea of sort of
what greedy being involved in dispense.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
One of the ways in which French culinary culture is
superior to any other is, you know, you use the
word gourmand to mean greedy, and when you saymond, you mean, oh,
he really loves to eat. And the French word gourmet,
which Americans and Brits have adapted, French folks don't really
use very much. You wouldn't say somebody's a gourmet unless.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
They were an American.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
But gourmand, yeah, though, it means greedy, and that sense
is a totally positive benediction. Tenon you know means really
loves food. So that's one part of my fascination with food.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
I can't remember many musicals that I've seen they have
restaurants scenes. I've interviewed actors who actually had to cook
on or eat on stage, or food is a part
of the drama. But you've actually created a musical about
a restaurant called Our Table.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Can you tell me about it?
Speaker 3 (08:10):
I'd love to.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
I wrote it with the great Broadway composer David Shire,
and it was inspired not so much by my book
about cooking, but out of a piece I wrote right
after nine to eleven about a cook's contest, and I
was inspired by the two chefs, particularly Peter Hoffman, who
ran a beautiful little restaurant with his wife called Savoy,
and David Waltuck, who also ran a beautiful, originally very
(08:33):
small restaurant with his wife called Chanterrelle, and the way
that they poured themselves into these restaurants, that they poured
all of their soul and their selves into these restaurants.
But of course they were up against the inexorable constraints
of New York City real estate, which basically says, if
you've had a successful ten year run, we're going to
(08:54):
quadruple your income. And so I got to thinking about
about that. And Peter had been at cooking school with
Tony bourdain and they were dear friends, but they defined
totally opposite ends of the cooking experience. Peter an idealist
making his perfect food every night for a small clientele,
(09:15):
Tony boordena on televisions. I wondered what would happen if
Tony Bourdena came back to rescue Peter's kitchen, And let's
imagine that he had had an affair with Peter's wife
twenty years before and they didn't know about it. And
so that was the premise of our table. But what
I particularly wanted to do was write about the sort
of micro mechanics of a restaurant, which I observed from
(09:37):
watching you and from watching other friends. I think that
chefs are the last true artists of the old fashioned kind, right,
because they're simultaneously trying to be inventive artistic. They have
a high standard, but at the same time they lived
to please the way Shakespeare lived to please. You can't say,
though a poet can say, well, if you don't like
(09:58):
it tough, right. Chefs are both artists and their inventiveness
and artisans in their commitment to a craft that has
to please. So I wanted to articulate that, but also
capture not the kind of the splendid and extravagant gestures
of a kitchen which you often see on television, but
all the tiny little you said to me once, Ruthie.
(10:20):
It is one of my favorite sayings, and I put
it into the show. Every table is a world, and
that's what a true restaurantur understands. Every table is something
is going on and that a great host has to recognize.
So I wrote a song with David Shire called Chopping Onions,
Folding Napkins, in which the husband whose chef is in
(10:42):
the kitchen chopping onions and his wife, who runs the
front of the house is in the dining room folding napkins,
getting ready for the service, and at the same time
they're having a fight about her old boyfriend. And of
all the things I've ever written, I love the microdrama
of that because it struck me as it's true.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
We can listen to this on Spotify.
Speaker 4 (11:02):
On Spotify our Table, I narrate it, and we have
a wonderful cast Melissa Erico, Andy Taylor, Constantine Marulis, and
it's you know, it's it's a show about a restaurant
and infidelity.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
Infidelity is probably more interesting.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
I've been sulted by that.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
I did nothing more interesting than a restaurant.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
I just wanted to write about the restaurant, but the
director kept saying, no, no, no, we need lovers and we
need all of you know, what about food is seduction.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
I My wife seduced me with a bottle of champagne
when I was about nineteen. She chased me around the
Christmas tree with a bottle of Bum's Extra Dry. So
we kind of got that done. Of course, it's it
is seduction always.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
You know I loved Do you remember the first Melia
cooked from Martha?
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Oh my gosh, yes, I cooked her. I was so
such a pretentious kid, and probably still am. I cooked
her a kish because I was learning to bake from
my mom mother's kitchen, in my mother's kitchen, her recipe.
But in the years since, Martha has one favorite meal
which I cook her whenever I want to please her.
(12:10):
Seduce more than please, and that is something I learned
to do in France, which is a good roast chicken
pole depress in France with carrots with cumin and orange
potatoes roasted under the chicken and a broccoli puree and
then a caramelized garlic sauce. You know, and if I
(12:31):
know that that that will always work.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Yeah. Every year, The River Cafe curates holiday gift boxes
filled with Italian ingredients.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Are extra virgin olive.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Oil bottled exclusively for The River Cafe, Paula Petrelli, tomatoes
from Pulla, Tuscan chocolates and candied sweets from Genoa. One
of our best boxes is the International box, which also
has River Cafe Limited Edition jam Chipriani, Ultrafine, Taglerini, Pasta
River Cafe Cantucci and Nabella Freud candle. There's only one
(13:09):
week to guarantee your gift box is there in time
for the holidays. Order on our website, shop the River
Cafe dot co dot uk or call me on seven. Sorry, okay, thanks.
(13:30):
You said that you were raised on French food.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Where are we born and what did you.
Speaker 4 (13:35):
I was born in Philadelphia because my parents were graduate
students at the University of Pennsylvania and my mother, who's
an extraordinary woman.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
So they were young, they were young, and they came
from very simple backgrounds.
Speaker 4 (13:48):
My grandparents were immigrants from the where on my father's
side from Russia there were Russian Jews, and on my
mother's side from.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
The Levant they were Sephardic Jews.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
That side they had been all around from Hebron to
Baghdad and beyond. The previous generation actually in Lisbon. My grandmother,
who I knew very well, was born in Lisbon. In
any case, truly they were wandering Jews, and that's the background.
But my mom, who was an extraordinarily gifted woman in
(14:21):
the manner of so many women of her generation, latched
onto French cooking and it was fascinating because she was
getting her PhD. She had six children. In linguistics, in linguistics,
in formal logic. She was one of the early students
of or researchers in artificial languages and in computer translation,
(14:42):
the stuff that you get now on Google in a minute.
She spent a long time working on that side of
things and then eventually became very well known for her
work in the genetics of language. She discovered one of
the first chromosomes that directly affect the way we form
sentences in any case. In a addition to that, she
was a passionate nightly cook, and like so many women
(15:04):
of her generation, she discovered Julia Child and French cooking
in the mid sixties.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
Explained to Julia Child, I guess we should.
Speaker 4 (15:11):
In fact, I did a little piece not long ago,
long piece actually for the New Yorker about Judith Jones,
who was a Julia Child's editor who discovered her really
out of a slush pile of a rejected book and
saw that it could be something great. Julia Child was
the American doyenne of French cooking, wrote had a TV
series called The French Chef. Like all people who are
(15:33):
going to television, her great gift was complete un self consciousness.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
She was sloppy and gray at had beautiful high boys.
Then she educated dropped a chicken famously.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
She was such a kind of total change to what
the American cook, domestic cook, the.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Benny Crocker cook. Yes, exactly too. Now you now chopped
the ratit? Oh no, yes, the joe it's on the floor.
Now we up.
Speaker 4 (15:57):
And it was wonderful and it liberates an entire generation.
And my mom is a perfectionist, and she just became
a great French cook. And when I say, I mean
all the things that we would never even do now,
like beef wellington, you know, or kleavaca of salmon, or
turn itdo rossini, you know, all of those things that
belong to the to the past of French cooking.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Now she did.
Speaker 4 (16:20):
And her great triumph was a grand Marniers soufle, which
to this day I would still say is the single
I will put a special golden border around the lemon
tart and chocolate nemesis here at the River Cafe.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
But was spectacular. And during the pandemic, when Martha and.
Speaker 4 (16:38):
I were alone, as all of us were, I set
myself the task of mastering my mother's gramarnies.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Do you have a recipe?
Speaker 3 (16:44):
I have her recipe? Did she write it down for
She wrote it down for me.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
But it's a somewhat metaphysical recipe because the key moment
in it is she says, beat the egg whites until
they are not truly stiff and yet not entirely soft,
which is a metaphysical zone to try and arrive at.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
Right and over time.
Speaker 4 (17:02):
I just did it by trial and error, and she
had one very smart, you know, with the colin French
and astus a hint, which is to have the oven
at four hundred degrees fahrenheit and then turn it down
once this siffley is in, and astonishingly it makes for
it makes for much better loft on it. But my
mama cooked every night for her six children and husband,
(17:25):
and she loved to shop down in Montreal. We moved
to Montreal when I was eleven because my parents got
jobs at McGill University. As I say, and she, you know,
I have nothing but memories of her cooking all the time.
And on my thirteenth birthday, she knew how much I
loved to eat, because I was the kid in the
family who was always greediest of all. And she said,
(17:50):
what's your favorite thing for dinner? And I said beef
struggle off, because it really was my favorite thing at
that point, she said, you're going to make it for
your own birthday dinner. And she showed me each step
along the way. Start taking the peppers and the onions,
and then the beef, then making the sauce with stock
and tomato paste and sour cream, and then the sheer
(18:11):
magic of that transformation the movement from raw to cooked
and then from raw to cooked to delicious was overwhelming
for me.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Was that a rare occasion? Then to bring her children
into the kitchen.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
No, we were in there all the time.
Speaker 4 (18:25):
The only problem was my mother is, bless her, an
extremely impatient woman, which is one reason why she got
those things done. And so she would always yell at you,
not in an angry way, but you know how that is.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
We all do it in the kitchen. I need the salt, No,
I need it now, I need you know.
Speaker 4 (18:42):
And as a consequence, very few people could quite take
the emotional heat in her kitchen, and I inherited all
of her impatience. And as a consequence, everyone of my
immediate family have tried to be my soux chef and
they've all quit, all walked out.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
And what about your father? Did he cook?
Speaker 3 (19:00):
No, my dad didn't cook at all, but he loved
my mother's cooking.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
So when we grew up in.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
This house of six children your parents is incredibly dynamic
and interesting and meal times.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Where all of you, eight of you, sat down every night.
Speaker 4 (19:14):
It was part of the beauty of my upbringing and
it's something I took with me and have been probably
unduly religious about. With my own family, we always had
dinner together, and dinner was always delicious, and it was
always a debating society, and it was always a community,
and there were always politics being played out, older children,
(19:36):
younger children, middle children, the middle children. Now, I'll say
bitterly that the older children, my sister Allison, and myself
were competing for my father's attention. But whatever was going
on to the table, it was always going on in
that sense that the dinner table is the altar and
sacrament of family life is something that I've taken forward
(19:57):
with me into my own existence. To my children's enormous frustration,
because they became accustomed at eight fifteen am, as they
were leaving for school, bleary eyed, exhausted, barely able to
keep themselves together, I'd say, what would you like for
dinner tonight?
Speaker 3 (20:11):
Would you like the salmon with lentils? Or I can
do a roast chicken, but I just need to know
so I can go shop for And then they said salmon.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
It growing up in a family where meals were taken together,
or your mother may be willing to do. You remember
leaving the comfort of home when you went to McGill
and being exposed to a completely different world.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
What was that like McGill was was home, so it
stay home.
Speaker 4 (20:44):
Martha, my wife and I were both at McGill together,
but we it's a Canadian thing. You don't go away
to school, you go nearby. But when we moved to
New York, yes, in the summer of nineteen eighty, we
had just graduated, and we got on a bus that
said New York City, like in a forties musical, and
my dad saw us off.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
He thought it was a mad adventure. We were going
to go live in New York.
Speaker 4 (21:06):
And he said to me as I got on the bus,
he said, just remember when you get to New York,
never underestimate the other person's insecurities. That as a general,
as a general piece of advice, and it's the best
advice I've ever gotten.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
It didn't advise you were to eat.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
I thought you might say, no, you forget to go
to Luisi.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
The thing that inspired me when we got to New
York was a writer, actually was Calvin Trillin, Bless him,
and he wrote beautifully about sort of folk dining in
New York, Russen Daughters, the Great smoke Fishing for him
the local Italian restaurants. But I arrived in New York
and I had to cook. We had a tiny basement apartment.
It was nine feet by eleven. No one believes this
(21:49):
when I tell it, but we lived there for three years.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
The size of this.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Tape about the size of this room.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
Yes, oh, oh my god, this room would have been
a mansion. No, it's half the size of this room. Yeah,
it's half the size of this. I did a one
man show once where I came out cold and lay
down in blue tape, a nine by eleven rectangle.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
Then I exited.
Speaker 4 (22:07):
I came back on and said, this is the room
my wife and I lived in for three years when
we came to New York. But I was determined to
do nothing but the best cooking. So we had this
tiny little stove in an unventilated nine by eleven room,
and I would do not you know, you know, heat
and serve things. I would do, you know, tuno pav or,
(22:29):
you know, a whole roast chicken in this tiny eleven
and the whole room would fill with smoke. Right, So
you'd open the one window we had and the smoke
would pour out onto the pavement of eighty seventh Street,
and we're.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
A student at.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
You knew you wanted to be an art historian. Did
you study art?
Speaker 3 (22:48):
I did.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
I studied art history, and I was accepted to a
PhD program at the Institute of Fine Arts at New
York University.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
But for me, that was just a mask. It was
a beard.
Speaker 4 (22:58):
I wanted to be a writer, an essayist in the songwriter.
Those are the two things I wanted. But it was
a way of getting to New York. I had a
fellowship to go to NYU. But then my first day,
my first fall at NYU, at the Institute, where I
intended just to pass through and kind of wave quickly
on my way to the New Yorker, actually I met
(23:18):
Kirk Varnado, who was for both of us a best friend,
who was the most inspired I get for clempt thinking
of that now, a teacher who has ever lived. He
was a great art historian, became the chief curator of
the Museum of Modern Art eventually, and he was such
an inspiring teacher and mentor and model that it became
(23:41):
a kind of diversion in my life for the next
ten years that I actually did my degrees in art history,
and we ended up doing a big show together at.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
The Museum of Modern Art.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Do you remember eating with him?
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Oh, my god.
Speaker 4 (23:52):
Kirk loved, as you know, loved good food, and he
loved French culture. Not just French cuisine, but French culture.
It was the first time in my life we would
go out for dinner. And we were, you know, kids
living in a basement. And Kirk was a young professor.
Wasn't that he had, you know, a lot of money
or anything. And he has just gotten married to Ellen Zimmerman,
his extraordinary artist wife. And we would go out for
(24:14):
dinner and have a bottle of white wine, champagne to start,
bottle of white wine, bottle of red wine, something afterwards
it was anything.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
It sounds like, you said, bottle of red wine. Well,
we would go, you know, we would really we would
eat well. And there was a restaurant in Washington, DC
that we went to once called the Papallon, like the
old French place in New York. And uh.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
The Kirk loved. He loved the intensity of that, he
loved the expansiveness of it. He loved everything that a
great French meal stood for as a piece of the
history of the pluralism of pleasures and so on. And
among the happiest days of my life, in which I
believe you participated too, is that when we lived in France,
(24:59):
we had tradition whenever Kirk and Ellen were there that
we would have cathedral and the lunch and we go
up to Rance or Sha and then spend the morning
touring the cathedral.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Richard was with us.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
I think they to Shark to Sharks.
Speaker 4 (25:13):
All exactly, and Kirkwood descant brilliantly and unforgettably about the
facade and the sculpture and the changes and the meanings
and the possibilities. And then after that, you know, staggeringly
informative and illuminating morning, we'd.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
Go for a two star or three star lunch.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
We ate in a restaurant I think it was called
something like frost Fois.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Just to introject I love for Kenneth Tita.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Do you remember when in the book when she says
we're going to eat in this restaurant called Styes, and
he said, any restaurant called.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Shay is going to be bad.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
I refuse, I was going to look up for Kirk
Varnadov's speech. He died in two thousand and three, and
both Adam and I gave eulogies for him at the
Metropolitan Museum. It brought this back nineteen seventy two, an
unrelenting rainstorm in Paris, Richard and I, Judy Bing and
(26:13):
Bud Marshner bolt for shelter into the Cafe Bozaar to
meet their friend. A gaspingly handsome man strides into the restaurant,
wet and wind swept from the ride on his motorcycle,
an eight p fifty MOTORGUTSI. He his broad shoulders, long hair, mustache,
and big sidebirds. He tries to find a space for himself,
(26:36):
his helmet and his leather jacket. As he squeezes onto
our table. He's already launched into a story about artists
who ate here in the turn of the century. Too
big for the restaurant with a story to tell.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
This was Kirk.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
It's a beautiful, beautiful description restaurant. You know, he was
a man of such expanse, of authority and appetite at
this same time, such a great appreciator. And you know
the two things that always come to mind for me
is you know he loved the brassriye delille on the
Ile Saint Luis, which is a classic old fashioned brassery,
and would love the the geaurette to pork with lentils,
(27:15):
you know, really basic things. But he was, as you know,
he died of ridiculously young. And you know, when Kirk
was on chemo in the last couple of years of
his life, I would go with him to the chemo
suite as they called it, bizarrely, and he would sit
because he couldn't waste time, you know, he couldn't.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
Waste time being having cancer.
Speaker 4 (27:39):
He would sit with the IV in his arm and
talk about art and talk about lectures he was going
to give, or a lecture I was going to get,
and we bat ideas around. He was working on a
series of lectures National Gallery in Washington about abstract art,
and he would just test them out on me, and
you know, you were kind of curtained off from the
other patients. And finally, after we've been doing this for
(28:01):
about six weeks, the kurt and open is very sweet
Russian guy Ball from the treatment with putting on his hat,
said excuse me. He said to Kirk, you are professor,
And Kirk said, yeah, yeah, I'm a teacher. And he said, ah,
he said, because he said, every week I come here
when I know you're going to be here, he said,
(28:21):
I used to bring a book, but now I just
listened to you.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
And that was Kirk.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
That was Kirk you were talking about. You were cooking
in New York in this one room. You were involved
in the Institute of Fine Arts with the Kirk. You're
starting to write for the New Yorker. And were you
just engulfed in the restaurant scene as well in New
York or was it mostly just cooking.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
Well, at the beginning, it was me attempting to cook
like my mom. For Martha. We had one.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
You know, I think it's true that all you remember
Tolstoy says about happy and unhappy families. And my theory
is that all bad marriages have a new fight. Every day,
they find something new to fight about. Good marriages had
the same fight over and over and over and over.
So Martha and I have been having the same fight
for forty plus years now. And it's that I like
(29:09):
things done rare. That was part of the culinary esthetic
of my family, and Martha comes from a well done family.
And this is a greater abyss than if she were
Protestant and I were Catholic. But the great thing is
if you go out to eat, you find that medium
is a perfect word of tender resolution, right because I
can say medium rare and Martha says medium.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Well, I shock everybody here now, I think because I think,
actually an Italian cooking, you don't eat rare meat.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
No.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
Richard's mother was an Italian cook from Trieste. Really didn't
like anything rare. And I think if you kind of
then take that a bit further, you really enjoy I
wouldn't say a well done, dry piece of meat, but
you do like a piece of meat falling off the bone.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
It breathed for hours.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
You should.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
Everything is braising everything, So I do you know, I
do becoming a vegetarian braised beef and you know seven
hour lamb in the French ware. You know you slow
cook a lamb, and I much prefer that it's like
this the stink.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
If you like listening to Ruthie's Table for would you
please make sure to write and review the podcast on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, O, wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
If food is all that we've described, and you are
also a very socially conscious, very political person and writer.
Do you have thoughts about the politics of food.
Speaker 4 (30:51):
I have been lucky to have good professors on that cause, yourself,
Alice Waters, Peter Hoffman, Dan Barber, who all feel passionately
about those subjects and to the degree that I can
honor it myself.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
But I go to the green market on Union Square
and buy from farmers.
Speaker 4 (31:09):
I try not to be a puritan about it, because
I recognize that the things that we believe in can
often be unobtainable and hard to do, so I try
to recognize that.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
But you know, my basic view of food is.
Speaker 4 (31:23):
You know, it's the most beautifully universal thing that human
beings do every stage of our lives. And if you
think about it, there's almost a universal grammar of food.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Right. We all like a neutral starch and a pungent protein.
Speaker 4 (31:38):
Right, whether it's paper deli with mulnaises sauce, or it's
a cassavo root with a pungent African chili, or it's
curry over rice. That's kind of the universal human meal
everyone today, billion people are going to sit down and
have a neutral starch and a pungent protein, a pizza
is that's what a pizza is. The beauty of that
(32:01):
universality never ceases to astonish me. And the degree to
which our humanity is prisoned, if you like, filtered through
the meals we eat, I think, is a powerful thing.
And I deeply believe Ruthy that there's a direct connection
between the pleasures we enjoy and the politics we want.
Because if there's one thing that I've spent the last
(32:23):
fifteen years writing about, liberal democracy apparently with absolutely no
success at all in altering anybody's view, because it remains
more in danger today as we sit together than at
any time in my lifetime, certainly, But the core principle
of healthy liberal democracy is pluralism. There are many menus
(32:43):
in a liberal democracy. We believe in many menus. We'd
love to go out for Indian food. We welcome immigrants
because they bring with them, whether they're Italians or bangladesh Is,
they bring with them flavors and tastes we haven't had before.
That's part of the the meaning and the magic of
a pluralistic democracy. So the pleasure we take in our
(33:07):
everyday food, the pleasure we take and the.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
Ability to have it, and the ability to have it
and we're you.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Know, I just somebody told me the other day that
the military, a huge percentage of people in the Army,
of the American Army, Navy, Air Force are in food stamps.
These people are fighting supposedly for us, and they're not
being able to eat food.
Speaker 3 (33:29):
You know, this is the prison at the same time.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
One of the great and you know, one of my
favorite books about food is Elizabeth Leeward's Sacred Food I
think it's called, And one of the points she makes
is the peasant cultures around the world have usually been
among the most creative and productive, and we get beautiful,
universal things like rice puddings.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
That we share.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
So I really believe that there's no that Not only
is there no distance between the pleasures of the table
and the necessities politics, there's a direct connection. We want
to assert universality. Everyone should eat well, and we want
to assert pluralism. Everybody should be free to eat the
menu that they desire. And that isn't just true about
(34:13):
the things we have at dinner. It's true about the
things we do in bed, the people we choose to love,
the way we choose to identify pluralism is a sign
of a healthy polity.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
We often eat food for comfort, and we have a
question that we do ask everyone at the end, which
is to say, if food is sharing, and food is
remembering your parents, going to Paris, or cooking in a
one room apartment, it's also comfort. Is there something that
you would go for particularly?
Speaker 4 (34:41):
Yes, I am, and absolutely I have one comfort menu
and it came about in a nice way. When we
were living in Paris, Luca got terribly sick with salmonella poisoning.
We didn't know what it was, and I ended up
at ten o'clock a night, having literally have them in
my arms, running to the children's hospital in the seventh
(35:01):
thro on dismall and they identified what it was and
they got him on the right antibiotics. So about midnight
we finally got him home, and you know, we had
been in a state of absolute anxiety, and we hadn't eaten,
and now we took a deep breath and I looked
around what was there? And all I had was in
the cupboard was rice and some canned beans, and I
(35:21):
had some apples i'd gotten, and I made Mark the
dinner of spicy rice and beans, with the rice treated
with some turmeric. So go orange, spicy rice and beans
with a little Rugeli mixed in that I had in
the fridge, and then a baked apple with red wine
and noir and walnuts, and it was the single best
meal we'd ever had because it was the worst day
(35:43):
of our life that was now ending decently, and from
that day to this, whenever we have a crisis or
difficulty of sun kind, and said, I'm going to let's
just have spicy rice and beans and a baked apple,
and I.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Know that that will be restored.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Yeah, thank you, Adam.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
Pleasure.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
I think
Speaker 1 (36:08):
H
This episode is brought to you by Me and M,
the British modern luxury clothing label designed for busy women.
Founded and designed in London. Me and M is about
intelligence style. Much thought and care are put into the
design process, so every piece is flattering, functional and made
to last forever. Me and M is well known for
its trousers and how I got to know the brand.
(00:22):
It's my go to for styles that are comfortable enough
to wear in the kitchen or the restaurant, also polished
enough for meetings. Me and M is available online and
its stores across London, Edinburgh, New York. If you're in London,
I'd really recommend heading to their beautiful, brand new flagship
store in Marlevin, which opens on the twenty ninth of October.
(00:44):
In the thirty four years at Adam Gopnik and I
have been friends. We have lived in the same city, Paris,
where he wrote his beautiful book Paris to the Moon.
We have loved and then lost our best friend, the
art historian and curator Kirk Varnado. We've taken care of
each other's children as if they were our own, and
sung show tunes together from every Broadway musical Because we know.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
All the lyrics.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Most of all, we have never stopped cooking, eating, and
talking about our passion for food. We may be separated
by an ocean, but we are always minutes and inches
away all the while. Adam leads a terrific life in writing,
staff writer for The New Yorker and author of nine
books of non fiction, fiction and memoir. Next year he
(01:29):
will perform his one man show Talk Therapy in New
York City. Adam is here now with me in London.
In four days, He's eaten in the River Cafe four times.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
This morning we sang You've.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Got to be taught from South Pacific, Rainbow Connection, from
the Muppets, and I've never been in love before from
Guys and Dolls. Tonight, after seeing Giant at the Royal Court,
we will go home and cook to Btapasta my definition
of a good friend. Thank you, sir Adam. You've chosen
the recipe and it was from the very first cookbook
(02:03):
we ever did, the River Cafe Cookbook, and the recipe
you chose was Penny with quick sausage sauce.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Would you like to read it?
Speaker 4 (02:11):
I would love to read it, and I should ad
that this is part of a diptick, as our historians
would say, with a penny with a slow sausage sauce,
So that is why it's quick. Two hundred fifty grams
of penny regatta, two tablespoons of olive oil, two red onions,
peeled and chopped, five sausages, meat crumbled, half a tablespoon
(02:31):
of fresh rosemary, two small dried chilis, eight hundred grams
of peeled plum tomatoes, one hundred and fifty mili liters
of cream, and one hundred and twenty grams of parmesan,
freshly grated. You heat the olive oil in the saucepan
and you fry the onion lightly. You add the sausage, rosemary,
bay leaves and chili all together, frying them over a
(02:53):
high heat, stirring to mash the sausages. You remove all
but one tablespoon of the fat and continue you to
cook for twenty minutes. Add the tomatoes, stir and return.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
To the boil.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
Then remove from the heat. Cook the penne in boiling
salted water, then drain and add directly to the sauce.
Stir the cream into the sauce with the penny and
half the parmesan, and then you serve the pustup with
the remaining parmesan grated on top.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
When I asked you for a recipe that you'd like
to read Ruthie's Table four, you immediately said, I know
exactly what I.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Want to do.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
I want to do the penne with quick sausage sauce.
And I was wondering why.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
Well, because it was nineteen ninety four, we had just
moved to Paris, my wife Martha and our little son
Luke had just moved to Paris then, and we got
your book, and by the strangest kind of syncopated cooking beat,
I started cooking your food in our Parisian kitchen, although
I had been raised on French food, and there was
(03:55):
something about the logic and grammar of this recipe that
was inspiring and explained so much. In other words, you
were taking the pungent things, the sweet onions, and then
the pungent sausages, and the hot pepper which I had
never cooked with before, the dried parakeet peppers, and making
all of that. Then you were reducing it with the
(04:18):
wine and then adding the tomatoes, and that basic pattern, right,
you have and it can be anchovies and.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Garblic, get the flavor tomato right, then cook.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
It down with wine until it's almost dry, and then
adding tomatoes, and then doing that. How many times in
a lifetime do we do that? And that basic grammar,
the savory flavors, the wine reduction, the addition of tomato
or cream or whatever it might be, is somehow so fundamental.
(04:53):
It was like this for me was a foundational recipe.
Once I knew how to do this, I felt that
I could do almost anything. So that's why I love
it so much, even though, to be honest with you,
I probably couldn't, so to speak, sell it at my
dining table today because the ladies I cook for, Martha
and Olivia are both pescatarians at this point.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
Yeah, so I couldn't. But do you ever have it?
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Make it for yourself?
Speaker 3 (05:14):
I always make it for myself.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
When I'm alone, I either make this or the matriciana
as Mike.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Can you get the Lucunega sausages in New York?
Speaker 3 (05:21):
You can get good sausages.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
You get good Italian sausages in New York, But those
are when I'm home alone.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
That's what I make for myself.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
So you've written just written a brilliant piece about the election.
You've written about the politics of our country. You've written
about Paris, You've written and yet you are uniquely interested,
I think, in writing and writing about food, and so
food comes into your musical. I mean, there aren't very
many musicals about a restaurant. There aren't very many articles
(05:52):
in the New Yorker. Well, now there are a few
more about food. Tell us about one of your books
that you've written where food has come into your book.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
I wrote an entire book just about the philosophy of
eating called The Table Comes First, which was the title
was given to me by our friend Burkus of Saint
John because we were having elevenses once and he said,
genuine he was genuinely perturbed. He said, there is this
young couple I know, he said, and they just getting
married and they want to buy a bed. Said, don't
(06:21):
they know the table comes first. They're having a bed
but no table. And I thought, oh, what a beautiful thought.
The table comes first. It's the altar in the raft
of human existence. So for me, my fascination with food
I think comes from two you know, sharply opposed places.
On the one end, just pure read I love to eat,
and I.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
See funny that greed comes into food. I have a
friend who had a nanny and she overheard her child
who said, I'd want, you know, a biscuit. She'd eaten
like five biscuits, and she heard the nanny saying, you know,
you're a greedy.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Little girl, and she fired her good.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
She fired it right on the spot.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
She said, you know what, I don't want somebody telling
my child that because they want more food, that they're greedy.
And for me, as an American and maybe that's something different,
is that greediness always meant that you want more money.
So I think it's interesting the idea of sort of
what greedy being involved in dispense.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
One of the ways in which French culinary culture is
superior to any other is, you know, you use the
word gourmand to mean greedy, and when you saymond, you mean, oh,
he really loves to eat. And the French word gourmet,
which Americans and Brits have adapted, French folks don't really
use very much. You wouldn't say somebody's a gourmet unless.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
They were an American.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
But gourmand, yeah, though, it means greedy, and that sense
is a totally positive benediction. Tenon you know means really
loves food. So that's one part of my fascination with food.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
I can't remember many musicals that I've seen they have
restaurants scenes. I've interviewed actors who actually had to cook
on or eat on stage, or food is a part
of the drama. But you've actually created a musical about
a restaurant called Our Table.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Can you tell me about it?
Speaker 3 (08:10):
I'd love to.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
I wrote it with the great Broadway composer David Shire,
and it was inspired not so much by my book
about cooking, but out of a piece I wrote right
after nine to eleven about a cook's contest, and I
was inspired by the two chefs, particularly Peter Hoffman, who
ran a beautiful little restaurant with his wife called Savoy,
and David Waltuck, who also ran a beautiful, originally very
(08:33):
small restaurant with his wife called Chanterrelle, and the way
that they poured themselves into these restaurants, that they poured
all of their soul and their selves into these restaurants.
But of course they were up against the inexorable constraints
of New York City real estate, which basically says, if
you've had a successful ten year run, we're going to
(08:54):
quadruple your income. And so I got to thinking about
about that. And Peter had been at cooking school with
Tony bourdain and they were dear friends, but they defined
totally opposite ends of the cooking experience. Peter an idealist
making his perfect food every night for a small clientele,
(09:15):
Tony boordena on televisions. I wondered what would happen if
Tony Bourdena came back to rescue Peter's kitchen, And let's
imagine that he had had an affair with Peter's wife
twenty years before and they didn't know about it. And
so that was the premise of our table. But what
I particularly wanted to do was write about the sort
of micro mechanics of a restaurant, which I observed from
(09:37):
watching you and from watching other friends. I think that
chefs are the last true artists of the old fashioned kind, right,
because they're simultaneously trying to be inventive artistic. They have
a high standard, but at the same time they lived
to please the way Shakespeare lived to please. You can't say,
though a poet can say, well, if you don't like
(09:58):
it tough, right. Chefs are both artists and their inventiveness
and artisans in their commitment to a craft that has
to please. So I wanted to articulate that, but also
capture not the kind of the splendid and extravagant gestures
of a kitchen which you often see on television, but
all the tiny little you said to me once, Ruthie.
(10:20):
It is one of my favorite sayings, and I put
it into the show. Every table is a world, and
that's what a true restaurantur understands. Every table is something
is going on and that a great host has to recognize.
So I wrote a song with David Shire called Chopping Onions,
Folding Napkins, in which the husband whose chef is in
(10:42):
the kitchen chopping onions and his wife, who runs the
front of the house is in the dining room folding napkins,
getting ready for the service, and at the same time
they're having a fight about her old boyfriend. And of
all the things I've ever written, I love the microdrama
of that because it struck me as it's true.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
We can listen to this on Spotify.
Speaker 4 (11:02):
On Spotify our Table, I narrate it, and we have
a wonderful cast Melissa Erico, Andy Taylor, Constantine Marulis, and
it's you know, it's it's a show about a restaurant
and infidelity.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
Infidelity is probably more interesting.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
I've been sulted by that.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
I did nothing more interesting than a restaurant.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
I just wanted to write about the restaurant, but the
director kept saying, no, no, no, we need lovers and we
need all of you know, what about food is seduction.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
I My wife seduced me with a bottle of champagne
when I was about nineteen. She chased me around the
Christmas tree with a bottle of Bum's Extra Dry. So
we kind of got that done. Of course, it's it
is seduction always.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
You know I loved Do you remember the first Melia
cooked from Martha?
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Oh my gosh, yes, I cooked her. I was so
such a pretentious kid, and probably still am. I cooked
her a kish because I was learning to bake from
my mom mother's kitchen, in my mother's kitchen, her recipe.
But in the years since, Martha has one favorite meal
which I cook her whenever I want to please her.
(12:10):
Seduce more than please, and that is something I learned
to do in France, which is a good roast chicken
pole depress in France with carrots with cumin and orange
potatoes roasted under the chicken and a broccoli puree and
then a caramelized garlic sauce. You know, and if I
(12:31):
know that that that will always work.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Yeah. Every year, The River Cafe curates holiday gift boxes
filled with Italian ingredients.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Are extra virgin olive.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Oil bottled exclusively for The River Cafe, Paula Petrelli, tomatoes
from Pulla, Tuscan chocolates and candied sweets from Genoa. One
of our best boxes is the International box, which also
has River Cafe Limited Edition jam Chipriani, Ultrafine, Taglerini, Pasta
River Cafe Cantucci and Nabella Freud candle. There's only one
(13:09):
week to guarantee your gift box is there in time
for the holidays. Order on our website, shop the River
Cafe dot co dot uk or call me on seven. Sorry, okay, thanks.
(13:30):
You said that you were raised on French food.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Where are we born and what did you.
Speaker 4 (13:35):
I was born in Philadelphia because my parents were graduate
students at the University of Pennsylvania and my mother, who's
an extraordinary woman.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
So they were young, they were young, and they came
from very simple backgrounds.
Speaker 4 (13:48):
My grandparents were immigrants from the where on my father's
side from Russia there were Russian Jews, and on my
mother's side from.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
The Levant they were Sephardic Jews.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
That side they had been all around from Hebron to
Baghdad and beyond. The previous generation actually in Lisbon. My grandmother,
who I knew very well, was born in Lisbon. In
any case, truly they were wandering Jews, and that's the background.
But my mom, who was an extraordinarily gifted woman in
(14:21):
the manner of so many women of her generation, latched
onto French cooking and it was fascinating because she was
getting her PhD. She had six children. In linguistics, in linguistics,
in formal logic. She was one of the early students
of or researchers in artificial languages and in computer translation,
(14:42):
the stuff that you get now on Google in a minute.
She spent a long time working on that side of
things and then eventually became very well known for her
work in the genetics of language. She discovered one of
the first chromosomes that directly affect the way we form
sentences in any case. In a addition to that, she
was a passionate nightly cook, and like so many women
(15:04):
of her generation, she discovered Julia Child and French cooking
in the mid sixties.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
Explained to Julia Child, I guess we should.
Speaker 4 (15:11):
In fact, I did a little piece not long ago,
long piece actually for the New Yorker about Judith Jones,
who was a Julia Child's editor who discovered her really
out of a slush pile of a rejected book and
saw that it could be something great. Julia Child was
the American doyenne of French cooking, wrote had a TV
series called The French Chef. Like all people who are
(15:33):
going to television, her great gift was complete un self consciousness.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
She was sloppy and gray at had beautiful high boys.
Then she educated dropped a chicken famously.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
She was such a kind of total change to what
the American cook, domestic cook, the.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Benny Crocker cook. Yes, exactly too. Now you now chopped
the ratit? Oh no, yes, the joe it's on the floor.
Now we up.
Speaker 4 (15:57):
And it was wonderful and it liberates an entire generation.
And my mom is a perfectionist, and she just became
a great French cook. And when I say, I mean
all the things that we would never even do now,
like beef wellington, you know, or kleavaca of salmon, or
turn itdo rossini, you know, all of those things that
belong to the to the past of French cooking.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Now she did.
Speaker 4 (16:20):
And her great triumph was a grand Marniers soufle, which
to this day I would still say is the single
I will put a special golden border around the lemon
tart and chocolate nemesis here at the River Cafe.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
But was spectacular. And during the pandemic, when Martha and.
Speaker 4 (16:38):
I were alone, as all of us were, I set
myself the task of mastering my mother's gramarnies.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Do you have a recipe?
Speaker 3 (16:44):
I have her recipe? Did she write it down for
She wrote it down for me.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
But it's a somewhat metaphysical recipe because the key moment
in it is she says, beat the egg whites until
they are not truly stiff and yet not entirely soft,
which is a metaphysical zone to try and arrive at.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
Right and over time.
Speaker 4 (17:02):
I just did it by trial and error, and she
had one very smart, you know, with the colin French
and astus a hint, which is to have the oven
at four hundred degrees fahrenheit and then turn it down
once this siffley is in, and astonishingly it makes for
it makes for much better loft on it. But my
mama cooked every night for her six children and husband,
(17:25):
and she loved to shop down in Montreal. We moved
to Montreal when I was eleven because my parents got
jobs at McGill University. As I say, and she, you know,
I have nothing but memories of her cooking all the time.
And on my thirteenth birthday, she knew how much I
loved to eat, because I was the kid in the
family who was always greediest of all. And she said,
(17:50):
what's your favorite thing for dinner? And I said beef
struggle off, because it really was my favorite thing at
that point, she said, you're going to make it for
your own birthday dinner. And she showed me each step
along the way. Start taking the peppers and the onions,
and then the beef, then making the sauce with stock
and tomato paste and sour cream, and then the sheer
(18:11):
magic of that transformation the movement from raw to cooked
and then from raw to cooked to delicious was overwhelming
for me.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Was that a rare occasion? Then to bring her children
into the kitchen.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
No, we were in there all the time.
Speaker 4 (18:25):
The only problem was my mother is, bless her, an
extremely impatient woman, which is one reason why she got
those things done. And so she would always yell at you,
not in an angry way, but you know how that is.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
We all do it in the kitchen. I need the salt, No,
I need it now, I need you know.
Speaker 4 (18:42):
And as a consequence, very few people could quite take
the emotional heat in her kitchen, and I inherited all
of her impatience. And as a consequence, everyone of my
immediate family have tried to be my soux chef and
they've all quit, all walked out.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
And what about your father? Did he cook?
Speaker 3 (19:00):
No, my dad didn't cook at all, but he loved
my mother's cooking.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
So when we grew up in.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
This house of six children your parents is incredibly dynamic
and interesting and meal times.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Where all of you, eight of you, sat down every night.
Speaker 4 (19:14):
It was part of the beauty of my upbringing and
it's something I took with me and have been probably
unduly religious about. With my own family, we always had
dinner together, and dinner was always delicious, and it was
always a debating society, and it was always a community,
and there were always politics being played out, older children,
(19:36):
younger children, middle children, the middle children. Now, I'll say
bitterly that the older children, my sister Allison, and myself
were competing for my father's attention. But whatever was going
on to the table, it was always going on in
that sense that the dinner table is the altar and
sacrament of family life is something that I've taken forward
(19:57):
with me into my own existence. To my children's enormous frustration,
because they became accustomed at eight fifteen am, as they
were leaving for school, bleary eyed, exhausted, barely able to
keep themselves together, I'd say, what would you like for
dinner tonight?
Speaker 3 (20:11):
Would you like the salmon with lentils? Or I can
do a roast chicken, but I just need to know
so I can go shop for And then they said salmon.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
It growing up in a family where meals were taken together,
or your mother may be willing to do. You remember
leaving the comfort of home when you went to McGill
and being exposed to a completely different world.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
What was that like McGill was was home, so it
stay home.
Speaker 4 (20:44):
Martha, my wife and I were both at McGill together,
but we it's a Canadian thing. You don't go away
to school, you go nearby. But when we moved to
New York, yes, in the summer of nineteen eighty, we
had just graduated, and we got on a bus that
said New York City, like in a forties musical, and
my dad saw us off.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
He thought it was a mad adventure. We were going
to go live in New York.
Speaker 4 (21:06):
And he said to me as I got on the bus,
he said, just remember when you get to New York,
never underestimate the other person's insecurities. That as a general,
as a general piece of advice, and it's the best
advice I've ever gotten.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
It didn't advise you were to eat.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
I thought you might say, no, you forget to go
to Luisi.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
The thing that inspired me when we got to New
York was a writer, actually was Calvin Trillin, Bless him,
and he wrote beautifully about sort of folk dining in
New York, Russen Daughters, the Great smoke Fishing for him
the local Italian restaurants. But I arrived in New York
and I had to cook. We had a tiny basement apartment.
It was nine feet by eleven. No one believes this
(21:49):
when I tell it, but we lived there for three years.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
The size of this.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Tape about the size of this room.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
Yes, oh, oh my god, this room would have been
a mansion. No, it's half the size of this room. Yeah,
it's half the size of this. I did a one
man show once where I came out cold and lay
down in blue tape, a nine by eleven rectangle.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
Then I exited.
Speaker 4 (22:07):
I came back on and said, this is the room
my wife and I lived in for three years when
we came to New York. But I was determined to
do nothing but the best cooking. So we had this
tiny little stove in an unventilated nine by eleven room,
and I would do not you know, you know, heat
and serve things. I would do, you know, tuno pav or,
(22:29):
you know, a whole roast chicken in this tiny eleven
and the whole room would fill with smoke. Right, So
you'd open the one window we had and the smoke
would pour out onto the pavement of eighty seventh Street,
and we're.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
A student at.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
You knew you wanted to be an art historian. Did
you study art?
Speaker 3 (22:48):
I did.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
I studied art history, and I was accepted to a
PhD program at the Institute of Fine Arts at New
York University.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
But for me, that was just a mask. It was
a beard.
Speaker 4 (22:58):
I wanted to be a writer, an essayist in the songwriter.
Those are the two things I wanted. But it was
a way of getting to New York. I had a
fellowship to go to NYU. But then my first day,
my first fall at NYU, at the Institute, where I
intended just to pass through and kind of wave quickly
on my way to the New Yorker, actually I met
(23:18):
Kirk Varnado, who was for both of us a best friend,
who was the most inspired I get for clempt thinking
of that now, a teacher who has ever lived. He
was a great art historian, became the chief curator of
the Museum of Modern Art eventually, and he was such
an inspiring teacher and mentor and model that it became
(23:41):
a kind of diversion in my life for the next
ten years that I actually did my degrees in art history,
and we ended up doing a big show together at.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
The Museum of Modern Art.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Do you remember eating with him?
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Oh, my god.
Speaker 4 (23:52):
Kirk loved, as you know, loved good food, and he
loved French culture. Not just French cuisine, but French culture.
It was the first time in my life we would
go out for dinner. And we were, you know, kids
living in a basement. And Kirk was a young professor.
Wasn't that he had, you know, a lot of money
or anything. And he has just gotten married to Ellen Zimmerman,
his extraordinary artist wife. And we would go out for
(24:14):
dinner and have a bottle of white wine, champagne to start,
bottle of white wine, bottle of red wine, something afterwards
it was anything.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
It sounds like, you said, bottle of red wine. Well,
we would go, you know, we would really we would
eat well. And there was a restaurant in Washington, DC
that we went to once called the Papallon, like the
old French place in New York. And uh.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
The Kirk loved. He loved the intensity of that, he
loved the expansiveness of it. He loved everything that a
great French meal stood for as a piece of the
history of the pluralism of pleasures and so on. And
among the happiest days of my life, in which I
believe you participated too, is that when we lived in France,
(24:59):
we had tradition whenever Kirk and Ellen were there that
we would have cathedral and the lunch and we go
up to Rance or Sha and then spend the morning
touring the cathedral.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Richard was with us.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
I think they to Shark to Sharks.
Speaker 4 (25:13):
All exactly, and Kirkwood descant brilliantly and unforgettably about the
facade and the sculpture and the changes and the meanings
and the possibilities. And then after that, you know, staggeringly
informative and illuminating morning, we'd.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
Go for a two star or three star lunch.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
We ate in a restaurant I think it was called
something like frost Fois.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Just to introject I love for Kenneth Tita.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Do you remember when in the book when she says
we're going to eat in this restaurant called Styes, and
he said, any restaurant called.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Shay is going to be bad.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
I refuse, I was going to look up for Kirk
Varnadov's speech. He died in two thousand and three, and
both Adam and I gave eulogies for him at the
Metropolitan Museum. It brought this back nineteen seventy two, an
unrelenting rainstorm in Paris, Richard and I, Judy Bing and
(26:13):
Bud Marshner bolt for shelter into the Cafe Bozaar to
meet their friend. A gaspingly handsome man strides into the restaurant,
wet and wind swept from the ride on his motorcycle,
an eight p fifty MOTORGUTSI. He his broad shoulders, long hair, mustache,
and big sidebirds. He tries to find a space for himself,
(26:36):
his helmet and his leather jacket. As he squeezes onto
our table. He's already launched into a story about artists
who ate here in the turn of the century. Too
big for the restaurant with a story to tell.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
This was Kirk.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
It's a beautiful, beautiful description restaurant. You know, he was
a man of such expanse, of authority and appetite at
this same time, such a great appreciator. And you know
the two things that always come to mind for me
is you know he loved the brassriye delille on the
Ile Saint Luis, which is a classic old fashioned brassery,
and would love the the geaurette to pork with lentils,
(27:15):
you know, really basic things. But he was, as you know,
he died of ridiculously young. And you know, when Kirk
was on chemo in the last couple of years of
his life, I would go with him to the chemo
suite as they called it, bizarrely, and he would sit
because he couldn't waste time, you know, he couldn't.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
Waste time being having cancer.
Speaker 4 (27:39):
He would sit with the IV in his arm and
talk about art and talk about lectures he was going
to give, or a lecture I was going to get,
and we bat ideas around. He was working on a
series of lectures National Gallery in Washington about abstract art,
and he would just test them out on me, and
you know, you were kind of curtained off from the
other patients. And finally, after we've been doing this for
(28:01):
about six weeks, the kurt and open is very sweet
Russian guy Ball from the treatment with putting on his hat,
said excuse me. He said to Kirk, you are professor,
And Kirk said, yeah, yeah, I'm a teacher. And he said, ah,
he said, because he said, every week I come here
when I know you're going to be here, he said,
(28:21):
I used to bring a book, but now I just
listened to you.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
And that was Kirk.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
That was Kirk you were talking about. You were cooking
in New York in this one room. You were involved
in the Institute of Fine Arts with the Kirk. You're
starting to write for the New Yorker. And were you
just engulfed in the restaurant scene as well in New
York or was it mostly just cooking.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
Well, at the beginning, it was me attempting to cook
like my mom. For Martha. We had one.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
You know, I think it's true that all you remember
Tolstoy says about happy and unhappy families. And my theory
is that all bad marriages have a new fight. Every day,
they find something new to fight about. Good marriages had
the same fight over and over and over and over.
So Martha and I have been having the same fight
for forty plus years now. And it's that I like
(29:09):
things done rare. That was part of the culinary esthetic
of my family, and Martha comes from a well done family.
And this is a greater abyss than if she were
Protestant and I were Catholic. But the great thing is
if you go out to eat, you find that medium
is a perfect word of tender resolution, right because I
can say medium rare and Martha says medium.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Well, I shock everybody here now, I think because I think,
actually an Italian cooking, you don't eat rare meat.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
No.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
Richard's mother was an Italian cook from Trieste. Really didn't
like anything rare. And I think if you kind of
then take that a bit further, you really enjoy I
wouldn't say a well done, dry piece of meat, but
you do like a piece of meat falling off the bone.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
It breathed for hours.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
You should.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
Everything is braising everything, So I do you know, I
do becoming a vegetarian braised beef and you know seven
hour lamb in the French ware. You know you slow
cook a lamb, and I much prefer that it's like
this the stink.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
If you like listening to Ruthie's Table for would you
please make sure to write and review the podcast on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, O, wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
If food is all that we've described, and you are
also a very socially conscious, very political person and writer.
Do you have thoughts about the politics of food.
Speaker 4 (30:51):
I have been lucky to have good professors on that cause, yourself,
Alice Waters, Peter Hoffman, Dan Barber, who all feel passionately
about those subjects and to the degree that I can
honor it myself.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
But I go to the green market on Union Square
and buy from farmers.
Speaker 4 (31:09):
I try not to be a puritan about it, because
I recognize that the things that we believe in can
often be unobtainable and hard to do, so I try
to recognize that.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
But you know, my basic view of food is.
Speaker 4 (31:23):
You know, it's the most beautifully universal thing that human
beings do every stage of our lives. And if you
think about it, there's almost a universal grammar of food.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Right. We all like a neutral starch and a pungent protein.
Speaker 4 (31:38):
Right, whether it's paper deli with mulnaises sauce, or it's
a cassavo root with a pungent African chili, or it's
curry over rice. That's kind of the universal human meal
everyone today, billion people are going to sit down and
have a neutral starch and a pungent protein, a pizza
is that's what a pizza is. The beauty of that
(32:01):
universality never ceases to astonish me. And the degree to
which our humanity is prisoned, if you like, filtered through
the meals we eat, I think, is a powerful thing.
And I deeply believe Ruthy that there's a direct connection
between the pleasures we enjoy and the politics we want.
Because if there's one thing that I've spent the last
(32:23):
fifteen years writing about, liberal democracy apparently with absolutely no
success at all in altering anybody's view, because it remains
more in danger today as we sit together than at
any time in my lifetime, certainly, But the core principle
of healthy liberal democracy is pluralism. There are many menus
(32:43):
in a liberal democracy. We believe in many menus. We'd
love to go out for Indian food. We welcome immigrants
because they bring with them, whether they're Italians or bangladesh Is,
they bring with them flavors and tastes we haven't had before.
That's part of the the meaning and the magic of
a pluralistic democracy. So the pleasure we take in our
(33:07):
everyday food, the pleasure we take and the.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
Ability to have it, and the ability to have it
and we're you.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Know, I just somebody told me the other day that
the military, a huge percentage of people in the Army,
of the American Army, Navy, Air Force are in food stamps.
These people are fighting supposedly for us, and they're not
being able to eat food.
Speaker 3 (33:29):
You know, this is the prison at the same time.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
One of the great and you know, one of my
favorite books about food is Elizabeth Leeward's Sacred Food I
think it's called, And one of the points she makes
is the peasant cultures around the world have usually been
among the most creative and productive, and we get beautiful,
universal things like rice puddings.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
That we share.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
So I really believe that there's no that Not only
is there no distance between the pleasures of the table
and the necessities politics, there's a direct connection. We want
to assert universality. Everyone should eat well, and we want
to assert pluralism. Everybody should be free to eat the
menu that they desire. And that isn't just true about
(34:13):
the things we have at dinner. It's true about the
things we do in bed, the people we choose to love,
the way we choose to identify pluralism is a sign
of a healthy polity.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
We often eat food for comfort, and we have a
question that we do ask everyone at the end, which
is to say, if food is sharing, and food is
remembering your parents, going to Paris, or cooking in a
one room apartment, it's also comfort. Is there something that
you would go for particularly?
Speaker 4 (34:41):
Yes, I am, and absolutely I have one comfort menu
and it came about in a nice way. When we
were living in Paris, Luca got terribly sick with salmonella poisoning.
We didn't know what it was, and I ended up
at ten o'clock a night, having literally have them in
my arms, running to the children's hospital in the seventh
(35:01):
thro on dismall and they identified what it was and
they got him on the right antibiotics. So about midnight
we finally got him home, and you know, we had
been in a state of absolute anxiety, and we hadn't eaten,
and now we took a deep breath and I looked
around what was there? And all I had was in
the cupboard was rice and some canned beans, and I
(35:21):
had some apples i'd gotten, and I made Mark the
dinner of spicy rice and beans, with the rice treated
with some turmeric. So go orange, spicy rice and beans
with a little Rugeli mixed in that I had in
the fridge, and then a baked apple with red wine
and noir and walnuts, and it was the single best
meal we'd ever had because it was the worst day
(35:43):
of our life that was now ending decently, and from
that day to this, whenever we have a crisis or
difficulty of sun kind, and said, I'm going to let's
just have spicy rice and beans and a baked apple,
and I.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Know that that will be restored.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Yeah, thank you, Adam.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
Pleasure.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
I think
Speaker 1 (36:08):
H
Host
Ruth Rogers
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.