August 8, 2023 • 45 mins
I'm often asked if it's intimidating cooking for celebrities who come to The River Cafe. My response is that the guests who really worry me are other chefs. It's a bit like that today as I'm about to interview the interviewer, Mariella Frostrup.
I was once the subject with Mariella. She wrote in her introduction ‘Despite such eloquence, Ruthie is a disaster of an interviewee.' Intimidated. Why would I be?
Join us on today’s episode of Ruthie’s Table 4.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and
Adamized Studios.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
I'm often asked if it's intimidating cooking for celebrities who
come to the River Cafe. My response is that the
guests who really worry me are other chefs. It's a
bit like that today, as I'm about to interview the
interviewer mary Ella Frostrop, especially since I was watched the
subject for the Guardian's Lunch with mary Ella, Mariella wrote,
despite such eloquence that Ruthie is a disaster of an interview.
(00:35):
My questions get longer as her answers get shorter and
inevitably end with a question for me. She's all, don't
you think? And do you find? And have you noticed?
But I'm reminding myself that I'm not here with Marielle
the journalist, but Mariella, my good friend. When Mariella books
a table in the River Cafe, it's most often for two,
usually with her husband, human rights lawyer Jason mccute. Watching
(00:58):
her is watching someone who's diverted only by what she
is eating and drinking, as she's entirely focused to the
person she's with, sitting close, talking, smiling, laughing and listening.
Her daughter Molly, who's working here as a bar back,
told me about growing up with her mother, cooking together,
eating together, traveling together to Norway, to Greece, all over
(01:21):
the world. Now, Mary Elle and I will do the same. Intimidated,
why would I be? Don't you think? Do you find?
Do you notice?
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Oh, Ruthie, that's the best introduction I've ever had, ever,
ever in my entire life. Don't you think? How would
you like to be described? Ruth I'm sorry I said that,
but it is true.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
That's true, said, it is really sweeter, he said, you
just kept turning the questions back coming. So today I'm
just going to listen to you and not tell you,
don't you think? But before we do, first of all,
I'm so happy you're here. I love having Molly here.
She's just fantastic.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
I think she feels like she's at a West End
show every night of her life because.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
She's a bar back. So she's behind the candy.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Who did the cooking? When you were in your house, well.
Speaker 5 (02:11):
In our house, it's very it was very fifty to fifty.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Do you have Sunday lunches? Was the one meal that
you would have.
Speaker 5 (02:17):
That would be we would have Sunday lunches, and I'd
say the most important thing of our Sunday lunch was
probably the Yorchhire puddings. My dad was obsessed with them.
He'd have like fifty.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
At least your mom grew up in Norway. Do you
have a connection food connection to Norway?
Speaker 5 (02:31):
So we go to Norway sometimes on holiday because I mean,
it's so beautiful and obviously, like mum likes the fact
that we all get to see we sort of web.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
We're from and stuff.
Speaker 5 (02:41):
But I wouldn't really say that that was a sort
of dish. But that's this sort of cheese that Mum's
obsessed with, but none of us.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
Like so much.
Speaker 5 (02:50):
Yeah, it's something it's like and it's a very brown color,
and it's very smelly and sweet and weird.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
It's not for me.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
I can't understand none of my family of conversion to
all with them. I think it's probably heavily processed and
not necessarily good for you. But it is a taste
of childhood. It's called ya toast and it's a goats cheese.
But it's I'm going to make it sound disgusting. It
looks sort of caramel color.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
It's a caramel.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Broone cheese. Because the thing about Norwegian is that it's
very literal. You know, if you pass a lake and
it's got brown water, it'll be called Brune Lake. You know,
if you pass a house and it's the first one
in the road, it'll be called Who's one, And so
Brune cheese cheese called okay.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
This gives us a chance to start at the beginning,
at the very beginning, Norway. You were born now.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
Where born in Oslo in nineteen sixty two, where my
dad had moved back. He and my mother met at Edinburgh.
She was a very young art student. She was sixteen
when they first met. She started Dark College two years early.
She was an incredible talent, but this was the end
(04:00):
of the nineteen fifties. He was studying English at Edinburgh University,
as a lot of Scandinavians so they still do. But
a lot of Norwegians particularly go to Edinburgh. So they
met there and when she was eighteen she gave up
Art college and went back with him to Norway, where
I was born, and then my brother and then my
sister in fairly quick succession.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Do you remember the food that you ate when you
were in Norway. What age did you live?
Speaker 4 (04:26):
Six?
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Oh, so you might not remember.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Yeah, but you know, there's a really weird thing I
think that happens. I mean, firstly, my main food memory
of Norway is actually because at that time, in the
nineteen sixties, they really didn't have many ingredients at all.
You know, there wasn't this sort of globalization of food,
and you know, you'd get strawberries, but only in midsummer.
There was a lot of pickling fish and vegetables, salt cord,
(04:52):
which I didn't like at all, but I do remember,
and I still love it. There's an arctic charred Arctic
chard that they did. That's just I mean, I think,
one of the most delicious pieces of fish or fishes
in the world. But because of that, I think most
I do remember things like cheese. We would always have
cheese at breakfast. And strawberry jam wasn't like strawberry jam
(05:16):
that you get here in jars and things. It would
be fresh made strawberry jam. They'd make it and then
it would last until the next summer, and so you
would have a saucer full of it and you would
just spoon it onto your cheese, on your crackers, or
on your rye bread.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
And I remember things like that.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
But the thing I remember most was I think it
was difficult times, and I think it was difficult with
my parents, and they weren't very happy in Norway, very young,
and my mom had sort of given up all of
her artistic expression to go there, and suddenly she had
three children. And it was the nineteen fifties and Norway
was very very conservative then, and my father used to
(05:58):
travel a lot because heat of his work. He was
a journalist. And he came back from Tanzania, a trip
to Tanzania, and he arrived back and this will show
you how long ago it was, with a box full
of fruit. It had things we'd never seen before. It
had mangoes and these extraordinary melons and then breadfruit and
(06:22):
just all of these things, and it was like a miracle.
It was like sunshine had just it was like all
the windows had opened and sunshine just blazed into our apartment.
And I'll never forget it, you know. It was a
really really strong and striking memory from a period of
time where I don't have.
Speaker 4 (06:38):
That many memories.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
But what I was going to say about sense memory
to do with food is I don't remember much about
the food there, but when I go back, I'm like
the you know, the woman in the tin drum in
the film, I'm like her, the one who can't stop
eating fish. I'm sat there with jars of herrings. I
can't get enough sourcial. You know, I can't pickle everything,
pickled gerkins, everything.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
And did your father miss it? Do you think did
you have any of it in Ireland?
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Or oh, we used to get suits, We would get
pickled fish and jars because you couldn't get that in Ireland.
Then I'm not sure that he missed it. He was
never much of a food man, my father. He was
more of a drink man, okay, so his interest in
food was sort of minimal.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Can you remember sitting down at nels with them? And
as a child, and was for dinners and lunches.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
It was the nineteen seventies, really, and I don't think
we did a lot of sitting down for meals, And
also because it was always complicated, they split up when
I was eight, so I think those sort of family
moments were very few and far between, which is probably
why Jason and I have been so kind of committed
to creating them to appoint where my children are like.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Oh no, not Sunday lunch please.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
But as you grew up in Ireland, so what was
it like growing up? You were quite poor? You said
that you had very little money.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
Yeah, and so food.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
You know, in terms of, you know, defining childhood food memories,
they tend to be not very.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
Not very warm and cozy ones.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
I mean the awful, awful memory ones when we really
had run out of food. And my brother, who was
always the one who tried to beat emmolient, he is
still the kindest man you'll meet, and he was trying
to make light of the fact that there literally was
nothing in the cupboard, and he was like, look, look
I've got spaghetti and I've got golden syrup.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
It'll be delicious.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
So you wouldn't have he wasn't going to have the
golden syrup. After the spaghetti he made it for us
with the golden syrup.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Was one of the most disgusting combinations I've ever come across.
Did you say that at the time, No, No, we
grained him and yeah, this is good lovely sugar, sugar
and starch I can have.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
It's like rice pudding. I suppose how long did you
live in Ireland.
Speaker 4 (08:59):
For till I was sixteen?
Speaker 2 (09:01):
So your father died?
Speaker 3 (09:03):
He died when I was fifteen, he was forty six.
He had a heart attack for years seventy eight, and
then I moved to London in seventy nine.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
So when you came to after the tragedy of your
father's death, is that when you moved from Ireland right
after that? The whole all three of you and your mom?
Speaker 4 (09:23):
No, no me?
Speaker 2 (09:24):
What by yourself? Yeah? How old were you?
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Well, I'd already left home. I left home when I
was fifteen. I lived with my mom for quite a while,
but my stepfather and I didn't get on and he
was not nice, okay, And so then I went to
live with my father, but that was very difficult because
he was by then a sort of fully fledged alcoholic,
and when my stepmother left him with the two children
(09:50):
that they'd had, and I ended up living with him
on my own and trying to go to school and
kind of manage what was really a fast deteriorating situation.
And he and I were living in some rented house
in the far reaches of Dublin, and i'd get home
from school and there would just be stuff piled in
(10:11):
the in the kitchen and everything, and so I decided
I had to leave. But going back to my mother's
wasn't really an option. So a very nice pair of
lesbian sisters, not a couple, but they said I could
rent a room from them. I'd met them working in
a restaurant in Dublin called the Blackboard where I used
(10:33):
to work at weekends.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
And there as.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
A waitress, yeah, and or a waiter as we say now,
And that was for too, A lovely gay couple called
Peter and Melvin, who really looked after me very well,
because I mean, what kind of a state I must
have been in? No idea, but apparently I was a
very good waitress, I can imagine.
Speaker 4 (10:51):
I loved it. It was my favorite jodea.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
What did you love about it?
Speaker 3 (10:54):
I loved the interaction, and I loved that it made
me feel quite efficient, and I loved the whole I
think the theater Robert actually really drama. Yeah, And I
just used to love get But I think maybe I
also just loved getting to work because it was it was.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Spike, you were still going to school but working.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
When I first started working there, and then I worked
there full time for about four months, and then a
friend of mine gave me a job in his recording
studio and so I did that until I left for London.
In Dublin, yeah, that's when I met, you know, all
of the people that we have in common. I recorded
U two's first demo tapes when I was, yeah, fifteen
(11:36):
and he was seventeen.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
He hates it when I remind him that he's older.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
But yeah, that was all when I was working at
Keystone Studios. But after my father died, Dublin started feeling
I don't know. I think my father got off at
a job at the Sunday Times, probably about four years
before he died, and I think in my head that
lodged as that would have been the moment that he
could have changed his life. That was the pivotal moment
(12:04):
where things could have changed for the better, and he
didn't take the job. And I think he didn't take
the job because he was afraid and because he was
an alcoholic, and so I think for me that always
represented this sort of golden light that you could you
could fly towards. And so after he died, I became
quite resolute about getting out, So I took the ferry
(12:27):
from dune Leary with my friend.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Oh you had another friend.
Speaker 4 (12:31):
She didn't know. She just had an address for us.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
There was a she had some Irish friends who were
living in a squat or friends of friends who were
living in a squat in Stoneleigh Street in West London,
actually not very far from here, off Latimer Road. And
we arrived there on a bright summer sunny morning and
were greeted at the door by just this crowd of
Irish men mostly, And I was like, married, what was
(12:56):
the point in coming all the way here if we're
just going to live with the whole house full of
Irish people. But they were incredible to us and made
they were so hospitable. Sixteen sixteen, she's eighteen, and they
gave us a room that there was already two of
them living in, but we were allowed to share it.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
I mean, there were.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Amazing days, you know, I think it was It was
a really great time to be young. You know, there
was huge adversity, but at the same time life just
felt full of possibility and you could afford to rent
places for cheap. You know. We were only in the
squad for about three months, and then I got a
job at Blushes on the King's Road. I don't know
if it's still There was a wine bar and it
(13:36):
used to be so amazing on a Saturday. Then you
know Bob Geldof and Paula because they live right around
the corner from and they used to arrive on a
Saturday morning at about eleven o'clock at the tube station
on the King's Road and then they would promenade up
the King's Road and they would be followed by this
sort of retinue of It was like a medieval you know.
(13:57):
It was like Henry the Eighth that arrived and all
these people would following along in their wake. And again
it was like theater watching, you know, and it was
punk and it was just incredible and exciting.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
Do you remember what you ate at the time? Would
you would you go to restaurants or would you cook
at home? Or would you I'd cook at home.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
I'd cook at home.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
Food wasn't great in London then, you know, it wasn't
and I didn't really care so much. I mean, I
was so obsessed with just survival and getting on, survival
and getting on. I mean, it was the nineteen seventies,
it was quite a bit of sort of beef Burgignon
and you know, black Forest ghetto, nothing to write home about.
Everyone was eating spaghetti bolonnaise because that was very exotic
(14:39):
and Italian, but not.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
Baudelais Nouver. That was always quite exciting.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Yeah, I remember that through the eighties, but not so
much the food really.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Yeah, so you're you're a sixteen year old in London,
You're working in blushes, you're living in the Irish house,
You're father has just died, and and you have a vision.
Did you know what you did? You know you wanted
to be the writer or the journalist or did you
did you go back to school? So you left school
at fifteen?
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Yeah, wow, I did my you know, the equivalent of
GCSEs And then yeah, it just wasn't possible. And for
a while I thought I'll go back to school, and
then I just realized that that wasn't going to happen.
And then I didn't really have a dream, you know,
because it was very much about survival really, and it
(15:37):
was day to day and I think I was just
very lucky, you know, I had lots.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
I think you probably must have been fantastic kid. Just
to have that courage and to you know that.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
They had courage when you're that age, don't you. I
think maybe because you don't know you know, now I
think I'm much less brave than I was when I
was sixteen years old or eighteen years old, because now
you have the benefit of or not of having, mean
what the world can do risk for risk and the
risk and the jeopardy, whereas then it's just about you know, possibility,
(16:09):
isn't it. And I felt possibility in London, you know
that energized me and just kept me going, you know,
I mean it was it wasn't of course, it wasn't easy,
you know. And I missed my dad so badly, you know,
because I think as a daughter, when you lose your
father at that age, you kind of deify them, and
(16:32):
so I'd elevated him to this impossible.
Speaker 4 (16:34):
Kind of Olympian height.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
And so I spent an awful lot of my late
teens in early twenties, you know, finding really broken men
and trying to fix them because I felt guilty that
I hadn't fixed my dad. And I really think it
took me till my thirties really to escape from the
kind of tyranny of his perfection, which you know and
(17:00):
realize who he was, you know, which doesn't make me
love him any less, but it certainly helped to create
a more functional life for myself.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
And did you drink? It was the fact that he
died of sort of alcohol?
Speaker 4 (17:15):
No, I think I drank, but I don't think.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
I mean, I've never I'm not a very addictive apart
from cigarettes, which I was hopelessly addicted to for sort
of all of my twenties and early thirties, which is
mad because my father died of a heart attack and
was chainsmoker. But drink, I mean, you know, it was
the nineteen eighties. I was in the music business. I
had a lot of fun then, Yes, because the next
(17:37):
thing I did was get a job at a record
company because of the studio that I'd worked in in Ireland.
You know, it was always people who you'd met who
then would introduce you to somebody else, and you know,
sometimes you'd get a little chink of an opportunity and
you would grab that and then you would and the
journalism and the television only happened again just by accident,
(17:58):
you know, I worked for this record company, worked with
Bob Geldof. I worked on band aid and live Aid,
and he stole my desk to sort out band Aid
from and you know, I was there on the day
when we all went to that studio in West London
and all of those people. It was a kind of amazing,
magical time. Then I set up my own little PR company.
(18:19):
But at the same time they were looking for a
TV presenter for a music program that Channel four were making,
and it was going to be all world music. And
that was what was really exciting about it to me
because it was my father always used to bring back
amazing records from Africa, Miriam mckeeba and just incredible music,
(18:41):
and so I was really excited to get involved in it,
and they gave me the job.
Speaker 4 (18:45):
I was appalling.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
I mean, someone sent me like a YouTube clip the
other day, you know how everything lives on.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
YouTube of me presenting.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Yeah, it was called Big World and I spoke in
a monotone like that, and I was clear, just shit scared,
really self to do that. But but so I did
that recovery years and then it.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Just did you have a domestic life as well? Did
you live with anybody and have to think about a
kitchen or food or bringing shopping home or did you
just basically food was smoked and.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
Smoked and drag.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
But I did get married when I was eighteen to
another lost soul who's a wonderful and old friend of
mine now called Richard Jobson, who was the lead singer
in this punk band called the Skids.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Yeah Skids, great.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
Yeah, into the valley working for the Yankee dollar, come on.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Anywhere.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
But Richard was a really interesting and unusual character. He
was another lost kid. He's left home at sixteen. He had,
you know, huge intellectual aspirations, many of which he went
on to realize a huge determination. And I think we
sort of fell together out of loneliness and we tried,
you know, we gave it our best shot for two kids,
(20:07):
and we stayed together till I was twenty one.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Wow, so young.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
So we had a domestic life then and very rudimentary.
I used to make things like grilled pork chops with
mustard on them, and a lot of potatoes, spaghetti, bolinnaise.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Cookbooks do you remember using.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
I had the Constant Spry cookbook that my mum had
given me because that was sort of her bible. So
she did yeah, she used to bake more than cook.
I mean, when I think about food that my mum made,
she used to make incredible gingerbread. She did make a
mean spaghetti. Bolonnaise she used to make. She made really
(20:48):
good normal food. You know, she'd make a great shepherds.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Part did she come from. She came from an English family.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
She's half Scottish, half English Scottish. She was Scottish really,
but she learned, you know, we used to.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
She used to.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
She taught me how to make love scass, which is
a it's a very rudimentary Norwegian stew, which is beef
and potatoes but cubed very small and cooked in their
own broth for quite a long period of time. And
she used to make these things called milkering, which are
that's sort of yogurts basically that Norwegians used to make.
(21:26):
And it was very weird because both she and my
stepmother used to make these yogurts. Once I left her
house and went went to live with my dad, every
cupboard you opened would have yogurt. You know.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Breeding was your father's second wife.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
She wasn't.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
They weren't married, but I mean, no, she was Irish,
but I think had an influence.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
No, they all wanted to impress them.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
He had this thing, you know, which clearly worked for
every woman in his life. And I don't think my
mum and my stepmother were the only ones either.
Speaker 4 (22:00):
So yeah, he has a thing of.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Cooking for you know, seduction as well, something that people
can remember. She can you remember meal where you wanted
to impress somebody and you cooked.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
I've never cooked when I wanted to impress.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Well, you're joined by Judy Dad, she said the same thing.
He might be came down and he said something to
her like you know. She said, this agent is coming,
so I'm going to make him the best omelet. She
tried to figure out how to make the best omelet
and he ate it and she was looking and he said,
I think you should stick to acting or something like that.
(22:41):
Right now, I'm going to ask you your shares of
all the recipes that we have in all our books.
You said that you wanted to make spaghetti bongolay, So
would you like to read the recipe for spaghetti vongolai.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
I will read the recipe for you. Four tablespoons of
extra virgin olive oil, four clothes of garlic finally chopped,
three dried red chilies crumbled, three kilos of small clams,
a bunch of flat leaf parsley finally chopped, and then
brackets divided. Talk about organization, sea salt and freshly ground
(23:13):
black pepper. Four hundred grams of spaghetti, one lemon quartered
fairly precise. I think only listeners will realize that serves four.
You heat the oil in a large frying pan over
a medium heat, Add the garlic, and fry over a
medium heat for one minute until just beginning to brown.
Speaker 4 (23:33):
That's where I go wrong. Often did you just.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Have bigger pieces of garlic and then you can take
them out or just cook it slowly? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (23:40):
Maybe add the crumbled chilies, clams, and two tablespoons of water.
Cover and fry over a high heat for about five
minutes until all the clams open, discarding any that don't.
Add half the parsley to the clams. Season with salt
and pepper. Drain the spaghetti and add to the clams.
(24:00):
Serve with the remaining parsley and the lemon quarters.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
And invade it with Carlota. Hi, I'm carloying with shap
at the River Cafe.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
So I'm going to start sweating off the garlic with
Passley sports, so it's sweating rather than frying. I think
that's the important thing exactly.
Speaker 4 (24:18):
Yeah. Now a bit of chili, now, flick of chili.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
Dried chili, dry chili, yes, always dried chili. So that's
starting to cry off.
Speaker 4 (24:27):
And at this stage I'm going to add the clams.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
You so you've scrubbed that, you've done all the hard
work with them, because that is the boring thing, isn't it?
And these clams are from where because the tastiest clams
I think comes from the Bay of Naples, and I
think it's far.
Speaker 4 (24:42):
It's a bit rubby, are they sorry?
Speaker 2 (24:46):
So this.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
This point we just want to get a little bit
more heaty to the plan and then I'm going to
so usually here we use.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
Savee to put the bongola in.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
Nice to sort of drink it and deleting the dish
as well. It's multi purpose. You can overcook the clams
as well, can't you. So what's too long?
Speaker 4 (25:09):
You want to catch them just as they're opening up?
Speaker 3 (25:13):
And will they if you stop the heat when they're
opening up? Will they keep opening up the way you
want them to?
Speaker 4 (25:22):
So they say they're starting to oisten up.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
So I'm going to finish and the start you wore
to the wine and the oils are going to come
together and sticking the saws.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
So listening, I bet you can. She's got a brilliant
hand tipping technique.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
You need to finish it with parsley freshness.
Speaker 4 (25:50):
So there we have it. Oh my god, the most
spectacular thing. And now I feel confident my love it.
Thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Related well, first of all, why did you choose us?
Speaker 3 (26:06):
It's entirely my favorite dish, mussels and clams. And there
was a period in my childhood when we lived on
the west coast of Ireland in Connemara, and it was
on one of my mother's kind of escapes from realities,
which used to happen quite often, and we went to
live there for six months and we were very poor,
and for about a three month period we just ate
(26:29):
potatoes that we could dig up and mussels which we
picked from the rocks. And you'd think that actually that
would have kind of knocked any desire to eat them
ever again out of me. But I think there was
a sort of four or five year hiatus, maybe a
bit longer. I think probably till I first came to London,
and then I re embraced them. And then I used
to go to Naples with my best friend and we
(26:51):
used to have spaghetti with Cottsen Fassolaris from the Bay
of Naples, and I mean ever since then. And then
Molly weirdly, my daughter, from when she was a toddler,
her absolute favorite thing was muscles and clams, and it's
quite odd to see a little toddler there kind of
throwing the shells over a children and digging into a
(27:14):
plate of seafood. So I think many influencers have combined
to make it my favorite, but I think it's really
difficult to make because it's so simple.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
There's no hiding.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
It is there, there's no hiding, and I really loved that.
I love food like that. I don't really like very
complicated food, you know, sort of very French high end.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
Never really enjoyed it much much.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
Prefer you know, really great fresh ingredients and a simple recipe,
which is probably why I've been found here for the
last you know, I used to see. I first came
to the River Cafe when you first opened virtually in
the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Yeah, nineteen eighty seven reopened and when we were only
opened for lunch. Do you remember we.
Speaker 4 (27:54):
Were only opened for lunch.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
I think when I first started coming and used to
have a wine from Antsi of Venice called I obviously
wasn't paying the bills then that was the beginning of
my career. But I used to come with a friend
and we used to have this wine called Where Dreams.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Yeah, that label wasn't it.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
It was amazing And even then this felt like the
most glamorous place on earth because it felt decadent in
all the best ways. And actually here was one of
the first places, and I know it's on a different
level from the pub on Grafton Street or whatever, it
was one of the first places where I really felt
(28:34):
that sort of bubble of excitement and conversation that you
get on a Friday night in a pub in Dublin
to be passionate about something, and food is something you
can be really passionate about. And I mean with my
I was not a great sort of domestic but actually
to go through a long period where I had a
house in Sussex that I used to rent with this
couple friends of mine, Nicola and Helena.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
They're still my friends and we used to cook together.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Yeah, and they were some of the happiest years of
my life, you know, cooking together every weekend. And I
actually learned a lot that Nikola was a particularly good
cold cook, and they were very precise, even things like
a I remember teaching me to make a basil omelet.
But it's a bit like the wonga lay. It's only
about the ingredients because it's so yeah yeah, and you
(29:23):
have to you know, and that I think I just
loved the sort of satisfaction that comes from that.
Speaker 4 (29:28):
But then when you have kids, Yeah, so what was
that like? Well, I loved cooking.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Going back to marrying Jason. Did he grow up on
a domestic house where meal and like yours or was
it the same?
Speaker 4 (29:39):
No, very unlike mine.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
His mum did everything and she was in she's a
really good cook. She still is, you know, I mean,
very English, quite sort of nineteen seventies. She had one
of those trolleys that's hot that keeps things hot, and
she would wheel it in, sit by the table and
you know, the plate to be in they're warming and
the food lots of sort of castle roles and pop
ghosts and things like that. But she's a really good
(30:03):
cook and it always looks perfect. She's a good baker
as well. And Jason is probably the better cook in
our house. He loves, absolutely loves cooking, and I feel
like I loved it during those years in Sussex, and
I loved the early days of cooking for my kids.
But then something happened when they just make faces about
(30:25):
the food you cooked and never like it, and it
became such a negotiation in the house that I kind
of lost the heart of it. I mean, now I'm back,
but Jason sort of took over in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
But do you eat really healthy? It's not consciously, it's
like the food that you like.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
It's the food that I like. I love fresh things,
I love, you know. One of the things that gives
me huge satisfaction is we've got a garden which during
the spring period of the year is just absolutely wall
to all wild garlic. It can almost be noxious the smell,
and I just love to gather it. And I make
pesto in industrial quantities.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Good. Oh, I have to. And when you go when
you go to Greece, do you cook there?
Speaker 4 (31:04):
Yeah, we go to Greece a lot.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
I get like a craving for I used to go
to Greece from the age of sixteen, and so you know,
Greek islands, you get there, the smell, the pine, the
Greek salad.
Speaker 4 (31:17):
Again, it's everything simple. I just love it. I just
love it.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
And so actually, you know there, we tend to eat
out quite a lot, but we'll make, you know, a
big lunch with Greek saladin. We'll make some dips and things,
and you know, we might get some.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
Fish and grill it. You know, we keep it very simple, but.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
You have a lot of friends over it. You do, like,
do you prefer going to people's houses or having them
come to you or do you like them?
Speaker 3 (31:41):
I prefer going to people's houses because then I don't
have to clear up. Jason prefers having people over because
I clear up after him and he loves cooking. But no,
we do have people over a lot, and there's nothing there.
I don't think there's anything nicer than a table full
of people and they're all eating and talking. And you know,
I tend to make big stews and things that I
(32:04):
don't have to do a lot of cook Our kitchen
is all open, like yeah, of yours. And when people
talk to me when I'm cooking, I can't cope with it.
I can't concentrate. So I have to make things that
are already and I love slow cook things and osubuko
and things like that.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
And yeah, so how do you combine working with cooking?
You know, the chad or how did you bring up children?
And for through your career and you know, I have
a home life. Did you brush from one thing to another?
Did you have was it hard? Did you just do it?
Do you think?
Speaker 3 (32:36):
I think same as every woman just you know, I mean,
it's so much every woman's experience these days, isn't it.
And it's kind of the bit that wasn't factored into
our great desire for you know, equality and independence. So
I think it's really hard. You know, it was less
hard for me because I had, you know, enough money
to have help. But I think it's a really difficult thing.
(32:59):
And I think, you know, for most women, it's a
burden of responsibility that you just you perform it because
you don't have a choice.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
You feel a kind of choice, you know, it is
really terry. I think also, as you say, it's economic,
you know, so when people say, oh, you know, there
are all these kids who are growing up on Peter McDonald's.
But the fact is that if you have a night
job and you have a choice, I often think I
like to think that maybe the mother has a choice
of doing homework with her kids or cooking a fresh
meal for them, maybe cut you know, And I think that's.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
I think if you've done a pretty hard graph job
that isn't based on your passion or any of the
luxuries that that you know, some of us have. If
you've done a hard graph job all day and then
you get home and you've got hungry, grumpy kids, I
don't think you want to sit down and start creating
a meal. I mean, for all the sense of you know,
holistic happiness it might offer, I don't think you're in
(33:54):
a place to actually think about or do that.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
You know. Yeah, you know we saw in lockdown when
kids didn't go for you know, the school, they didn't
have their one meal the day. And I was, you know,
talking to Jamie the other day about you know, the
goal now is to make lunches so nutritious, because you know,
that's the only meal the kid's going to have.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
But we should have free school meals, I mean universally
across the nation, you know, And one of the first
things we need to do is recognize that there's real
hunger in this country and address it. And the idea
that you know, we can sit around and have our
amazing meals and somewhere else, just down the road, there's
a kid who isn't getting separate. It makes me feel
(34:38):
physically sick, and I just don't understand why we can't
address it, you know. I mean, I spent my whole
childhood worried about things like food, and I know, you know,
I kind of know the smell of poverty, and I'm
frightened to death of it, you know. And I've run
so far in the opposite director, but I'm still, you know,
(35:01):
rubbish at kind of handling it because it's a fear.
It's a deep, deep rooted fear, and we're bringing up,
you know, a whole generation of kids, so experiencing that.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
When you're working your column, when you're writing on your campaigns,
on your books.
Speaker 4 (35:28):
Do you eat well?
Speaker 3 (35:30):
You Since I started my radio show at the times,
I've lost a lot of weight. I mean not a lot,
but I've definitely got thinner, not intentionally, but because it's
a lunchtime show, and lunch is my favorite meal. Like
I can eat like a horse at lunchtime.
Speaker 4 (35:46):
I love it.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
I can still sleep at night, you know, because once
your menopausal and postmenopause, sleep can become a bit of
a challenge. And so lunch is my favorite meal. And
four days a week I can't have lunch, and I
just don't eat until after I finished my show, so
I end up having maybe one and a half meals
a day. You know, I have supper, but I have
(36:07):
a breakfast tea to you know, kids high tea suffer.
I always eat about six thirty or seven. I don't
really like breakfast very At weekends, I have breakfast. I
make breakfast for the kids at the weekend. I love
doing that. You know, it makes you feel. There's so
few moments as a parent, I think where you feel
I've got this, yeah, you know, and making them breakfast
(36:27):
is one of them, you know, whether it's banana pancakes
or scrambled eggs and bacon or whatever avocado on toast.
I mean, it's ridiculous. My children in are seventeen and eighteen,
and they still at the weekends will come in and
kind of go, what's for breakfast?
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Mum? Yeah, but that will never stop.
Speaker 4 (36:43):
I hope it doesn't because it makes me feel useful.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
I think going home and being fed, and I think,
you know, we all grew up with kind of role models.
I certainly, you know, did, and I see myself sort
of acting. My mother was incredibly child oriented. You know,
she never blamed a child, never told off a child.
The child was always right, oh my. You know, we
had a lot of way that we kind of grew up.
(37:08):
But I think for somebody who didn't grow up with
that and then to be the way they are, it's like,
you know, it's so inspiring to me because it's you know,
so that you've come from. Maybe you know, your father's
but you had love.
Speaker 4 (37:22):
You know, I had love, you know what.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
And I always think about this because you know, they
say that basically we shape our children by the time
they're five or six. And I think I was really
lucky because the one thing that they were really good
at was they made me feel very loved. And once
you have that, it gives you a confidence to step
out into the world and you know, stick your toe
(37:45):
in the water and see what's out there, and I think,
you know, without that, that's when the real damage sets in.
And so all of the other things were pretty survivable.
But I think without that early love and we were definitely,
you know, my mum was in a amazing particularly when
we were little before things got difficult.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
But I'm very injured.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
I have to ask you one question, which is were
you interested in food even when you were a teenager
and in your twenties or was it your mother in
law that inspired you really with food?
Speaker 2 (38:16):
I would say that my mother was here, we go,
see what was it? Don't you think? Don't you find there?
We go? Yeah, the stories that my father was a
doctor and my mother was a librarian, and I think
they both came they were immigrants, their families were. They
were born in the Lower East Side and then you
(38:38):
know Jewish immigrants who came Ellis Island all that, and
I think that for them the whole thing was education,
whereas there my grandparents were very focused on food. I
think both my mother was trying to get it. She
went back to college when we were like five or
six to be a librarian, and my father was, you know,
trying to make it as a doctor. And I think
(38:59):
that we always ate fresh food. We always ate well,
we sat around you know that thing I was sitting
around the table. But probably I romanticize it. Probably the
food we had my sister is much more scathing. But
I sort of I think that the conversation was more
important than than what we ate.
Speaker 4 (39:19):
But we ate well.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
We never had dilvered or package. No, no, we didn't
have to get syrup for me. It all opened up
when I did come to Europe, going to Italy and
then living in Paris as we did. That was the
kind of food, you know, inspiration.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
But I think there's something about Italian food though as well,
because most of it, maybe you know, some of it's complicated,
but most of it is about fresh ingredients and simplicity,
and it's very seductive. You know. I became interested in food,
as I said to you, when when I used to
go and stay with with my friend Natalie, you know,
because this was amazing food, Natalie from Naples. It was
(40:00):
performance food. It was just amazingly good food. And you know,
they wouldn't have beans on toast at four o'clock in
the morning, as I said, they would make a pasta. Yeah,
you know, and actually you know, a lot of Italian
men can cook as well, which you know, still find
really impressive. You know, I'm lucky because I married a
man who can cook. But the number of my friends
who sort of look at Jason wistfully and go oh, yesh,
(40:21):
mine could do that exactly.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
So we've talked about the work, we've talked about the children,
we've talked about you know, the husband who cooks. Maybe
we should wind up on the comfort food and ask
you if food is is sharing and love and memories.
Certainly memories. Your memories are about food.
Speaker 4 (40:40):
It's about food and memory.
Speaker 3 (40:42):
And I also think that our emotional lives are often
channeled through food. So when food isn't good, I mean
it is a bit like like water for chocolate or whatever.
You know, when when food isn't good, it's because other
things aren't good. And that's why, you know, the bad
meals are as almost defining memories as the good meals,
you know. And for me sitting down at the table
(41:05):
and having something simple and delicious with my kids sitting
opposite me and my husband sitting at the table, it
does feel in some ways, not to be too saccharin
about it, but like a sort of dream come true,
and and the table is the place where that theater
of it plays out. And I look around and think, gosh,
(41:26):
you know, un lucky I got this.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
Yeah, and we are. And do you have a comfort
food that you go to when you that's what you needed?
Speaker 3 (41:36):
Well, all the way through my twenties, I used to
go and stay with my best friend Natalie in Maples.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
I'm getting I'm getting friend jealous in here.
Speaker 3 (41:46):
I've got two best friends. Okay, that's best friends, but
that's really you know. I've known them since I was
eighteen years and we used to cook and we used
to cook it at four o'clock in the morning when
we came back from the nightclub.
Speaker 4 (42:04):
In Carpery where we used to go.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
We used to cook it in the middle of the
afternoon if we got peckish. We used to cook it
if one of us was sobbing, you know. And so
in many ways that still is my sort of go
to comfort food. But the other thing I've learned to
cook quite recently is this delicious I call it porridge bread.
It is an Irish recipe and it is very much
(42:26):
porridge bread because it's just made with oats and seeds,
and live yogurt and a spoon of baking powder, and
it's incredibly easy to make, foolproof, no yeast, no flour,
and no flour, and it's so delicious. Bread well, it's
like soda bread. It's like the wheat and bread. It's
very like that, which is also another sort of comfort food.
(42:49):
So you take all these grains and the oats and
the yogurt and the baking powder, and you just put
it all in a bowl, mix it all together, put
it into a loaf tin in in baking paper, you know,
and you have to cook it for about fifty minutes altogether,
called forty minutes one side, and then tip it over.
(43:09):
It's rock hard on the outside. It's absolutely moist and
delicious on the inside. And that with a thick layer
of butter.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
Okay, I love butter, Yeah, I love butter. I love butter.
Richard Richard's mother used to say that butter was the
best cheese, and she was a Northern Italian. But if
you think about butter like a cheese, then you can
have that thick piece with a little thin bit of bread,
you know.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Yeah, yeah, you just want the car for the butter,
isn't it I think that's and that's very irish as well.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
Yeah. True. And we're going to go right now into
the River Cafe and you're going to meet a friend
and have dinner, aren't you. I am.
Speaker 4 (43:43):
I'm so excited.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
So's nice. Who are you having dinner with tonight? Then
go on, I can allow to ask that question, you can.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
It's not my husband, for change, I have a gentleman guest. No,
I'm having dinner with your friend and mine. Danny his
timeh fabulous and he's about to do my podcast Books
to Live By, And I'm so excited to talk to
him because you know he's going to pick his the
five books that have shaped his life in many ways.
Speaker 4 (44:12):
Books, it's the literary companion to this one.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
And food and reading. Yes see, Danny, And.
Speaker 3 (44:18):
Thank you Mary, thank you, pleasure, thank you so much
for having me.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
The River Cafe Lookbook is now available in bookshops and online.
It has over one hundred recipes, beautifully illustrated with photographs
from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The book has fifty
delicious and easy to prepare recipes, including a host of
River Cafe classics that have been specially adapted for new cooks.
(44:47):
The River Cafe lookbook recipes for cooks of all ages.
Ruthie's Table four is a production of iHeartRadio and Adami Studios.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and
Adamized Studios.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
I'm often asked if it's intimidating cooking for celebrities who
come to the River Cafe. My response is that the
guests who really worry me are other chefs. It's a
bit like that today, as I'm about to interview the
interviewer mary Ella Frostrop, especially since I was watched the
subject for the Guardian's Lunch with mary Ella, Mariella wrote,
despite such eloquence that Ruthie is a disaster of an interview.
(00:35):
My questions get longer as her answers get shorter and
inevitably end with a question for me. She's all, don't
you think? And do you find? And have you noticed?
But I'm reminding myself that I'm not here with Marielle
the journalist, but Mariella, my good friend. When Mariella books
a table in the River Cafe, it's most often for two,
usually with her husband, human rights lawyer Jason mccute. Watching
(00:58):
her is watching someone who's diverted only by what she
is eating and drinking, as she's entirely focused to the
person she's with, sitting close, talking, smiling, laughing and listening.
Her daughter Molly, who's working here as a bar back,
told me about growing up with her mother, cooking together,
eating together, traveling together to Norway, to Greece, all over
(01:21):
the world. Now, Mary Elle and I will do the same. Intimidated,
why would I be? Don't you think? Do you find?
Do you notice?
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Oh, Ruthie, that's the best introduction I've ever had, ever,
ever in my entire life. Don't you think? How would
you like to be described? Ruth I'm sorry I said that,
but it is true.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
That's true, said, it is really sweeter, he said, you
just kept turning the questions back coming. So today I'm
just going to listen to you and not tell you,
don't you think? But before we do, first of all,
I'm so happy you're here. I love having Molly here.
She's just fantastic.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
I think she feels like she's at a West End
show every night of her life because.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
She's a bar back. So she's behind the candy.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Who did the cooking? When you were in your house, well.
Speaker 5 (02:11):
In our house, it's very it was very fifty to fifty.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Do you have Sunday lunches? Was the one meal that
you would have.
Speaker 5 (02:17):
That would be we would have Sunday lunches, and I'd
say the most important thing of our Sunday lunch was
probably the Yorchhire puddings. My dad was obsessed with them.
He'd have like fifty.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
At least your mom grew up in Norway. Do you
have a connection food connection to Norway?
Speaker 5 (02:31):
So we go to Norway sometimes on holiday because I mean,
it's so beautiful and obviously, like mum likes the fact
that we all get to see we sort of web.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
We're from and stuff.
Speaker 5 (02:41):
But I wouldn't really say that that was a sort
of dish. But that's this sort of cheese that Mum's
obsessed with, but none of us.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
Like so much.
Speaker 5 (02:50):
Yeah, it's something it's like and it's a very brown color,
and it's very smelly and sweet and weird.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
It's not for me.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
I can't understand none of my family of conversion to
all with them. I think it's probably heavily processed and
not necessarily good for you. But it is a taste
of childhood. It's called ya toast and it's a goats cheese.
But it's I'm going to make it sound disgusting. It
looks sort of caramel color.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
It's a caramel.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Broone cheese. Because the thing about Norwegian is that it's
very literal. You know, if you pass a lake and
it's got brown water, it'll be called Brune Lake. You know,
if you pass a house and it's the first one
in the road, it'll be called Who's one, And so
Brune cheese cheese called okay.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
This gives us a chance to start at the beginning,
at the very beginning, Norway. You were born now.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
Where born in Oslo in nineteen sixty two, where my
dad had moved back. He and my mother met at Edinburgh.
She was a very young art student. She was sixteen
when they first met. She started Dark College two years early.
She was an incredible talent, but this was the end
(04:00):
of the nineteen fifties. He was studying English at Edinburgh University,
as a lot of Scandinavians so they still do. But
a lot of Norwegians particularly go to Edinburgh. So they
met there and when she was eighteen she gave up
Art college and went back with him to Norway, where
I was born, and then my brother and then my
sister in fairly quick succession.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Do you remember the food that you ate when you
were in Norway. What age did you live?
Speaker 4 (04:26):
Six?
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Oh, so you might not remember.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Yeah, but you know, there's a really weird thing I
think that happens. I mean, firstly, my main food memory
of Norway is actually because at that time, in the
nineteen sixties, they really didn't have many ingredients at all.
You know, there wasn't this sort of globalization of food,
and you know, you'd get strawberries, but only in midsummer.
There was a lot of pickling fish and vegetables, salt cord,
(04:52):
which I didn't like at all, but I do remember,
and I still love it. There's an arctic charred Arctic
chard that they did. That's just I mean, I think,
one of the most delicious pieces of fish or fishes
in the world. But because of that, I think most
I do remember things like cheese. We would always have
cheese at breakfast. And strawberry jam wasn't like strawberry jam
(05:16):
that you get here in jars and things. It would
be fresh made strawberry jam. They'd make it and then
it would last until the next summer, and so you
would have a saucer full of it and you would
just spoon it onto your cheese, on your crackers, or
on your rye bread.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
And I remember things like that.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
But the thing I remember most was I think it
was difficult times, and I think it was difficult with
my parents, and they weren't very happy in Norway, very young,
and my mom had sort of given up all of
her artistic expression to go there, and suddenly she had
three children. And it was the nineteen fifties and Norway
was very very conservative then, and my father used to
(05:58):
travel a lot because heat of his work. He was
a journalist. And he came back from Tanzania, a trip
to Tanzania, and he arrived back and this will show
you how long ago it was, with a box full
of fruit. It had things we'd never seen before. It
had mangoes and these extraordinary melons and then breadfruit and
(06:22):
just all of these things, and it was like a miracle.
It was like sunshine had just it was like all
the windows had opened and sunshine just blazed into our apartment.
And I'll never forget it, you know. It was a
really really strong and striking memory from a period of
time where I don't have.
Speaker 4 (06:38):
That many memories.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
But what I was going to say about sense memory
to do with food is I don't remember much about
the food there, but when I go back, I'm like
the you know, the woman in the tin drum in
the film, I'm like her, the one who can't stop
eating fish. I'm sat there with jars of herrings. I
can't get enough sourcial. You know, I can't pickle everything,
pickled gerkins, everything.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
And did your father miss it? Do you think did
you have any of it in Ireland?
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Or oh, we used to get suits, We would get
pickled fish and jars because you couldn't get that in Ireland.
Then I'm not sure that he missed it. He was
never much of a food man, my father. He was
more of a drink man, okay, so his interest in
food was sort of minimal.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Can you remember sitting down at nels with them? And
as a child, and was for dinners and lunches.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
It was the nineteen seventies, really, and I don't think
we did a lot of sitting down for meals, And
also because it was always complicated, they split up when
I was eight, so I think those sort of family
moments were very few and far between, which is probably
why Jason and I have been so kind of committed
to creating them to appoint where my children are like.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Oh no, not Sunday lunch please.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
But as you grew up in Ireland, so what was
it like growing up? You were quite poor? You said
that you had very little money.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
Yeah, and so food.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
You know, in terms of, you know, defining childhood food memories,
they tend to be not very.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
Not very warm and cozy ones.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
I mean the awful, awful memory ones when we really
had run out of food. And my brother, who was
always the one who tried to beat emmolient, he is
still the kindest man you'll meet, and he was trying
to make light of the fact that there literally was
nothing in the cupboard, and he was like, look, look
I've got spaghetti and I've got golden syrup.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
It'll be delicious.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
So you wouldn't have he wasn't going to have the
golden syrup. After the spaghetti he made it for us
with the golden syrup.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Was one of the most disgusting combinations I've ever come across.
Did you say that at the time, No, No, we
grained him and yeah, this is good lovely sugar, sugar
and starch I can have.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
It's like rice pudding. I suppose how long did you
live in Ireland.
Speaker 4 (08:59):
For till I was sixteen?
Speaker 2 (09:01):
So your father died?
Speaker 3 (09:03):
He died when I was fifteen, he was forty six.
He had a heart attack for years seventy eight, and
then I moved to London in seventy nine.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
So when you came to after the tragedy of your
father's death, is that when you moved from Ireland right
after that? The whole all three of you and your mom?
Speaker 4 (09:23):
No, no me?
Speaker 2 (09:24):
What by yourself? Yeah? How old were you?
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Well, I'd already left home. I left home when I
was fifteen. I lived with my mom for quite a while,
but my stepfather and I didn't get on and he
was not nice, okay, And so then I went to
live with my father, but that was very difficult because
he was by then a sort of fully fledged alcoholic,
and when my stepmother left him with the two children
(09:50):
that they'd had, and I ended up living with him
on my own and trying to go to school and
kind of manage what was really a fast deteriorating situation.
And he and I were living in some rented house
in the far reaches of Dublin, and i'd get home
from school and there would just be stuff piled in
(10:11):
the in the kitchen and everything, and so I decided
I had to leave. But going back to my mother's
wasn't really an option. So a very nice pair of
lesbian sisters, not a couple, but they said I could
rent a room from them. I'd met them working in
a restaurant in Dublin called the Blackboard where I used
(10:33):
to work at weekends.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
And there as.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
A waitress, yeah, and or a waiter as we say now,
And that was for too, A lovely gay couple called
Peter and Melvin, who really looked after me very well,
because I mean, what kind of a state I must
have been in? No idea, but apparently I was a
very good waitress, I can imagine.
Speaker 4 (10:51):
I loved it. It was my favorite jodea.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
What did you love about it?
Speaker 3 (10:54):
I loved the interaction, and I loved that it made
me feel quite efficient, and I loved the whole I
think the theater Robert actually really drama. Yeah, And I
just used to love get But I think maybe I
also just loved getting to work because it was it was.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Spike, you were still going to school but working.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
When I first started working there, and then I worked
there full time for about four months, and then a
friend of mine gave me a job in his recording
studio and so I did that until I left for London.
In Dublin, yeah, that's when I met, you know, all
of the people that we have in common. I recorded
U two's first demo tapes when I was, yeah, fifteen
(11:36):
and he was seventeen.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
He hates it when I remind him that he's older.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
But yeah, that was all when I was working at
Keystone Studios. But after my father died, Dublin started feeling
I don't know. I think my father got off at
a job at the Sunday Times, probably about four years
before he died, and I think in my head that
lodged as that would have been the moment that he
could have changed his life. That was the pivotal moment
(12:04):
where things could have changed for the better, and he
didn't take the job. And I think he didn't take
the job because he was afraid and because he was
an alcoholic, and so I think for me that always
represented this sort of golden light that you could you
could fly towards. And so after he died, I became
quite resolute about getting out, So I took the ferry
(12:27):
from dune Leary with my friend.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Oh you had another friend.
Speaker 4 (12:31):
She didn't know. She just had an address for us.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
There was a she had some Irish friends who were
living in a squat or friends of friends who were
living in a squat in Stoneleigh Street in West London,
actually not very far from here, off Latimer Road. And
we arrived there on a bright summer sunny morning and
were greeted at the door by just this crowd of
Irish men mostly, And I was like, married, what was
(12:56):
the point in coming all the way here if we're
just going to live with the whole house full of
Irish people. But they were incredible to us and made
they were so hospitable. Sixteen sixteen, she's eighteen, and they
gave us a room that there was already two of
them living in, but we were allowed to share it.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
I mean, there were.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Amazing days, you know, I think it was It was
a really great time to be young. You know, there
was huge adversity, but at the same time life just
felt full of possibility and you could afford to rent
places for cheap. You know. We were only in the
squad for about three months, and then I got a
job at Blushes on the King's Road. I don't know
if it's still There was a wine bar and it
(13:36):
used to be so amazing on a Saturday. Then you
know Bob Geldof and Paula because they live right around
the corner from and they used to arrive on a
Saturday morning at about eleven o'clock at the tube station
on the King's Road and then they would promenade up
the King's Road and they would be followed by this
sort of retinue of It was like a medieval you know.
(13:57):
It was like Henry the Eighth that arrived and all
these people would following along in their wake. And again
it was like theater watching, you know, and it was
punk and it was just incredible and exciting.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
Do you remember what you ate at the time? Would
you would you go to restaurants or would you cook
at home? Or would you I'd cook at home.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
I'd cook at home.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
Food wasn't great in London then, you know, it wasn't
and I didn't really care so much. I mean, I
was so obsessed with just survival and getting on, survival
and getting on. I mean, it was the nineteen seventies,
it was quite a bit of sort of beef Burgignon
and you know, black Forest ghetto, nothing to write home about.
Everyone was eating spaghetti bolonnaise because that was very exotic
(14:39):
and Italian, but not.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
Baudelais Nouver. That was always quite exciting.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Yeah, I remember that through the eighties, but not so
much the food really.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Yeah, so you're you're a sixteen year old in London,
You're working in blushes, you're living in the Irish house,
You're father has just died, and and you have a vision.
Did you know what you did? You know you wanted
to be the writer or the journalist or did you
did you go back to school? So you left school
at fifteen?
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Yeah, wow, I did my you know, the equivalent of
GCSEs And then yeah, it just wasn't possible. And for
a while I thought I'll go back to school, and
then I just realized that that wasn't going to happen.
And then I didn't really have a dream, you know,
because it was very much about survival really, and it
(15:37):
was day to day and I think I was just
very lucky, you know, I had lots.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
I think you probably must have been fantastic kid. Just
to have that courage and to you know that.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
They had courage when you're that age, don't you. I
think maybe because you don't know you know, now I
think I'm much less brave than I was when I
was sixteen years old or eighteen years old, because now
you have the benefit of or not of having, mean
what the world can do risk for risk and the
risk and the jeopardy, whereas then it's just about you know, possibility,
(16:09):
isn't it. And I felt possibility in London, you know
that energized me and just kept me going, you know,
I mean it was it wasn't of course, it wasn't easy,
you know. And I missed my dad so badly, you know,
because I think as a daughter, when you lose your
father at that age, you kind of deify them, and
(16:32):
so I'd elevated him to this impossible.
Speaker 4 (16:34):
Kind of Olympian height.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
And so I spent an awful lot of my late
teens in early twenties, you know, finding really broken men
and trying to fix them because I felt guilty that
I hadn't fixed my dad. And I really think it
took me till my thirties really to escape from the
kind of tyranny of his perfection, which you know and
(17:00):
realize who he was, you know, which doesn't make me
love him any less, but it certainly helped to create
a more functional life for myself.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
And did you drink? It was the fact that he
died of sort of alcohol?
Speaker 4 (17:15):
No, I think I drank, but I don't think.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
I mean, I've never I'm not a very addictive apart
from cigarettes, which I was hopelessly addicted to for sort
of all of my twenties and early thirties, which is
mad because my father died of a heart attack and
was chainsmoker. But drink, I mean, you know, it was
the nineteen eighties. I was in the music business. I
had a lot of fun then, Yes, because the next
(17:37):
thing I did was get a job at a record
company because of the studio that I'd worked in in Ireland.
You know, it was always people who you'd met who
then would introduce you to somebody else, and you know,
sometimes you'd get a little chink of an opportunity and
you would grab that and then you would and the
journalism and the television only happened again just by accident,
(17:58):
you know, I worked for this record company, worked with
Bob Geldof. I worked on band aid and live Aid,
and he stole my desk to sort out band Aid
from and you know, I was there on the day
when we all went to that studio in West London
and all of those people. It was a kind of amazing,
magical time. Then I set up my own little PR company.
(18:19):
But at the same time they were looking for a
TV presenter for a music program that Channel four were making,
and it was going to be all world music. And
that was what was really exciting about it to me
because it was my father always used to bring back
amazing records from Africa, Miriam mckeeba and just incredible music,
(18:41):
and so I was really excited to get involved in it,
and they gave me the job.
Speaker 4 (18:45):
I was appalling.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
I mean, someone sent me like a YouTube clip the
other day, you know how everything lives on.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
YouTube of me presenting.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Yeah, it was called Big World and I spoke in
a monotone like that, and I was clear, just shit scared,
really self to do that. But but so I did
that recovery years and then it.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Just did you have a domestic life as well? Did
you live with anybody and have to think about a
kitchen or food or bringing shopping home or did you
just basically food was smoked and.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
Smoked and drag.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
But I did get married when I was eighteen to
another lost soul who's a wonderful and old friend of
mine now called Richard Jobson, who was the lead singer
in this punk band called the Skids.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Yeah Skids, great.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
Yeah, into the valley working for the Yankee dollar, come on.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Anywhere.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
But Richard was a really interesting and unusual character. He
was another lost kid. He's left home at sixteen. He had,
you know, huge intellectual aspirations, many of which he went
on to realize a huge determination. And I think we
sort of fell together out of loneliness and we tried,
you know, we gave it our best shot for two kids,
(20:07):
and we stayed together till I was twenty one.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Wow, so young.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
So we had a domestic life then and very rudimentary.
I used to make things like grilled pork chops with
mustard on them, and a lot of potatoes, spaghetti, bolinnaise.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Cookbooks do you remember using.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
I had the Constant Spry cookbook that my mum had
given me because that was sort of her bible. So
she did yeah, she used to bake more than cook.
I mean, when I think about food that my mum made,
she used to make incredible gingerbread. She did make a
mean spaghetti. Bolonnaise she used to make. She made really
(20:48):
good normal food. You know, she'd make a great shepherds.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Part did she come from. She came from an English family.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
She's half Scottish, half English Scottish. She was Scottish really,
but she learned, you know, we used to.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
She used to.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
She taught me how to make love scass, which is
a it's a very rudimentary Norwegian stew, which is beef
and potatoes but cubed very small and cooked in their
own broth for quite a long period of time. And
she used to make these things called milkering, which are
that's sort of yogurts basically that Norwegians used to make.
(21:26):
And it was very weird because both she and my
stepmother used to make these yogurts. Once I left her
house and went went to live with my dad, every
cupboard you opened would have yogurt. You know.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Breeding was your father's second wife.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
She wasn't.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
They weren't married, but I mean, no, she was Irish,
but I think had an influence.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
No, they all wanted to impress them.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
He had this thing, you know, which clearly worked for
every woman in his life. And I don't think my
mum and my stepmother were the only ones either.
Speaker 4 (22:00):
So yeah, he has a thing of.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Cooking for you know, seduction as well, something that people
can remember. She can you remember meal where you wanted
to impress somebody and you cooked.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
I've never cooked when I wanted to impress.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Well, you're joined by Judy Dad, she said the same thing.
He might be came down and he said something to
her like you know. She said, this agent is coming,
so I'm going to make him the best omelet. She
tried to figure out how to make the best omelet
and he ate it and she was looking and he said,
I think you should stick to acting or something like that.
(22:41):
Right now, I'm going to ask you your shares of
all the recipes that we have in all our books.
You said that you wanted to make spaghetti bongolay, So
would you like to read the recipe for spaghetti vongolai.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
I will read the recipe for you. Four tablespoons of
extra virgin olive oil, four clothes of garlic finally chopped,
three dried red chilies crumbled, three kilos of small clams,
a bunch of flat leaf parsley finally chopped, and then
brackets divided. Talk about organization, sea salt and freshly ground
(23:13):
black pepper. Four hundred grams of spaghetti, one lemon quartered
fairly precise. I think only listeners will realize that serves four.
You heat the oil in a large frying pan over
a medium heat, Add the garlic, and fry over a
medium heat for one minute until just beginning to brown.
Speaker 4 (23:33):
That's where I go wrong. Often did you just.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Have bigger pieces of garlic and then you can take
them out or just cook it slowly? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (23:40):
Maybe add the crumbled chilies, clams, and two tablespoons of water.
Cover and fry over a high heat for about five
minutes until all the clams open, discarding any that don't.
Add half the parsley to the clams. Season with salt
and pepper. Drain the spaghetti and add to the clams.
(24:00):
Serve with the remaining parsley and the lemon quarters.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
And invade it with Carlota. Hi, I'm carloying with shap
at the River Cafe.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
So I'm going to start sweating off the garlic with
Passley sports, so it's sweating rather than frying. I think
that's the important thing exactly.
Speaker 4 (24:18):
Yeah. Now a bit of chili, now, flick of chili.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
Dried chili, dry chili, yes, always dried chili. So that's
starting to cry off.
Speaker 4 (24:27):
And at this stage I'm going to add the clams.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
You so you've scrubbed that, you've done all the hard
work with them, because that is the boring thing, isn't it?
And these clams are from where because the tastiest clams
I think comes from the Bay of Naples, and I
think it's far.
Speaker 4 (24:42):
It's a bit rubby, are they sorry?
Speaker 2 (24:46):
So this.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
This point we just want to get a little bit
more heaty to the plan and then I'm going to
so usually here we use.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
Savee to put the bongola in.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
Nice to sort of drink it and deleting the dish
as well. It's multi purpose. You can overcook the clams
as well, can't you. So what's too long?
Speaker 4 (25:09):
You want to catch them just as they're opening up?
Speaker 3 (25:13):
And will they if you stop the heat when they're
opening up? Will they keep opening up the way you
want them to?
Speaker 4 (25:22):
So they say they're starting to oisten up.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
So I'm going to finish and the start you wore
to the wine and the oils are going to come
together and sticking the saws.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
So listening, I bet you can. She's got a brilliant
hand tipping technique.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
You need to finish it with parsley freshness.
Speaker 4 (25:50):
So there we have it. Oh my god, the most
spectacular thing. And now I feel confident my love it.
Thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Related well, first of all, why did you choose us?
Speaker 3 (26:06):
It's entirely my favorite dish, mussels and clams. And there
was a period in my childhood when we lived on
the west coast of Ireland in Connemara, and it was
on one of my mother's kind of escapes from realities,
which used to happen quite often, and we went to
live there for six months and we were very poor,
and for about a three month period we just ate
(26:29):
potatoes that we could dig up and mussels which we
picked from the rocks. And you'd think that actually that
would have kind of knocked any desire to eat them
ever again out of me. But I think there was
a sort of four or five year hiatus, maybe a
bit longer. I think probably till I first came to London,
and then I re embraced them. And then I used
to go to Naples with my best friend and we
(26:51):
used to have spaghetti with Cottsen Fassolaris from the Bay
of Naples, and I mean ever since then. And then
Molly weirdly, my daughter, from when she was a toddler,
her absolute favorite thing was muscles and clams, and it's
quite odd to see a little toddler there kind of
throwing the shells over a children and digging into a
(27:14):
plate of seafood. So I think many influencers have combined
to make it my favorite, but I think it's really
difficult to make because it's so simple.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
There's no hiding.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
It is there, there's no hiding, and I really loved that.
I love food like that. I don't really like very
complicated food, you know, sort of very French high end.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
Never really enjoyed it much much.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
Prefer you know, really great fresh ingredients and a simple recipe,
which is probably why I've been found here for the
last you know, I used to see. I first came
to the River Cafe when you first opened virtually in
the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Yeah, nineteen eighty seven reopened and when we were only
opened for lunch. Do you remember we.
Speaker 4 (27:54):
Were only opened for lunch.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
I think when I first started coming and used to
have a wine from Antsi of Venice called I obviously
wasn't paying the bills then that was the beginning of
my career. But I used to come with a friend
and we used to have this wine called Where Dreams.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Yeah, that label wasn't it.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
It was amazing And even then this felt like the
most glamorous place on earth because it felt decadent in
all the best ways. And actually here was one of
the first places, and I know it's on a different
level from the pub on Grafton Street or whatever, it
was one of the first places where I really felt
(28:34):
that sort of bubble of excitement and conversation that you
get on a Friday night in a pub in Dublin
to be passionate about something, and food is something you
can be really passionate about. And I mean with my
I was not a great sort of domestic but actually
to go through a long period where I had a
house in Sussex that I used to rent with this
couple friends of mine, Nicola and Helena.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
They're still my friends and we used to cook together.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Yeah, and they were some of the happiest years of
my life, you know, cooking together every weekend. And I
actually learned a lot that Nikola was a particularly good
cold cook, and they were very precise, even things like
a I remember teaching me to make a basil omelet.
But it's a bit like the wonga lay. It's only
about the ingredients because it's so yeah yeah, and you
(29:23):
have to you know, and that I think I just
loved the sort of satisfaction that comes from that.
Speaker 4 (29:28):
But then when you have kids, Yeah, so what was
that like? Well, I loved cooking.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Going back to marrying Jason. Did he grow up on
a domestic house where meal and like yours or was
it the same?
Speaker 4 (29:39):
No, very unlike mine.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
His mum did everything and she was in she's a
really good cook. She still is, you know, I mean,
very English, quite sort of nineteen seventies. She had one
of those trolleys that's hot that keeps things hot, and
she would wheel it in, sit by the table and
you know, the plate to be in they're warming and
the food lots of sort of castle roles and pop
ghosts and things like that. But she's a really good
(30:03):
cook and it always looks perfect. She's a good baker
as well. And Jason is probably the better cook in
our house. He loves, absolutely loves cooking, and I feel
like I loved it during those years in Sussex, and
I loved the early days of cooking for my kids.
But then something happened when they just make faces about
(30:25):
the food you cooked and never like it, and it
became such a negotiation in the house that I kind
of lost the heart of it. I mean, now I'm back,
but Jason sort of took over in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
But do you eat really healthy? It's not consciously, it's
like the food that you like.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
It's the food that I like. I love fresh things,
I love, you know. One of the things that gives
me huge satisfaction is we've got a garden which during
the spring period of the year is just absolutely wall
to all wild garlic. It can almost be noxious the smell,
and I just love to gather it. And I make
pesto in industrial quantities.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Good. Oh, I have to. And when you go when
you go to Greece, do you cook there?
Speaker 4 (31:04):
Yeah, we go to Greece a lot.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
I get like a craving for I used to go
to Greece from the age of sixteen, and so you know,
Greek islands, you get there, the smell, the pine, the
Greek salad.
Speaker 4 (31:17):
Again, it's everything simple. I just love it. I just
love it.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
And so actually, you know there, we tend to eat
out quite a lot, but we'll make, you know, a
big lunch with Greek saladin. We'll make some dips and things,
and you know, we might get some.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
Fish and grill it. You know, we keep it very simple, but.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
You have a lot of friends over it. You do, like,
do you prefer going to people's houses or having them
come to you or do you like them?
Speaker 3 (31:41):
I prefer going to people's houses because then I don't
have to clear up. Jason prefers having people over because
I clear up after him and he loves cooking. But no,
we do have people over a lot, and there's nothing there.
I don't think there's anything nicer than a table full
of people and they're all eating and talking. And you know,
I tend to make big stews and things that I
(32:04):
don't have to do a lot of cook Our kitchen
is all open, like yeah, of yours. And when people
talk to me when I'm cooking, I can't cope with it.
I can't concentrate. So I have to make things that
are already and I love slow cook things and osubuko
and things like that.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
And yeah, so how do you combine working with cooking?
You know, the chad or how did you bring up children?
And for through your career and you know, I have
a home life. Did you brush from one thing to another?
Did you have was it hard? Did you just do it?
Do you think?
Speaker 3 (32:36):
I think same as every woman just you know, I mean,
it's so much every woman's experience these days, isn't it.
And it's kind of the bit that wasn't factored into
our great desire for you know, equality and independence. So
I think it's really hard. You know, it was less
hard for me because I had, you know, enough money
to have help. But I think it's a really difficult thing.
(32:59):
And I think, you know, for most women, it's a
burden of responsibility that you just you perform it because
you don't have a choice.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
You feel a kind of choice, you know, it is
really terry. I think also, as you say, it's economic,
you know, so when people say, oh, you know, there
are all these kids who are growing up on Peter McDonald's.
But the fact is that if you have a night
job and you have a choice, I often think I
like to think that maybe the mother has a choice
of doing homework with her kids or cooking a fresh
meal for them, maybe cut you know, And I think that's.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
I think if you've done a pretty hard graph job
that isn't based on your passion or any of the
luxuries that that you know, some of us have. If
you've done a hard graph job all day and then
you get home and you've got hungry, grumpy kids, I
don't think you want to sit down and start creating
a meal. I mean, for all the sense of you know,
holistic happiness it might offer, I don't think you're in
(33:54):
a place to actually think about or do that.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
You know. Yeah, you know we saw in lockdown when
kids didn't go for you know, the school, they didn't
have their one meal the day. And I was, you know,
talking to Jamie the other day about you know, the
goal now is to make lunches so nutritious, because you know,
that's the only meal the kid's going to have.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
But we should have free school meals, I mean universally
across the nation, you know, And one of the first
things we need to do is recognize that there's real
hunger in this country and address it. And the idea
that you know, we can sit around and have our
amazing meals and somewhere else, just down the road, there's
a kid who isn't getting separate. It makes me feel
(34:38):
physically sick, and I just don't understand why we can't
address it, you know. I mean, I spent my whole
childhood worried about things like food, and I know, you know,
I kind of know the smell of poverty, and I'm
frightened to death of it, you know. And I've run
so far in the opposite director, but I'm still, you know,
(35:01):
rubbish at kind of handling it because it's a fear.
It's a deep, deep rooted fear, and we're bringing up,
you know, a whole generation of kids, so experiencing that.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
When you're working your column, when you're writing on your campaigns,
on your books.
Speaker 4 (35:28):
Do you eat well?
Speaker 3 (35:30):
You Since I started my radio show at the times,
I've lost a lot of weight. I mean not a lot,
but I've definitely got thinner, not intentionally, but because it's
a lunchtime show, and lunch is my favorite meal. Like
I can eat like a horse at lunchtime.
Speaker 4 (35:46):
I love it.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
I can still sleep at night, you know, because once
your menopausal and postmenopause, sleep can become a bit of
a challenge. And so lunch is my favorite meal. And
four days a week I can't have lunch, and I
just don't eat until after I finished my show, so
I end up having maybe one and a half meals
a day. You know, I have supper, but I have
(36:07):
a breakfast tea to you know, kids high tea suffer.
I always eat about six thirty or seven. I don't
really like breakfast very At weekends, I have breakfast. I
make breakfast for the kids at the weekend. I love
doing that. You know, it makes you feel. There's so
few moments as a parent, I think where you feel
I've got this, yeah, you know, and making them breakfast
(36:27):
is one of them, you know, whether it's banana pancakes
or scrambled eggs and bacon or whatever avocado on toast.
I mean, it's ridiculous. My children in are seventeen and eighteen,
and they still at the weekends will come in and
kind of go, what's for breakfast?
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Mum? Yeah, but that will never stop.
Speaker 4 (36:43):
I hope it doesn't because it makes me feel useful.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
I think going home and being fed, and I think,
you know, we all grew up with kind of role models.
I certainly, you know, did, and I see myself sort
of acting. My mother was incredibly child oriented. You know,
she never blamed a child, never told off a child.
The child was always right, oh my. You know, we
had a lot of way that we kind of grew up.
(37:08):
But I think for somebody who didn't grow up with
that and then to be the way they are, it's like,
you know, it's so inspiring to me because it's you know,
so that you've come from. Maybe you know, your father's
but you had love.
Speaker 4 (37:22):
You know, I had love, you know what.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
And I always think about this because you know, they
say that basically we shape our children by the time
they're five or six. And I think I was really
lucky because the one thing that they were really good
at was they made me feel very loved. And once
you have that, it gives you a confidence to step
out into the world and you know, stick your toe
(37:45):
in the water and see what's out there, and I think,
you know, without that, that's when the real damage sets in.
And so all of the other things were pretty survivable.
But I think without that early love and we were definitely,
you know, my mum was in a amazing particularly when
we were little before things got difficult.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
But I'm very injured.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
I have to ask you one question, which is were
you interested in food even when you were a teenager
and in your twenties or was it your mother in
law that inspired you really with food?
Speaker 2 (38:16):
I would say that my mother was here, we go,
see what was it? Don't you think? Don't you find there?
We go? Yeah, the stories that my father was a
doctor and my mother was a librarian, and I think
they both came they were immigrants, their families were. They
were born in the Lower East Side and then you
(38:38):
know Jewish immigrants who came Ellis Island all that, and
I think that for them the whole thing was education,
whereas there my grandparents were very focused on food. I
think both my mother was trying to get it. She
went back to college when we were like five or
six to be a librarian, and my father was, you know,
trying to make it as a doctor. And I think
(38:59):
that we always ate fresh food. We always ate well,
we sat around you know that thing I was sitting
around the table. But probably I romanticize it. Probably the
food we had my sister is much more scathing. But
I sort of I think that the conversation was more
important than than what we ate.
Speaker 4 (39:19):
But we ate well.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
We never had dilvered or package. No, no, we didn't
have to get syrup for me. It all opened up
when I did come to Europe, going to Italy and
then living in Paris as we did. That was the
kind of food, you know, inspiration.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
But I think there's something about Italian food though as well,
because most of it, maybe you know, some of it's complicated,
but most of it is about fresh ingredients and simplicity,
and it's very seductive. You know. I became interested in food,
as I said to you, when when I used to
go and stay with with my friend Natalie, you know,
because this was amazing food, Natalie from Naples. It was
(40:00):
performance food. It was just amazingly good food. And you know,
they wouldn't have beans on toast at four o'clock in
the morning, as I said, they would make a pasta. Yeah,
you know, and actually you know, a lot of Italian
men can cook as well, which you know, still find
really impressive. You know, I'm lucky because I married a
man who can cook. But the number of my friends
who sort of look at Jason wistfully and go oh, yesh,
(40:21):
mine could do that exactly.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
So we've talked about the work, we've talked about the children,
we've talked about you know, the husband who cooks. Maybe
we should wind up on the comfort food and ask
you if food is is sharing and love and memories.
Certainly memories. Your memories are about food.
Speaker 4 (40:40):
It's about food and memory.
Speaker 3 (40:42):
And I also think that our emotional lives are often
channeled through food. So when food isn't good, I mean
it is a bit like like water for chocolate or whatever.
You know, when when food isn't good, it's because other
things aren't good. And that's why, you know, the bad
meals are as almost defining memories as the good meals,
you know. And for me sitting down at the table
(41:05):
and having something simple and delicious with my kids sitting
opposite me and my husband sitting at the table, it
does feel in some ways, not to be too saccharin
about it, but like a sort of dream come true,
and and the table is the place where that theater
of it plays out. And I look around and think, gosh,
(41:26):
you know, un lucky I got this.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
Yeah, and we are. And do you have a comfort
food that you go to when you that's what you needed?
Speaker 3 (41:36):
Well, all the way through my twenties, I used to
go and stay with my best friend Natalie in Maples.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
I'm getting I'm getting friend jealous in here.
Speaker 3 (41:46):
I've got two best friends. Okay, that's best friends, but
that's really you know. I've known them since I was
eighteen years and we used to cook and we used
to cook it at four o'clock in the morning when
we came back from the nightclub.
Speaker 4 (42:04):
In Carpery where we used to go.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
We used to cook it in the middle of the
afternoon if we got peckish. We used to cook it
if one of us was sobbing, you know. And so
in many ways that still is my sort of go
to comfort food. But the other thing I've learned to
cook quite recently is this delicious I call it porridge bread.
It is an Irish recipe and it is very much
(42:26):
porridge bread because it's just made with oats and seeds,
and live yogurt and a spoon of baking powder, and
it's incredibly easy to make, foolproof, no yeast, no flour,
and no flour, and it's so delicious. Bread well, it's
like soda bread. It's like the wheat and bread. It's
very like that, which is also another sort of comfort food.
(42:49):
So you take all these grains and the oats and
the yogurt and the baking powder, and you just put
it all in a bowl, mix it all together, put
it into a loaf tin in in baking paper, you know,
and you have to cook it for about fifty minutes altogether,
called forty minutes one side, and then tip it over.
(43:09):
It's rock hard on the outside. It's absolutely moist and
delicious on the inside. And that with a thick layer
of butter.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
Okay, I love butter, Yeah, I love butter. I love butter.
Richard Richard's mother used to say that butter was the
best cheese, and she was a Northern Italian. But if
you think about butter like a cheese, then you can
have that thick piece with a little thin bit of bread,
you know.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Yeah, yeah, you just want the car for the butter,
isn't it I think that's and that's very irish as well.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
Yeah. True. And we're going to go right now into
the River Cafe and you're going to meet a friend
and have dinner, aren't you. I am.
Speaker 4 (43:43):
I'm so excited.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
So's nice. Who are you having dinner with tonight? Then
go on, I can allow to ask that question, you can.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
It's not my husband, for change, I have a gentleman guest. No,
I'm having dinner with your friend and mine. Danny his
timeh fabulous and he's about to do my podcast Books
to Live By, And I'm so excited to talk to
him because you know he's going to pick his the
five books that have shaped his life in many ways.
Speaker 4 (44:12):
Books, it's the literary companion to this one.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
And food and reading. Yes see, Danny, And.
Speaker 3 (44:18):
Thank you Mary, thank you, pleasure, thank you so much
for having me.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
The River Cafe Lookbook is now available in bookshops and online.
It has over one hundred recipes, beautifully illustrated with photographs
from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The book has fifty
delicious and easy to prepare recipes, including a host of
River Cafe classics that have been specially adapted for new cooks.
(44:47):
The River Cafe lookbook recipes for cooks of all ages.
Ruthie's Table four is a production of iHeartRadio and Adami Studios.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Host
Ruth Rogers
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