March 22, 2022 • 21 mins
For more than 30 years The River Cafe in London, has been the home-from-home of artists, architects, designers, actors, collectors, writers, activists, and politicians. Michael Caine, Glenn Close, JJ Abrams, Steve McQueen, Victoria and David Beckham, and Lily Allen, are just some of the people who love to call The River Cafe home.
On Ruthie's Table 4, Rogers sits down with her customers—who have become friends—to talk about food memories. Table 4 explores how food impacts every aspect of our lives. “Foods is politics, food is cultural, food is how you express love, food is about your heritage, it defines who you and who you want to be,” says Rogers.
Each week, Rogers invites her guest to reminisce about family suppers and first dates, what they cook, how they eat when performing, the restaurants they choose, and what food they seek when they need comfort. And to punctuate each episode of Table 4, guests such as Ralph Fiennes, Emily Blunt and Alfonso Cuarón, read their favourite recipe from one of the best-selling River Cafe cookbooks.
Table 4 itself, is situated near The River Cafe’s open kitchen, close to the bright pink wood-fired oven and next to the glossy yellow pass, where Ruthie oversees the restaurant. You are invited to take a seat at this intimate table and join the conversation.
For more information, recipes, and ingredients, go to https://shoptherivercafe.co.uk/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/therivercafelondon/
Facebook: https://en-gb.facebook.com/therivercafelondon/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to River Cafe Table for a production of I
Heart Radio and Adam I Studios. There is an infinite
amount of subjects I'd like to discuss with Speaker of
the House Pelosi, but you know the rules of River
Cafe Table for we only discuss food, memories and how
(00:24):
food fits into our lives, family, work, and values. Nancy
Pelosi and I share the same aspirations and concerns inequality
the environment. The difference is that I wake up every
day worrying about the world, and she goes to work
(00:48):
every day to change it. In an hour, fifty guests
will be arriving for dinner in our home to celebrate
this awesome woman. While we are talking, River Cafe chefs
are cooking risotto amarone, poaching langustine, roasting pumpkin, and because
Speaker Pelosi loves chocolate, We're going to have two chocolate desserts,
(01:13):
a bit of chocolate sorbet and a rich chocolate cake.
I'm very happy to read the recipe for chocolate sorbet,
one of my favorite basic foods. In order to achieve
this work of art, you take seven hundred and fifty
(01:33):
milli liters of water, two hundred and fifty grams of
castor sugar a hundred and fifty grams of cocoa powder
a hundred milli. Leaders of Reccio Romagna gently boil the
water and sugar together to this light syrup. At the
cocoa powder could gently stirring for fifteen to twenty minutes
(01:58):
until the cocoa powder is complete, be dissolved, strain, cool
and add the brandy. Put the mixture into an ice
cream maker and churn until frozen or freeze and flat
freezer trays. Thank you. Before we go into food and values,
(02:21):
and food and family and food and memories, tell me
about your love for chocolate. My earliest memories are about
loving chocolate. I remember once when I was a very
little girl, my big brother, who was a teenager. My
parents said, you can have the car if you bring
Nancy home some ice cream. First, he brought vanilla ice
(02:42):
cream home. I put it under the bed, never ate
it because it wasn't chocolate. Why would he bring me
vanilla ice cream? But I've always loved it, and as
time has gone by, I've loved it darker and darker
and darker. Yeah, what about ice cream? Because I did
(03:03):
read that you have ice cream for breakfast or is
that an urban myth. No, it's not an urban myth.
It's convenient, it's right there, it has long shelf life.
I don't have to worry about it. It's right there,
and but I have it for breakfast. It's a great
way to start the day. I don't have it every day,
(03:24):
but I have it often. And when I was younger,
I used to have it before I went to sleep,
a pint of ice chocolate ice cream. But as time
has gone by, the later the chocolate, the less sleep
I am. How do you find the caffeine in the chocolate?
Does so? As a child, so you ate chocolate? Did
your mother know that you were having a pint of
(03:45):
ice cream before you went to sleep? And that was fine?
That was not ut. We didn't have sodas or soft
drinks or anything in our home like that. Everything was fresh,
except we had chocolate ice cream. I love ice cream.
When I go to the River Cafe, my restaurant, or
go to any restaurant, the dessert I go for is
(04:05):
always ice cream. Well, people say to me, you're going
to some of the fanciest restaurants in the world and
you're ordering chocolate ice cream a dessert. Don't you think
you should have something more sophisticated. It's delicious. I think
it's the way to end a meal. Should we go
back then to your mother and your older brother. How
(04:26):
many of you were there in your family? Well, I'm
talking about my oldest brother. At the time, there was
seven children, six boys, one girl. I was the youngest,
and I'm talking about my brother was like eleven years
older than I was. My oldest brother. When we talked
about if you want to have the car, you have
to get ice cream for Nancy first. So your your
(04:47):
parents had six boys and then they had to have
one of them died when he was young. So I
was really raised with five five boys in the Dallasandra
household of six children. How how is the food? Who cooked?
The cook cooked my mother? May she rest in peace,
bless her heart. She had a cook and what was
(05:10):
the what was it? What was it was very Italian?
But it was also very fresh and delicious. And of
the rest, I mean the cook would come in the
morning and make breakfast and that what would that be?
It could be anything you want. You could have eggs
or you could have oatmeal. There were some standard things.
(05:31):
Sometimes I would even drink coffee at an early age,
like eleven or twelve, And would you all sit down
to breakfast, so that would be a six or seven
children and two parents. Was breakfast a meal that you
all shared sort of dinner was what we said, what
we shared. And my father my whole life. My father
was the mayor of Baltimore from when I was in
(05:51):
first grade. When I went away to college my freshman
year of college, he was still the mayor of Baltimore.
So our routine was he would come home and in
those days a long time ago, he would go out
to make all of his speeches in the evening in
black time, everything was very formal. So he would come
home from work, we would have our family dinner together early.
(06:15):
What time would that be because he'd have to then
go on the campaign trail or just the civic engagements.
So that was the time that we were together. And
and then of course Sunday brunch and those kinds of things.
But I'm just telling about it every day and to
this day, my husband, Paul, he was born and raised
(06:37):
in San Francisco. I was born and raised in Baltimore.
To this day, he likes to dine at eight, and
I like to eat at five early, like a peasant.
Now well, actually I find that now in the restaurant,
more and more people are eating earlier. We used to.
Everybody used to make fun of Americans for wanting to
(06:58):
eat early, and now harder for us to sell the
later tables, even young people. Everybody wants to eat early.
But going back to this day of your father coming
back from work and you're all sitting down with would
there be would it be raucous, would it be talk?
Would everybody be? What was it like at the table?
Would be a mixture, just depending what the mood was
(07:19):
at the time. But there were certain things that I
carried over and to my own children, and I'm still
that way. In a restaurant I had, we always had
to have a tablecloth, you know. I mean that was
a long time ago, so it doesn't it isn't so
unusual to think tablecloth then. Now it's almost a luxury.
(07:39):
And so when my own children, we've never had a
meal without two things, some linen's, whatever it might be.
It could be a place matt and salad and whatever
else we happen to have. And when they were growing up,
the five of them five and six years in one
week to the day a pack. I had different things
(08:04):
I would try. I would try when they came home
from school, Let's say, let's have dessert now for three
thirty four o'clock left dessert and then we'll have dinner later.
Then I decided wouldn't be a good idea because they
came home that they were hungry to have dinner at
four o'clock, so that they would have their dinner and
(08:25):
then we'd have dessert later. Who tried all kinds of
things to satisfy their appetites. I love that you said
that your families were basically a map of those very
(08:47):
and and so tell me about the Italian influence on
the food. Well, my father's mother was born in Baltimore, Maryland,
but her parents, which would be my great grandparents, one
was born in Venice and one was born in Genoa,
so there was a lot of that influence in the
(09:07):
in the food in northern and northern Italian. My mother's
family was from Campobasso, which was in the center of Italy,
but we lived in an Italian neighborhood, so there was
every food you can imagine in the neighborhood and every
dialect that you could imagine in the neighborhood. But there
was one thing in common, the smell of very fresh
(09:28):
bread early in the morning, fresh Italian bread. To this day,
it's one of the my happiest memories, the smell of
fresh baked bread smells. That's a good smell. But I
think we always talked about Italy, you know, which was
um became a country very late. So you have the
very strong regional dishes, don't you. So in Venice you
(09:51):
have the Polenta, and and southern Italy you have modests,
and and then in Florence it's very In Tuscan it's
very bread oriented. And then everybody, I guess came to
Baltimore and there was there was everything in everything. You
had the Toscana, the Siciliana, the market John of brutes
(10:12):
as the what do they call the Genovese, they were
the very other different names from the Lagorian. Yeah, the
Venezzi that was from Venis by the name of where
they came from, because they were all sort of like
city states. Wheny of the northern Italians came early. You know,
(10:33):
As I say, my father's mother, she was born in Baltimore,
probably like in the eighteen eighties or something like that. Yeah,
they came earlier than the others, and then the southern
Italians came later, you think the more so later, the
middle and later. And then San Francisco is a very
(10:53):
Italian American city. The Bank of America was originally the
Bank of Italy. I didn't know. Uh, it's a bank
of Italy. And the influence there is very Italian in
terms of food. So it was a comfortable move for me.
And what did you so, what would it meal be like?
Would they make Did you have a lot of spaghetti
(11:14):
or pasta? And we have because we used to say
in those days you had macaroni and gravy and ice cream,
and then it became pasta and sauce and gelato. Did
you have pasta every day regularly? It may may not
be actually every day, but on the average of every
(11:36):
day in one form or another. And we had, you know,
my my husband's family Italian. My husband was born in Florence,
and his mother was born in Trieste, and his father
was born he was born in Nice and then moved
to Tria. So the whole family is very Italian. If
we tell the story that one of the cousins came
to visit from Florence to London and they put the
(11:57):
food on the table and there wasn't a pasta. Started
to cry because it was just a meal without pasta
was not and it pasta wasn't the meal, it was
part of the meal. Is yeah, it's a prey. When
my friends so that when they'd have it a exchange
student or something like that, it would be we tell
(12:18):
the story when they were having lunch and they said, well,
you know who's having peanut butter and jelly, who's having
this or that? What would you like? And the child said, well,
how about a little veal with lemon. Came from Tuscan exactly.
And so did you remember the pastas that you had?
You remember the food, exact food, all the standard stuff
(12:40):
that you see now, of course, but I loved it.
I always liked it. A little thicker and a little
moral dante. Whether it was that chucchini. Of course, with
a tony would be hard. I prefer cheese, rabbit, only polenta.
But was very amused because my big brother. One day
a very fancy restaurant opened up in Maryland, and not
(13:01):
in Bold but in sort of eastern shore of Maryland.
It was very acclaimed and it's hard to get into
and this or that, and my brothers went to the
restaurant and he came back. He said, Nancy, you'll never
believe it. They had polenta as if it was from
a former time. Said, no, tell me, that's become chic
(13:22):
and that exactly. Now, that's that. What year would that
have been when remember probably about twenty five years ago
that became It's not like they're having your grandmother's polenta.
They're having well, now, let me just say, people say
to me, what is your In fact, my grandchild son
said to me for our family tree project in our class,
(13:45):
we have to have a family favorite family recipe that's
been in our family for generations, and what would you suggest?
And I said, well, what I would suggest is probably
chocolate or chocolate moves. And he said, no, I mean
a traditional family thing. My mother wasn't. She wouldn't like
me saying this. She wasn't a big cook. I mean
(14:06):
she was capable of cooking, but she always had a
cook and her mother didn't cook because her husband cooked.
He was a chef. He would I would see him
break the neck of an eel or whatever and cook
these fabulous grandfather my grandfather and so my grandmother never cooked,
and I was like, you better talk to your father
(14:27):
about a family recipe. So you so the Italian influence
so stayed and stayed the deliciousness of it. I think,
you know, it's funny what you say about polenta, because
polenta and a lot of the dishes that come from
very traditional. I hate the word, but what they call
(14:49):
peasant food, I would never let it be called peasant food.
But rust are cooking, family cooking. Family dishes are now
so as you say, so sophisticated. Well, my husband's mother
made tripe all the time, and that was pretty standard.
She try, Oh she made tripe with polenti tripe with polente,
(15:09):
or polenta with almost anything. So when it became chic,
we thought, oh my gosh, Nana, it's really on the forefront.
Did your parents speak Italian? No, well, I don't know.
(15:32):
I didn't speak Italian. See, my father's mother was born
in Baltimore, so it wasn't a case of his he
didn't know Italian. My mother she spoke some, but I
don't know how good she was. And every time I
would go to see my grandfather, who was so beautiful
and wonderful, and I loved him so much. The chef.
He was going to teach me how to speak Italian,
(15:54):
and every time i'd go, he'd get out of map
and we'd start, there's a different die elects of Italian.
So I could give you the map of Italy in
the different dialects, but I don't know to speak Italian
because we'd start with that map every time. Now there
are they're very you know again. My husband, I was saying,
was born in Florence, but when we would go to
(16:14):
Venice very often he couldn't understand some of the fishermen,
you know that, but they were speaking. It's interesting because
in these podcasts I talked to many people who recall
their grandparents cooking almost more than their parents cooking, And
very often they come from families that emigrated from another country.
And I often think that perhaps the mother was trying
(16:37):
to adapt to the new new environment where the grand
parents probably, you know, that was their identity and took
it with them. But I haven't ended you know, the
fact that your grandfather was actually a professional chef. My
understanding of this is before I was aware of what
he was doing. He sold postive, He had one of
(16:58):
those shops that sold products from Italy pasta, dry pasta
and those kinds of things. So he was a foodie.
I mean, he was into food and a chef. And
my grandmother was treated like a queen. She never did
any housework or anything like that. She and she didn't cook.
That's I mean, I never knew how to cook one thing.
(17:21):
In my mother's case, she had these seven children. She
were alive in another generation, who knows what she would
have been. She was a mom, She was a political
organizer from my father. She was a poet, she was
a inventor. She did all kinds of things. She said
to me once when I was a little girl, I
(17:42):
know that the telephone can be used for more things.
I just have to figure it out. And also you
were her only daughter. We're very by the way, in
all of this, very devoutly Catholic, very so. Lots of
times the ritual of food surrounded Mass, either after or
(18:03):
midnight or Sunday branch trew. A lot of it revolved
around going to church home in eating afterwards. As I
always say, we were born in a family was devoutly Catholic,
fiercely patriotic, proud of our Italian heritage, and staunchly democratic.
H staunchly democratic. Those principles came in. They related to
(18:28):
our Catholicism in our view of taking care of other
people and food people came to our door when people
were pouring. My brother Tommy, my older brother, he used
to tell me that when he was a little boy,
people would come to the door and Mommy would always
be giving them food, giving them food, giving them food.
And even in her old age, she was giving ice
cream to children and they knew to come to the
(18:49):
door to get ice cream. So it's all about nourishment,
one way or another. And when you left this incredibly
close family and at such it around the table and
food and and church. When you left this family and
went to university to college, how did you deal with food? Then?
(19:10):
Do you remember? Yeah, I went away. The only place
that I was allowed to go would be a woman's
Catholic college. That would be where was that? What college
was called Trinity College in Washington, d c. The oldest
Catholic women's college in America. It was strict academic school
(19:31):
and it was within fifty miles of Baltimore, Maryland. So
that's act and our college. It's not exactly a culinary life,
but we used to We used to don't tell anybody
who told you this. We used to go at night.
They know now years later they know. But we used
(19:53):
to go, like in the middle of the night, down
to the the dining room and break into of the
freezer to get ice cream. Now they was locked, so
you can only lift it a little bit and the
scooper in there pull it out. We better not tell
certain members of the house about this. It's hard to
(20:15):
tell a flavor and the dark and the dark you
could tell if it's chocolate or not, but peach, strawberry
and the rest of it kind of comes together. And
sometimes we would order pizza so that the guard, we'd
say the guard somebody would go talk to the garden,
said I ordered pizza. I'm waiting here for the pizza,
(20:36):
while we would go down and steal dar screen, steal
the ice cream. And so your your college days were
spent stealing ice staling ice cream. Basically, twenty minutes speaker
(20:56):
Nacy Pelosi was never going to be enough time to
explore her movie and memorable food story, So join us
next week when we will continue our conversation River Cafe
Table for Part two. To visit the online shop of
the River Cafe, go to shop the River Cafe dot
(21:20):
co dot UK. River Cafe Table four is a production
of I Heart Radio and Adam I Studios. For more
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to River Cafe Table for a production of I
Heart Radio and Adam I Studios. There is an infinite
amount of subjects I'd like to discuss with Speaker of
the House Pelosi, but you know the rules of River
Cafe Table for we only discuss food, memories and how
(00:24):
food fits into our lives, family, work, and values. Nancy
Pelosi and I share the same aspirations and concerns inequality
the environment. The difference is that I wake up every
day worrying about the world, and she goes to work
(00:48):
every day to change it. In an hour, fifty guests
will be arriving for dinner in our home to celebrate
this awesome woman. While we are talking, River Cafe chefs
are cooking risotto amarone, poaching langustine, roasting pumpkin, and because
Speaker Pelosi loves chocolate, We're going to have two chocolate desserts,
(01:13):
a bit of chocolate sorbet and a rich chocolate cake.
I'm very happy to read the recipe for chocolate sorbet,
one of my favorite basic foods. In order to achieve
this work of art, you take seven hundred and fifty
(01:33):
milli liters of water, two hundred and fifty grams of
castor sugar a hundred and fifty grams of cocoa powder
a hundred milli. Leaders of Reccio Romagna gently boil the
water and sugar together to this light syrup. At the
cocoa powder could gently stirring for fifteen to twenty minutes
(01:58):
until the cocoa powder is complete, be dissolved, strain, cool
and add the brandy. Put the mixture into an ice
cream maker and churn until frozen or freeze and flat
freezer trays. Thank you. Before we go into food and values,
(02:21):
and food and family and food and memories, tell me
about your love for chocolate. My earliest memories are about
loving chocolate. I remember once when I was a very
little girl, my big brother, who was a teenager. My
parents said, you can have the car if you bring
Nancy home some ice cream. First, he brought vanilla ice
(02:42):
cream home. I put it under the bed, never ate
it because it wasn't chocolate. Why would he bring me
vanilla ice cream? But I've always loved it, and as
time has gone by, I've loved it darker and darker
and darker. Yeah, what about ice cream? Because I did
(03:03):
read that you have ice cream for breakfast or is
that an urban myth. No, it's not an urban myth.
It's convenient, it's right there, it has long shelf life.
I don't have to worry about it. It's right there,
and but I have it for breakfast. It's a great
way to start the day. I don't have it every day,
(03:24):
but I have it often. And when I was younger,
I used to have it before I went to sleep,
a pint of ice chocolate ice cream. But as time
has gone by, the later the chocolate, the less sleep
I am. How do you find the caffeine in the chocolate?
Does so? As a child, so you ate chocolate? Did
your mother know that you were having a pint of
(03:45):
ice cream before you went to sleep? And that was fine?
That was not ut. We didn't have sodas or soft
drinks or anything in our home like that. Everything was fresh,
except we had chocolate ice cream. I love ice cream.
When I go to the River Cafe, my restaurant, or
go to any restaurant, the dessert I go for is
(04:05):
always ice cream. Well, people say to me, you're going
to some of the fanciest restaurants in the world and
you're ordering chocolate ice cream a dessert. Don't you think
you should have something more sophisticated. It's delicious. I think
it's the way to end a meal. Should we go
back then to your mother and your older brother. How
(04:26):
many of you were there in your family? Well, I'm
talking about my oldest brother. At the time, there was
seven children, six boys, one girl. I was the youngest,
and I'm talking about my brother was like eleven years
older than I was. My oldest brother. When we talked
about if you want to have the car, you have
to get ice cream for Nancy first. So your your
(04:47):
parents had six boys and then they had to have
one of them died when he was young. So I
was really raised with five five boys in the Dallasandra
household of six children. How how is the food? Who cooked?
The cook cooked my mother? May she rest in peace,
bless her heart. She had a cook and what was
(05:10):
the what was it? What was it was very Italian?
But it was also very fresh and delicious. And of
the rest, I mean the cook would come in the
morning and make breakfast and that what would that be?
It could be anything you want. You could have eggs
or you could have oatmeal. There were some standard things.
(05:31):
Sometimes I would even drink coffee at an early age,
like eleven or twelve, And would you all sit down
to breakfast, so that would be a six or seven
children and two parents. Was breakfast a meal that you
all shared sort of dinner was what we said, what
we shared. And my father my whole life. My father
was the mayor of Baltimore from when I was in
(05:51):
first grade. When I went away to college my freshman
year of college, he was still the mayor of Baltimore.
So our routine was he would come home and in
those days a long time ago, he would go out
to make all of his speeches in the evening in
black time, everything was very formal. So he would come
home from work, we would have our family dinner together early.
(06:15):
What time would that be because he'd have to then
go on the campaign trail or just the civic engagements.
So that was the time that we were together. And
and then of course Sunday brunch and those kinds of things.
But I'm just telling about it every day and to
this day, my husband, Paul, he was born and raised
(06:37):
in San Francisco. I was born and raised in Baltimore.
To this day, he likes to dine at eight, and
I like to eat at five early, like a peasant.
Now well, actually I find that now in the restaurant,
more and more people are eating earlier. We used to.
Everybody used to make fun of Americans for wanting to
(06:58):
eat early, and now harder for us to sell the
later tables, even young people. Everybody wants to eat early.
But going back to this day of your father coming
back from work and you're all sitting down with would
there be would it be raucous, would it be talk?
Would everybody be? What was it like at the table?
Would be a mixture, just depending what the mood was
(07:19):
at the time. But there were certain things that I
carried over and to my own children, and I'm still
that way. In a restaurant I had, we always had
to have a tablecloth, you know. I mean that was
a long time ago, so it doesn't it isn't so
unusual to think tablecloth then. Now it's almost a luxury.
(07:39):
And so when my own children, we've never had a
meal without two things, some linen's, whatever it might be.
It could be a place matt and salad and whatever
else we happen to have. And when they were growing up,
the five of them five and six years in one
week to the day a pack. I had different things
(08:04):
I would try. I would try when they came home
from school, Let's say, let's have dessert now for three
thirty four o'clock left dessert and then we'll have dinner later.
Then I decided wouldn't be a good idea because they
came home that they were hungry to have dinner at
four o'clock, so that they would have their dinner and
(08:25):
then we'd have dessert later. Who tried all kinds of
things to satisfy their appetites. I love that you said
that your families were basically a map of those very
(08:47):
and and so tell me about the Italian influence on
the food. Well, my father's mother was born in Baltimore, Maryland,
but her parents, which would be my great grandparents, one
was born in Venice and one was born in Genoa,
so there was a lot of that influence in the
(09:07):
in the food in northern and northern Italian. My mother's
family was from Campobasso, which was in the center of Italy,
but we lived in an Italian neighborhood, so there was
every food you can imagine in the neighborhood and every
dialect that you could imagine in the neighborhood. But there
was one thing in common, the smell of very fresh
(09:28):
bread early in the morning, fresh Italian bread. To this day,
it's one of the my happiest memories, the smell of
fresh baked bread smells. That's a good smell. But I
think we always talked about Italy, you know, which was
um became a country very late. So you have the
very strong regional dishes, don't you. So in Venice you
(09:51):
have the Polenta, and and southern Italy you have modests,
and and then in Florence it's very In Tuscan it's
very bread oriented. And then everybody, I guess came to
Baltimore and there was there was everything in everything. You
had the Toscana, the Siciliana, the market John of brutes
(10:12):
as the what do they call the Genovese, they were
the very other different names from the Lagorian. Yeah, the
Venezzi that was from Venis by the name of where
they came from, because they were all sort of like
city states. Wheny of the northern Italians came early. You know,
(10:33):
As I say, my father's mother, she was born in Baltimore,
probably like in the eighteen eighties or something like that. Yeah,
they came earlier than the others, and then the southern
Italians came later, you think the more so later, the
middle and later. And then San Francisco is a very
(10:53):
Italian American city. The Bank of America was originally the
Bank of Italy. I didn't know. Uh, it's a bank
of Italy. And the influence there is very Italian in
terms of food. So it was a comfortable move for me.
And what did you so, what would it meal be like?
Would they make Did you have a lot of spaghetti
(11:14):
or pasta? And we have because we used to say
in those days you had macaroni and gravy and ice cream,
and then it became pasta and sauce and gelato. Did
you have pasta every day regularly? It may may not
be actually every day, but on the average of every
(11:36):
day in one form or another. And we had, you know,
my my husband's family Italian. My husband was born in Florence,
and his mother was born in Trieste, and his father
was born he was born in Nice and then moved
to Tria. So the whole family is very Italian. If
we tell the story that one of the cousins came
to visit from Florence to London and they put the
(11:57):
food on the table and there wasn't a pasta. Started
to cry because it was just a meal without pasta
was not and it pasta wasn't the meal, it was
part of the meal. Is yeah, it's a prey. When
my friends so that when they'd have it a exchange
student or something like that, it would be we tell
(12:18):
the story when they were having lunch and they said, well,
you know who's having peanut butter and jelly, who's having
this or that? What would you like? And the child said, well,
how about a little veal with lemon. Came from Tuscan exactly.
And so did you remember the pastas that you had?
You remember the food, exact food, all the standard stuff
(12:40):
that you see now, of course, but I loved it.
I always liked it. A little thicker and a little
moral dante. Whether it was that chucchini. Of course, with
a tony would be hard. I prefer cheese, rabbit, only polenta.
But was very amused because my big brother. One day
a very fancy restaurant opened up in Maryland, and not
(13:01):
in Bold but in sort of eastern shore of Maryland.
It was very acclaimed and it's hard to get into
and this or that, and my brothers went to the
restaurant and he came back. He said, Nancy, you'll never
believe it. They had polenta as if it was from
a former time. Said, no, tell me, that's become chic
(13:22):
and that exactly. Now, that's that. What year would that
have been when remember probably about twenty five years ago
that became It's not like they're having your grandmother's polenta.
They're having well, now, let me just say, people say
to me, what is your In fact, my grandchild son
said to me for our family tree project in our class,
(13:45):
we have to have a family favorite family recipe that's
been in our family for generations, and what would you suggest?
And I said, well, what I would suggest is probably
chocolate or chocolate moves. And he said, no, I mean
a traditional family thing. My mother wasn't. She wouldn't like
me saying this. She wasn't a big cook. I mean
(14:06):
she was capable of cooking, but she always had a
cook and her mother didn't cook because her husband cooked.
He was a chef. He would I would see him
break the neck of an eel or whatever and cook
these fabulous grandfather my grandfather and so my grandmother never cooked,
and I was like, you better talk to your father
(14:27):
about a family recipe. So you so the Italian influence
so stayed and stayed the deliciousness of it. I think,
you know, it's funny what you say about polenta, because
polenta and a lot of the dishes that come from
very traditional. I hate the word, but what they call
(14:49):
peasant food, I would never let it be called peasant food.
But rust are cooking, family cooking. Family dishes are now
so as you say, so sophisticated. Well, my husband's mother
made tripe all the time, and that was pretty standard.
She try, Oh she made tripe with polenti tripe with polente,
(15:09):
or polenta with almost anything. So when it became chic,
we thought, oh my gosh, Nana, it's really on the forefront.
Did your parents speak Italian? No, well, I don't know.
(15:32):
I didn't speak Italian. See, my father's mother was born
in Baltimore, so it wasn't a case of his he
didn't know Italian. My mother she spoke some, but I
don't know how good she was. And every time I
would go to see my grandfather, who was so beautiful
and wonderful, and I loved him so much. The chef.
He was going to teach me how to speak Italian,
(15:54):
and every time i'd go, he'd get out of map
and we'd start, there's a different die elects of Italian.
So I could give you the map of Italy in
the different dialects, but I don't know to speak Italian
because we'd start with that map every time. Now there
are they're very you know again. My husband, I was saying,
was born in Florence, but when we would go to
(16:14):
Venice very often he couldn't understand some of the fishermen,
you know that, but they were speaking. It's interesting because
in these podcasts I talked to many people who recall
their grandparents cooking almost more than their parents cooking, And
very often they come from families that emigrated from another country.
And I often think that perhaps the mother was trying
(16:37):
to adapt to the new new environment where the grand
parents probably, you know, that was their identity and took
it with them. But I haven't ended you know, the
fact that your grandfather was actually a professional chef. My
understanding of this is before I was aware of what
he was doing. He sold postive, He had one of
(16:58):
those shops that sold products from Italy pasta, dry pasta
and those kinds of things. So he was a foodie.
I mean, he was into food and a chef. And
my grandmother was treated like a queen. She never did
any housework or anything like that. She and she didn't cook.
That's I mean, I never knew how to cook one thing.
(17:21):
In my mother's case, she had these seven children. She
were alive in another generation, who knows what she would
have been. She was a mom, She was a political
organizer from my father. She was a poet, she was
a inventor. She did all kinds of things. She said
to me once when I was a little girl, I
(17:42):
know that the telephone can be used for more things.
I just have to figure it out. And also you
were her only daughter. We're very by the way, in
all of this, very devoutly Catholic, very so. Lots of
times the ritual of food surrounded Mass, either after or
(18:03):
midnight or Sunday branch trew. A lot of it revolved
around going to church home in eating afterwards. As I
always say, we were born in a family was devoutly Catholic,
fiercely patriotic, proud of our Italian heritage, and staunchly democratic.
H staunchly democratic. Those principles came in. They related to
(18:28):
our Catholicism in our view of taking care of other
people and food people came to our door when people
were pouring. My brother Tommy, my older brother, he used
to tell me that when he was a little boy,
people would come to the door and Mommy would always
be giving them food, giving them food, giving them food.
And even in her old age, she was giving ice
cream to children and they knew to come to the
(18:49):
door to get ice cream. So it's all about nourishment,
one way or another. And when you left this incredibly
close family and at such it around the table and
food and and church. When you left this family and
went to university to college, how did you deal with food? Then?
(19:10):
Do you remember? Yeah, I went away. The only place
that I was allowed to go would be a woman's
Catholic college. That would be where was that? What college
was called Trinity College in Washington, d c. The oldest
Catholic women's college in America. It was strict academic school
(19:31):
and it was within fifty miles of Baltimore, Maryland. So
that's act and our college. It's not exactly a culinary life,
but we used to We used to don't tell anybody
who told you this. We used to go at night.
They know now years later they know. But we used
(19:53):
to go, like in the middle of the night, down
to the the dining room and break into of the
freezer to get ice cream. Now they was locked, so
you can only lift it a little bit and the
scooper in there pull it out. We better not tell
certain members of the house about this. It's hard to
(20:15):
tell a flavor and the dark and the dark you
could tell if it's chocolate or not, but peach, strawberry
and the rest of it kind of comes together. And
sometimes we would order pizza so that the guard, we'd
say the guard somebody would go talk to the garden,
said I ordered pizza. I'm waiting here for the pizza,
(20:36):
while we would go down and steal dar screen, steal
the ice cream. And so your your college days were
spent stealing ice staling ice cream. Basically, twenty minutes speaker
(20:56):
Nacy Pelosi was never going to be enough time to
explore her movie and memorable food story, So join us
next week when we will continue our conversation River Cafe
Table for Part two. To visit the online shop of
the River Cafe, go to shop the River Cafe dot
(21:20):
co dot UK. River Cafe Table four is a production
of I Heart Radio and Adam I Studios. For more
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Ruth Rogers
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