October 13, 2025 • 35 mins
Adam Gopnik is a brilliant mind. An acclaimed writer, essayist and commentator; he's authored nine books, and has written for The New Yorker for nearly forty years, to which he's contributed non-fiction, fiction, memoir and criticism.
I've been lucky enough to share 34 years of friendship with Adam, and in that time, we've never stopped cooking, and sharing our passion for food. Today, we're talking about family, the world, and of course, eating.
Originally recorded in 2024.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Adam Gopnik is a close friend and my guest on
this episode from the archive, recorded last December. This gives
me the chance to tell you all that Adam will
be playing in his own, very funny and touching one
man show, Adam Gopnik's New York at Lincoln Center, from
October seventeenth through the twenty sixth. We can find tickets
(00:22):
online at Adamgopniknewyork dot com. I'm coming from London, so
I'll see you there. In the thirty four years at
Adam Gopnik and I have been friends. We have lived
in the same city, Paris, where he wrote his beautiful book,
Paris to the Moon. We have loved and then lost
(00:43):
our best friend, the art historian and curator Kirk Varnado.
We've taken care of each other's children as if they
were our own, and sung show tunes together from every
Broadway musical because we know.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
All the lyrics.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Most of all, we have never stopped cooking, eating, and
talking about our passion for food. We may be separated
by an ocean, but we are always minutes and inches away.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
All the while, Adam leads a terrific life in writing.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Staff writer for the New Yorker and author of nine
books of non fiction, fiction and memoir. Next year, he
will perform his one man show Talk Therapy in New
York City. Adam is here now with me in London.
In four days, he's eaten in the River Cafe four times.
This morning we sang You've got to be taught from
(01:31):
South Pacific, Rainbow Connection from the Muppets, and I've never
been in love before from Guys and Dolls. Tonight, after
seeing Giant at the Royal Court, we will go home
and cook to moto pasta my definition of a good friend.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Thank you, sir Adam.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
You've chosen the recipe and it was from the very
first cookbook we ever did, the River Cafe Cookbook, and
the recipe you chose was penny with quick sausage sauce, which.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
You like to beat.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
I would love to read it, and I shouldd that
this is part of a diptick, as our historians would say,
with a penny with a slow sausage sauce. So that
is why it's quick. Two hundred and fifty grams of
penny regatta, two tablespoons of olive oil. Two red onions,
peeled and chopped, five sausages, meat crumbled, half a tablespoon
(02:20):
of fresh rosemary, two small dried chilis, eight hundred grams
of peeled plum tomatoes, one hundred and fifty mililters of cream,
and one hundred and twenty grams of parmesan freshly grated.
You heat the olive oil in the saucepan and you
fry the onion lightly. You add the sausage, rosemary, bay leaves,
and chili all together, frying them over a high heat,
(02:42):
stirring to mash the sausages. You remove all but one
tablespoon of the fat and continue to cook for twenty minutes.
Add the tomatoes, stir and return to the boil. Then
remove from the heat. Cook the penne in boiling salted water,
then drain and add directly to the sauce. Stir the
cream into the sauce with the penny and half the parmesan,
(03:04):
and then you serve the pusta with the remaining parmesan
grated on top.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
When I asked you for a recipe that you'd like
to read Ruthie's Table four, you immediately said, I know
exactly what I want to do. I want to do
the penne with quick sausage sauce.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
And I was wondering why.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Well, because it was nineteen ninety four. We had just
moved to Paris, my wife Martha and our little son
Luke had just moved to Paris then, and we got
your book, and by the strangest kind of syncopated cooking beat,
I started cooking your food in our Parisian kitchen, although
I had been raised on French food, and there was
(03:44):
something about the logic and grammar of this recipe that
was inspiring and explained so much. In other words, you
were taking the pungent things, the sweet onions, and then
the pungent sausages, and the hot pepper which I had
never cooked with before, the dried parakeet peppers, and making
all of that. Then you were reducing it with the
(04:07):
wine and then adding the tomatoes, and that basic pattern, right,
you have and it can be anchovies and.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Garlic, get the flavor.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Tomato right, then cook it down with wine until it's
almost dry, and then adding tomatoes and then doing that.
How many times in a lifetime do we do that?
And that basic grammar, the savory flavors, the wine reduction,
the addition of tomato or cream or whatever it might be,
(04:39):
is somehow so fundamental. It was like this for me
was a foundational recipe. Once I knew how to do this,
I felt that I could do almost anything. So that's
why I love it so much, even though, to be
honest with you, I probably couldn't, so to speak, sell
it at my dining table today because the ladies I
cook for, Martha and Olivia, are both pescatarians at this point,
(05:00):
so I couldn't.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
But do you ever have it? Make it for yourself?
Speaker 3 (05:02):
I always make it for myself when I'm alone. I
either make this or the matricianas Mike.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Can you get the Lucunega sausages in New York?
Speaker 3 (05:10):
You can get good sausages. You get good Italian sausages
in New York. But those are when I'm home alone.
That's what I make for myself.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
So you've written, just written a brilliant piece about the election.
You've written about the politics of our country. You've written
about Paris. You've written and yet you are uniquely interested,
I think, in writing and writing about food, and so
food comes into your musical. I mean, there aren't very
many musicals about a restaurant. There aren't very many articles
(05:41):
in the New Yorker. Well, now there are a few
more about food. Tell us about one of your books
that you've written where food has come into your book.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
I wrote an entire book just about the philosophy of
eating called The Table Comes First, which was the title
was given to me by our friend Furcus of Saint
John because we were having elevenses once and he said,
genuine he was genuinely perturbed. He said, there is this
young couple I know, he said, and they just getting
married and they want to buy a bed. He said,
(06:10):
don't they know the table comes first. They're having a
bed but no table. And I thought, oh, what a
beautiful thought. The table comes first. It's the altar in
the raft of human existence. So for me, my fascination
with food, I think comes from two you know, sharply
opposed places. On the one end, just pure reed. I
love to eat, and I see funny.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
That greed comes into food. I have a friend who
had a nanny and she overheard her child who said,
I'd want, you know, a biscuit, and she'd eaten like
five biscuits, and she heard the nanny saying, you know,
you're a greedy little girl.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
And she fired her good. She fired it right on
the spot.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
She said, you know what, I don't want somebody telling
my child that because they want more food that they're greedy.
And for me, as an American and maybe that's something different,
is that greediness always meant that you want more money.
So I think it's interesting the idea of sort of
what reedy being involved in dispense.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
One of the ways in which French culinary culture is
superior to any other is, you know, you use the
word gourmand to mean greedy, and when you saymond, you mean, oh,
he really loves to eat. And the French word gourmet,
which Americans and Brits have adapted, French folks don't really
use very much. You wouldn't say somebody's a gourmet unless
they were an American. But gourmand, yeah, though it means greedy,
(07:29):
and that sense is a totally positive benediction. Ten you know,
means really loves food. So that's one part of my
fascination with food.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
I can't remember many musicals that I've seen they have
restaurant scenes. I've interviewed actors who actually had to cook
on stage, or eat on stage, or.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Food is a part of the drama.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
But you've actually created a musical about a restaurant called
Our Table.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Can you tell me about it?
Speaker 3 (07:59):
I'd love to. I wrote it with the great Broadway
composer David Shire, and it was inspired not so much
by my book about cooking, but out of a piece
I wrote right after nine to eleven about a cook's contest,
and I was inspired by the two chefs, particularly Peter Hoffman,
who ran a beautiful little restaurant with his wife called Savoy,
(08:19):
and David Waltuck, who also ran a beautiful, originally very
small restaurant with his wife called Chanterrelle, and the way
that they poured themselves into these restaurants, that they poured
all of their soul and their selves into these restaurants.
But of course they were up against the inexorable constraints
of New York City real estate, which basically says, if
(08:40):
you've had a successful ten year run, we're going to
quadruple your income. And so I got to thinking about
about that. And Peter had been at cooking school with
Tony Bourdain and they were dear friends, but they defined
totally opposite ends of the cooking experience, Peter, an idealist
(09:00):
making his perfect food every night for a small clientele,
Tony Boordena on televisions. I wondered what would happen if
Tony Bourdena came back to rescue Peter's kitchen. And let's
imagine that he had had an affair with Peter's wife
twenty years before and they didn't know about it. And
so that was the premise of our table. But what
I particularly wanted to do was write about the sort
(09:21):
of micro mechanics of a restaurant, which I observed from
watching you and from watching other friends. I think that
chefs are the last true artists of the old fashioned kind,
right because they're simultaneously trying to be inventive artistic. They
have a high standard, but at the same time they
(09:42):
lived to please the way Shakespeare lived to please. You
can't say, though a poet can say, well, if you
don't like it, tough. Chefs are both artists and their
inventiveness and artisans in their commitment to a craft that
has to please. So I wanted to articulate that, but
also capture not the kind of the splendid and extravagant
(10:02):
gestures of a kitchen, which you often see on television,
but all the tiny little you said to me once, Ruthie.
It is one of my favorite sayings, and I put
it into the show. Every table is a world, and
that's what a true restaurateur understands. Every table is something
is going on, and that a great host hass to recognize.
(10:23):
So I wrote a song with David Shire called Chopping Onions,
Folding Napkins, in which the husband whose chef is in
the kitchen chopping onions and his wife, who runs the
front of the house is in the dining room folding
napkins getting ready for the service, and at the same
time they're having a fight about her old boyfriend. And
of all the things I've ever written, I love the
(10:46):
micro drama of that because it struck me as true.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
We can listen to this on Spotify.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
On Spotify our table, I narrate it and we have
a wonderful cast Melissa Erico, Andy Taylor, Constantine Marulis, and
it's you know, it's it's a show about a restaurant
and infidelity. Infidelity is probably more interesting.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
I've been sulted by that nothing more interesting than a restaurant.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
I just wanted to write about the restaurant, but the
director kept saying, no, no, no, we need lovers and we
need all.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Of You know, what about food is seduction.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
I my wife seduced me with a bottle of champagne
when I was about nineteen. She chased me around the
Christmas tree with a bottle of Bum's Extra Dry. So
we kind of got that done. Of course, it's it
is seduction always. You know I loved Do you remember
the first meal you cooked from Martha? Oh, my gosh, yes,
I cooked her. I was so such a pretentious kid,
(11:41):
and probably still am. I cooked her a kishe because
I was learning to bake from my in my mother's kitchen,
her recipe. But in the years since, Martha has one
favorite meal which I cook her whenever I want to
please her, seduce more than please. And that is something
(12:02):
I learned to do in France, which is a good
roast chicken pules depress in France, with carrots with cumin
and orange potatoes roasted under the chicken and a broccoli
puree and then a caramelized garlic sauce. You know, and
if I know that that will always work.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Yeah, you said that you were raised on French food.
Where were you born and what did you.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
I was born in Philadelphia because my parents were graduate
students at the University of Pennsylvania, and my mother, who's
an extraordinary woman.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
So they were young.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
They were young, and they came from very simple backgrounds.
My grandparents were immigrants, on my father's side from Russia
Russian Jews, and on my mother's side from the Levant.
They were Sephardic Jews. On that side they had been
all around from Hebron to Baghdad and beyond. The previous
(13:06):
generation actually in Lisbon. My grandmother, who I knew very well,
was born in Lisbon. In any case, truly, they were
wandering Jews, and that's the background. But my mom, who
was an extraordinarily gifted woman in the manner of so
many women of her generation, latched onto French cooking and
(13:27):
it was fascinating because she was getting her PhD. She
had six children. In linguistics, in linguistics, in formal logic.
She was one of the early students of or researchers
in artificial languages and in computer translation, the stuff that
you get now on Google in a minute. She spent
a long time working on that side of things, and
(13:48):
then eventually became very well known for her work in
the genetics of language. She discovered one of the first
chromosomes that directly affect the way we form sentences in
any case. In addition into that, she was a passionate
nightly cook, and like so many women of her generation,
she discovered Julia Child and French cooking in the mid sixties.
(14:09):
Explained to Julia Child, I guess we should. In fact,
I did a little piece not long ago, long piece
actually for the New Yorker about Judith Jones, who was
Julia Child's editor, who discovered her really out of a
slush pile of a rejected book and saw that it
could be something great. Julia Child was the American doyenne
of French cooking, wrote had a TV series called The
(14:30):
French Chef. Like all people who are going on television,
her great gift was complete un self consciousness. She was
sloppy and gray at beautiful high boys. Then she educated.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
Dropped a chicken famously. She was such a kind of
total change to what the American cook, domestic cook.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
The Benny Crocker cook. Yes, exactly too. Now you now
chopped the ratits. Oh no, here's the joe. It's on
the floor. And it was wonderful and it liberated an
entire generation. And my mom is a perfectionist, and she
just became a great French cook. And when I say,
I mean all the things that we would never even
(15:09):
do now, like beef Wellington, you know, or kleavac of salmon,
or turnado rossini, you know, all of those things that
belong to the past of French cooking. Now she did.
And her great triumph was a grand Marnier soufle, which
to this day I would still say is the single
I will put a special golden border around the lemon
(15:31):
tarte and chocolate nemesis here at the River Cafe. But
was spectacular. And during the pandemic, when Martha and I
were alone, as all of us were, I set myself
the task of mastering my mother's gramarnieresu, Do you.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Have a recipe?
Speaker 3 (15:44):
I have her recipe?
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Did she write it down.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
For She wrote it down for me. But it's a
somewhat metaphysical recipe because the key moment in it is
she says, beat the egg whites until they are not
truly stiff and yet not entirely soft, which is a
metaphysical zone to try and arrive at right and over time,
I just did it by trial and error. And she
had one very smart you know, with the colin French
(16:08):
and Astus's hint, which is to have the oven at
four hundred degrees fahirneight and then turn it down once
this alay is in, and astonishingly it makes for it
makes for much better loft on it. But my mama
cooked every night for her six children and husband, and
she loved to shop down in Montreal. We moved to
(16:28):
Montreal when I was eleven because my parents got jobs
at McGill University. As I say, and she, you know,
I have nothing but memories of her cooking all the time.
And on my thirteenth birthday, she knew how much I
loved to eat, because I was the kid in the
family who was always greediest of all. And she said,
(16:50):
what's your favorite thing for dinner? And I said beef
strugging off because it really was my favorite thing at
that point. She said, you're going to make it for
your own birthday dinner. And she showed me each step
along the way. Startaging the peppers and the onions, and
then the beef, and making the sauce with stock and
tomato paste and sour cream, and then the sheer magic
(17:11):
of that transformation, the movement from raw to cooked and
then from raw to cooked to delicious was overwhelming for me.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Was that a rare occasion? Then to bring her children
into the kitchen?
Speaker 3 (17:23):
No, we were in there all the time. The only
problem was my mother is, bless her, an extremely impatient woman,
which is one reason why she got those things done.
And so she would always yell at you, not in
an angry way, but you know how that is. We
all do it in the kitchen. I need the salt, No,
I need it now, I need you know. And as
a consequence, very few people could quite take the emotional
(17:47):
heat in her kitchen, and I inherited all of her impatience.
And as a consequence, everyone of my immediate family have
tried to be my soux chef and they've all quit,
all walked out. And what about your father did No,
my dad didn't cook at all, but he loved my
mother's cooking.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
So you grew up in this house of six children
your parents is incredibly dynamic and interesting, and meal times
where all of you, eight of you sat down every night.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
It was part of the beauty of my upbringing, and
it's something I took with me and have been probably
unduly religious about. With my own family. We always had
dinner together, and dinner was always delicious, and it was
always a debating society, and it was always a community,
and there were always politics being played out, older children,
(18:36):
younger children, middle children, the middle children. Now I'll say
bitterly that the older children, my sister Allison, and myself
were competing for my father's attention. But whatever was going
on at the table, it was always going on. In
that sense that the dinner table is the altar and
sacrament of family life is something that I've taken forward
(18:57):
with me into my own existence. To my children's enormous frustration,
because they became accustomed. At eight fifteen am, as they
were leaving for school, bleary eyed, exhausted, barely able to
keep themselves together, I'd say, what would you like for
dinner tonight? Would you like the salmon with lentils? Or
I can do I can do a roast chicken, but
I just need to know so I can go shop
(19:18):
for it. And then they said salmon do.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
It growing up in a family where meals were taken together,
or your mother may be willing to do. You remember
leaving the comfort of home when you went to McGill
and being exposed to completely different world. What was that
like When McGill was was home, so it was I lived, say.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Martha, my wife and I were both at McGill together,
but we it's a Canadian thing, you know, go away
to school, you go nearby. But when we moved to
New York in the summer of nineteen eighty, we had
just graduated, and we got on a bus that said
New York City like in a four He's musical, and
my dad saw us off. He thought it was a
mad adventure. We were going to go live in New York.
(20:06):
And he said to me as I got on the bus,
he said, just remember when you get to New York,
never underestimate the other person's insecurities.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
As a general.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
As a general piece of advice. And it's the best
advice I've ever gotten.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
It didn't advise you where to eat.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
I thought you might say, no, you forget to go
to Louisia.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
The thing that inspired me when we got to New
York was a writer actually was Calvin Trillin, bless him,
and he wrote beautifully about sort of folk dining in
New York Russen Daughters, the Great smoke Fish impo him
the local Italian restaurants. But I arrived in New York
and I had to cook. We had a tiny basement apartment.
It was nine feet by eleven. No one believes this
(20:48):
when I tell it, but we lived there for three years.
The size of this.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Tape About the size of this room.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Yes, oh, oh my god, this room would have been
a mansion. No, it's half the size of this room. Yeah,
it's half the size of this room. I did a
one man show once where I came out cold and
lay down in blue tape, a nine by eleven rectangle.
Then I exited. I came back on and said, this
is the room my wife and I lived in for
three years when we came to New York. But I
(21:14):
was determined to do nothing but the best cooking. So
we had this tiny little stove in an unventilated nine
by eleven room, and I would do not you know,
you know, heat and serve things. I would do, you know,
tuno pav or you know, a whole roast chicken, in
this tiny eleven and the whole room would fill with smoke,
right so you'd open the one window we had and
(21:36):
the smoke would pour out onto the pavement of eighty
seventh Street.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
And you're a student at.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
You knew you wanted to be an art historian. Did
you study art?
Speaker 3 (21:48):
I did. I studied art history, and I was accepted
to a pH d program at the Institute of Fine
Arts at New York University. But for me, that was
just a mask. It was a beard. I wanted to
be a writer, an essayist in the songwriter. Those were
the two things I wanted. But it was a way
of getting to New York. I had a fellowship to
go to NYU. But then my first day, my first
(22:10):
fall at NYU, at the Institute, where I intended just
to pass through and kind of wave quickly on my
way to the New Yorker, actually I met Kirk Varnado,
who was for both of us, a best friend, who
was the most inspired I get for clemped thinking of
that now, a teacher who has ever lived. He was
a great art historian, became the chief curator of the
(22:32):
Museum of Modern Art eventually, and he was such an
inspiring teacher and mentor and model that it became a
kind of diversion in my life for the next ten
years that I actually did my degrees in art history
and we ended up doing a big show together at
the Museum of Modern Art.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Do you remember eating with him?
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Oh, my god. Kirk loved as you know, loved good food,
and he loved French culture, not just French cuisine, but
French culture. And it was the first time in my
life we would go out for dinner. And we were,
you know, kids living in a basement and Kirk was
a young professor, wasn't that he had, you know, a
lot of money or anything. And he has just gotten
married to Ellen Zimmerman, his extraordinary artist wife. And we
(23:13):
would go out for dinner and have a bottle of
white wine, champagne to start, bottle of white wine, bottle
of red wine something afterwards it was set anything.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
It sounds like, you said, a bottle of red wine.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
Well, we would go, you know, we would really we
would eat well. And there was a restaurant in Washington,
DC that we went to once called the Paviallon, like
the old French place in New York. And uh, the
Kirk loved. He loved the intensity of that, he loved
the expansiveness of it. He loved everything that a great
(23:45):
French meal stood for as a piece of the history
of the pluralism of pleasures and so on. And among
the happiest days of my life, in which I believe
you participated too, is that when we lived in France,
we had a tradition whenever Kirk and Ellen were there
that we would have Cathedral in the lunch and we
(24:05):
go up to Rance or Shark and then spend the
morning touring the cathedral. Richard was with us.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
I think they had to Shark to Sharks.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
All exactly, and Kirkwood descant brilliantly and unforgettably about the
facade and the sculpture and the changes and the meanings
and the possibilities. And then after that, you know, staggeringly
informative and illuminating morning, we'd go for a two star
or three star lunch.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
We ate in a restaurant. I think it was called
something like frost Fois.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Just to introjective I love for Kenneth Tita. Do you
remember when in the book when she said we're going
to eat in this restaurant called, and he said, any
restaurant called Shay is going to be bad.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
I refuse.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
I was going to look up for Kirk Varnadov's speech.
He died in two thousand and three, and both Adam
and I I gave eulogies for him at the Metropolitan Museum.
It brought this back nineteen seventy two, an unrelenting rainstorm
in Paris, Richard and I, Judy Bing and Bud Marshner
(25:14):
bolt for shelter into the Cafe Bozaar to meet their friend.
A gaspingly handsome man strides into the restaurant, wet and
wind swept from the ride on his motorcycle, an eight
P fifteen MOTORGUTSI. He has broad shoulders, long hair, mustache,
and big sidebirds. He tries to find a space for himself,
(25:35):
his helmet and his leather jacket. As he squeezes onto
our table. He's already launched into a story about artists
who ate here in the turn of the century. Too
big for the restaurant with a story to tell. This
was Kirk.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
It's a beautiful, beautiful description restaurant. You know he was
a man of such expanse, of authority and appetite at
the same time time. Such a great appreciator. And you know,
the two things that always come to mind for me is,
you know, he loved the brassery delille on the ill
Saint Luis, which is a classic old fashioned brasser and
(26:12):
would love the the geaurettedu porque with lentils. You know,
really basic things. But he was, as you know, he
died of ridiculously young. And you know, when Kirk was
on chemo in the last couple of years of his life,
I would go with him to the the chemo suite
as they called it, bizarrely, and he would sit because
(26:35):
he couldn't waste time, you know, he couldn't waste time
being having cancer. He would sit with the IV in
his arm and talk about art and talk about lectures
he was going to give or a lecture I was
going to get, and we bat ideas around. He was
working on a series of lectures National Gallery in Washington
about to abstract art, and he would just test them
out on me, and you know, you were kind of
(26:57):
curtained off from the other patients. And finally, after we've
been doing this for about six weeks, the Kurt and
opened is very sweet Russian guy ball from the treatment
with putting on his hat. Set. Excuse me, he said
to Kirk, you are professor, and Kirk said, yeah, yeah,
I'm a teacher. And he said, ah, he said, because
he said, every week I come here when I know
(27:20):
you're going to be here. He said, I used to
bring a book, but now I just listened to you.
And that was Kirk.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
That was Kirk.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
We were talking about. You were cooking in New York
in this one room. You were involved in the Institute
of Fine Arts with the Kirk. He was starting to
write for The New Yorker. And were you just evolved
in the restaurant scene as well in New York or
was it mostly just cooking.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Well, at the beginning, it was me attempting to cook
like my mom. For Martha. We had one. You know,
I think it's true that all you remember Tolstoy says
about happy and unhappy families. And my theory is that
all bad marriages have a new fight every day, they
find something new to fight about. Good marriages had the
same fight over and over and over and over. So
(28:04):
Martha and I have been having the same fight for
forty plus years now, and it's that I like things
done rare. That was part of the culinary esthetic of
my family. And Martha comes from a well done family.
And this is a greater abyss than if she were
Protestant and I were Catholic. But the great thing is
if you go out to eat, you find that medium
(28:25):
is a perfect word of tender resolution, right because I
can say medium rare and Martha says medium.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Well, I shock everybody here now, I think because I think,
actually an Italian cooking, you don't eat rare meat.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
No.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Richard's mother was an Italian cook from Trieste. Really didn't
like anything rare. And I think if you kind of
then take that a bit further, you really enjoy I
wouldn't say a well done, dry piece of meat, but
you do like a piece of meat falling off the bone.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
Breaze for hours, solution and everything is braising everything, So
I do you know, I do becoming a vegetarian braised
beef and you know seven hour lamb in the French ware,
you know, you slow cook a lamb, and I much
prefer that it's like this this stink.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
If you like listening to Ruthie's table for would you
please make sure to write and review the podcast on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, O, wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
If food is all that we've described, and you are
also a very socially conscious, very political person and writer,
do you have thoughts about the politics of food.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
I have been lucky to have good professors on that cause, yourself,
Alice Waters, Peter Hoffman, Dan Barber, who all feel passionately
about those subjects and to the degree that I can
honor it myself. But I go to the green market
on Union Square and buy from farmers. I try not
to be a puritan about it, because I recognize that
(30:12):
the things that we believe in can often be unobtainable
and hard to do, so I try to recognize that.
But you know, my basic view of food is, you know,
it's the most beautifully universal thing that human beings do
every stage of our lives. And if you think about it,
there's almost a universal grammar of food. Right. We all
(30:35):
like a neutral starch and a pungent protein. Right, whether
it's paper deli with mulinnaisy sauce, or it's a cassavo
root with a pungent African chili or it's curry over rice.
That's kind of the universal human meal everyone today, billion
people are going to sit down and have a neutral
starch and a pungent protein A pizza is. That's what
(30:58):
a pizza is. The beauty of that universality never ceases
to astonish me. And the degree to which our humanity
is prisoned, if you like, filtered through the meals we eat,
I think is a powerful thing. And I deeply believe
Ruthy that there's a direct connection between the pleasures we
enjoy and the politics we want. Because if there's one
(31:21):
thing that I've spent the last fifteen years writing about,
liberal democracy apparently with absolutely no success at all in
altering anybody's view, because it remains more in danger today
as we sit together than at any time in my lifetime, certainly,
But the core principle of healthy liberal democracy is pluralism.
(31:42):
There are many menus in a liberal democracy. We believe
in many menus. We'd love to go out for Indian food.
We welcome immigrants because they bring with them, whether they're
Italians or Bangladeshis, they bring with them flavors and tastes
we haven't had before. That's part of the the meaning
and the magic of a pluralistic democracy. So the pleasure
(32:06):
we take in our everyday food, the pleasure we take.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
And the ability to have it, and the ability to
have it, and we're you know, I just somebody told
me the other day that the military, a huge percentage
of people in the arm of the American Army, Navy,
Air Force are in food stamps. These people are fighting
supposedly for us, and they're not being able to eat food.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
You know, this is.
Speaker 3 (32:32):
At the same time one of the great and you know,
one of my favorite books about food is Elizabeth Leeward's
Sacred Food I think it's called, And one of the
points she makes is the peasant cultures around the world
have usually been among the most creative and productive, and
we get beautiful, universal things like rice puddings that we share.
(32:52):
So I really believe that there's no that not only
is there no distance between the pleasures of the table
and the necessities of politics, there's a direct connection. We
want to assert universality. Everyone should eat well, and we
want to assert pluralism. Everybody should be free to eat
the menu that they desire. And that isn't just true
(33:13):
about the things we have at dinner. It's true about
the things we do in bed, the people we choose
to love, the way we choose to identify pluralism is
a sign of a healthy polity.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
We often eat food for comfort, and we have a
question that we do ask everyone at the end, which
is to say, if food is sharing, and food is
remembering your parents, going to Paris, or cooking in a
one room apartment, it's also comfort. Is there something that
you would go for particularly?
Speaker 3 (33:41):
Yes, I am, and absolutely I have one comfort menu
And it came about in a nice way. When we
were living in Paris, Luca got terribly sick with salmonella poisoning.
We didn't know what it was, and I ended up
at ten o'clock the night, having literally have them in
my arms, running to the children's hospital in the in
the seventh or on small and they identified what it
(34:04):
was and they got him on the right antibiotics. So
by about midnight we finally got him home, and you know,
we had been in a state of absolute anxiety, and
we hadn't eaten, and now we took a deep breath
and I looked around what was there, and all I
had was in the cupboard was rice and some canned beans,
and I had some apples i'd gotten, and I made
Martha dinner of spicy rice and beans with the rice
(34:28):
treated with some turmeric so it would go orange. Spicy
rice and beans with a little rugeli mixed in that
I had in the fridge, and then a baked apple
with red wine and noir and walnuts. And it was
the single best meal we'd ever had because it was
the worst day of our life that was now ending decently,
and from that day to this, whenever we have a
crisis or difficulty of sunkind, I said, I'm going to
(34:51):
let's just have spicy rice and beans and a baked apple,
and I know that that will be restored.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
And yeah, thank you, Adam.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
Pleasure with Hi.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
It's Ruthie Rogers, and I'm so excited to announce that
we have a new book. Squeeze Me has forty seven
delicious lemon recipes from the River Cafe, Beautiful art by
Ed Bouchet and words by Heather Eve.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Pre Order now
Adam Gopnik is a close friend and my guest on
this episode from the archive, recorded last December. This gives
me the chance to tell you all that Adam will
be playing in his own, very funny and touching one
man show, Adam Gopnik's New York at Lincoln Center, from
October seventeenth through the twenty sixth. We can find tickets
(00:22):
online at Adamgopniknewyork dot com. I'm coming from London, so
I'll see you there. In the thirty four years at
Adam Gopnik and I have been friends. We have lived
in the same city, Paris, where he wrote his beautiful book,
Paris to the Moon. We have loved and then lost
(00:43):
our best friend, the art historian and curator Kirk Varnado.
We've taken care of each other's children as if they
were our own, and sung show tunes together from every
Broadway musical because we know.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
All the lyrics.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Most of all, we have never stopped cooking, eating, and
talking about our passion for food. We may be separated
by an ocean, but we are always minutes and inches away.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
All the while, Adam leads a terrific life in writing.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Staff writer for the New Yorker and author of nine
books of non fiction, fiction and memoir. Next year, he
will perform his one man show Talk Therapy in New
York City. Adam is here now with me in London.
In four days, he's eaten in the River Cafe four times.
This morning we sang You've got to be taught from
(01:31):
South Pacific, Rainbow Connection from the Muppets, and I've never
been in love before from Guys and Dolls. Tonight, after
seeing Giant at the Royal Court, we will go home
and cook to moto pasta my definition of a good friend.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Thank you, sir Adam.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
You've chosen the recipe and it was from the very
first cookbook we ever did, the River Cafe Cookbook, and
the recipe you chose was penny with quick sausage sauce, which.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
You like to beat.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
I would love to read it, and I shouldd that
this is part of a diptick, as our historians would say,
with a penny with a slow sausage sauce. So that
is why it's quick. Two hundred and fifty grams of
penny regatta, two tablespoons of olive oil. Two red onions,
peeled and chopped, five sausages, meat crumbled, half a tablespoon
(02:20):
of fresh rosemary, two small dried chilis, eight hundred grams
of peeled plum tomatoes, one hundred and fifty mililters of cream,
and one hundred and twenty grams of parmesan freshly grated.
You heat the olive oil in the saucepan and you
fry the onion lightly. You add the sausage, rosemary, bay leaves,
and chili all together, frying them over a high heat,
(02:42):
stirring to mash the sausages. You remove all but one
tablespoon of the fat and continue to cook for twenty minutes.
Add the tomatoes, stir and return to the boil. Then
remove from the heat. Cook the penne in boiling salted water,
then drain and add directly to the sauce. Stir the
cream into the sauce with the penny and half the parmesan,
(03:04):
and then you serve the pusta with the remaining parmesan
grated on top.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
When I asked you for a recipe that you'd like
to read Ruthie's Table four, you immediately said, I know
exactly what I want to do. I want to do
the penne with quick sausage sauce.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
And I was wondering why.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Well, because it was nineteen ninety four. We had just
moved to Paris, my wife Martha and our little son
Luke had just moved to Paris then, and we got
your book, and by the strangest kind of syncopated cooking beat,
I started cooking your food in our Parisian kitchen, although
I had been raised on French food, and there was
(03:44):
something about the logic and grammar of this recipe that
was inspiring and explained so much. In other words, you
were taking the pungent things, the sweet onions, and then
the pungent sausages, and the hot pepper which I had
never cooked with before, the dried parakeet peppers, and making
all of that. Then you were reducing it with the
(04:07):
wine and then adding the tomatoes, and that basic pattern, right,
you have and it can be anchovies and.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Garlic, get the flavor.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Tomato right, then cook it down with wine until it's
almost dry, and then adding tomatoes and then doing that.
How many times in a lifetime do we do that?
And that basic grammar, the savory flavors, the wine reduction,
the addition of tomato or cream or whatever it might be,
(04:39):
is somehow so fundamental. It was like this for me
was a foundational recipe. Once I knew how to do this,
I felt that I could do almost anything. So that's
why I love it so much, even though, to be
honest with you, I probably couldn't, so to speak, sell
it at my dining table today because the ladies I
cook for, Martha and Olivia, are both pescatarians at this point,
(05:00):
so I couldn't.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
But do you ever have it? Make it for yourself?
Speaker 3 (05:02):
I always make it for myself when I'm alone. I
either make this or the matricianas Mike.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Can you get the Lucunega sausages in New York?
Speaker 3 (05:10):
You can get good sausages. You get good Italian sausages
in New York. But those are when I'm home alone.
That's what I make for myself.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
So you've written, just written a brilliant piece about the election.
You've written about the politics of our country. You've written
about Paris. You've written and yet you are uniquely interested,
I think, in writing and writing about food, and so
food comes into your musical. I mean, there aren't very
many musicals about a restaurant. There aren't very many articles
(05:41):
in the New Yorker. Well, now there are a few
more about food. Tell us about one of your books
that you've written where food has come into your book.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
I wrote an entire book just about the philosophy of
eating called The Table Comes First, which was the title
was given to me by our friend Furcus of Saint
John because we were having elevenses once and he said,
genuine he was genuinely perturbed. He said, there is this
young couple I know, he said, and they just getting
married and they want to buy a bed. He said,
(06:10):
don't they know the table comes first. They're having a
bed but no table. And I thought, oh, what a
beautiful thought. The table comes first. It's the altar in
the raft of human existence. So for me, my fascination
with food, I think comes from two you know, sharply
opposed places. On the one end, just pure reed. I
love to eat, and I see funny.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
That greed comes into food. I have a friend who
had a nanny and she overheard her child who said,
I'd want, you know, a biscuit, and she'd eaten like
five biscuits, and she heard the nanny saying, you know,
you're a greedy little girl.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
And she fired her good. She fired it right on
the spot.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
She said, you know what, I don't want somebody telling
my child that because they want more food that they're greedy.
And for me, as an American and maybe that's something different,
is that greediness always meant that you want more money.
So I think it's interesting the idea of sort of
what reedy being involved in dispense.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
One of the ways in which French culinary culture is
superior to any other is, you know, you use the
word gourmand to mean greedy, and when you saymond, you mean, oh,
he really loves to eat. And the French word gourmet,
which Americans and Brits have adapted, French folks don't really
use very much. You wouldn't say somebody's a gourmet unless
they were an American. But gourmand, yeah, though it means greedy,
(07:29):
and that sense is a totally positive benediction. Ten you know,
means really loves food. So that's one part of my
fascination with food.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
I can't remember many musicals that I've seen they have
restaurant scenes. I've interviewed actors who actually had to cook
on stage, or eat on stage, or.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Food is a part of the drama.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
But you've actually created a musical about a restaurant called
Our Table.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Can you tell me about it?
Speaker 3 (07:59):
I'd love to. I wrote it with the great Broadway
composer David Shire, and it was inspired not so much
by my book about cooking, but out of a piece
I wrote right after nine to eleven about a cook's contest,
and I was inspired by the two chefs, particularly Peter Hoffman,
who ran a beautiful little restaurant with his wife called Savoy,
(08:19):
and David Waltuck, who also ran a beautiful, originally very
small restaurant with his wife called Chanterrelle, and the way
that they poured themselves into these restaurants, that they poured
all of their soul and their selves into these restaurants.
But of course they were up against the inexorable constraints
of New York City real estate, which basically says, if
(08:40):
you've had a successful ten year run, we're going to
quadruple your income. And so I got to thinking about
about that. And Peter had been at cooking school with
Tony Bourdain and they were dear friends, but they defined
totally opposite ends of the cooking experience, Peter, an idealist
(09:00):
making his perfect food every night for a small clientele,
Tony Boordena on televisions. I wondered what would happen if
Tony Bourdena came back to rescue Peter's kitchen. And let's
imagine that he had had an affair with Peter's wife
twenty years before and they didn't know about it. And
so that was the premise of our table. But what
I particularly wanted to do was write about the sort
(09:21):
of micro mechanics of a restaurant, which I observed from
watching you and from watching other friends. I think that
chefs are the last true artists of the old fashioned kind,
right because they're simultaneously trying to be inventive artistic. They
have a high standard, but at the same time they
(09:42):
lived to please the way Shakespeare lived to please. You
can't say, though a poet can say, well, if you
don't like it, tough. Chefs are both artists and their
inventiveness and artisans in their commitment to a craft that
has to please. So I wanted to articulate that, but
also capture not the kind of the splendid and extravagant
(10:02):
gestures of a kitchen, which you often see on television,
but all the tiny little you said to me once, Ruthie.
It is one of my favorite sayings, and I put
it into the show. Every table is a world, and
that's what a true restaurateur understands. Every table is something
is going on, and that a great host hass to recognize.
(10:23):
So I wrote a song with David Shire called Chopping Onions,
Folding Napkins, in which the husband whose chef is in
the kitchen chopping onions and his wife, who runs the
front of the house is in the dining room folding
napkins getting ready for the service, and at the same
time they're having a fight about her old boyfriend. And
of all the things I've ever written, I love the
(10:46):
micro drama of that because it struck me as true.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
We can listen to this on Spotify.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
On Spotify our table, I narrate it and we have
a wonderful cast Melissa Erico, Andy Taylor, Constantine Marulis, and
it's you know, it's it's a show about a restaurant
and infidelity. Infidelity is probably more interesting.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
I've been sulted by that nothing more interesting than a restaurant.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
I just wanted to write about the restaurant, but the
director kept saying, no, no, no, we need lovers and we
need all.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Of You know, what about food is seduction.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
I my wife seduced me with a bottle of champagne
when I was about nineteen. She chased me around the
Christmas tree with a bottle of Bum's Extra Dry. So
we kind of got that done. Of course, it's it
is seduction always. You know I loved Do you remember
the first meal you cooked from Martha? Oh, my gosh, yes,
I cooked her. I was so such a pretentious kid,
(11:41):
and probably still am. I cooked her a kishe because
I was learning to bake from my in my mother's kitchen,
her recipe. But in the years since, Martha has one
favorite meal which I cook her whenever I want to
please her, seduce more than please. And that is something
(12:02):
I learned to do in France, which is a good
roast chicken pules depress in France, with carrots with cumin
and orange potatoes roasted under the chicken and a broccoli
puree and then a caramelized garlic sauce. You know, and
if I know that that will always work.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Yeah, you said that you were raised on French food.
Where were you born and what did you.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
I was born in Philadelphia because my parents were graduate
students at the University of Pennsylvania, and my mother, who's
an extraordinary woman.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
So they were young.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
They were young, and they came from very simple backgrounds.
My grandparents were immigrants, on my father's side from Russia
Russian Jews, and on my mother's side from the Levant.
They were Sephardic Jews. On that side they had been
all around from Hebron to Baghdad and beyond. The previous
(13:06):
generation actually in Lisbon. My grandmother, who I knew very well,
was born in Lisbon. In any case, truly, they were
wandering Jews, and that's the background. But my mom, who
was an extraordinarily gifted woman in the manner of so
many women of her generation, latched onto French cooking and
(13:27):
it was fascinating because she was getting her PhD. She
had six children. In linguistics, in linguistics, in formal logic.
She was one of the early students of or researchers
in artificial languages and in computer translation, the stuff that
you get now on Google in a minute. She spent
a long time working on that side of things, and
(13:48):
then eventually became very well known for her work in
the genetics of language. She discovered one of the first
chromosomes that directly affect the way we form sentences in
any case. In addition into that, she was a passionate
nightly cook, and like so many women of her generation,
she discovered Julia Child and French cooking in the mid sixties.
(14:09):
Explained to Julia Child, I guess we should. In fact,
I did a little piece not long ago, long piece
actually for the New Yorker about Judith Jones, who was
Julia Child's editor, who discovered her really out of a
slush pile of a rejected book and saw that it
could be something great. Julia Child was the American doyenne
of French cooking, wrote had a TV series called The
(14:30):
French Chef. Like all people who are going on television,
her great gift was complete un self consciousness. She was
sloppy and gray at beautiful high boys. Then she educated.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
Dropped a chicken famously. She was such a kind of
total change to what the American cook, domestic cook.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
The Benny Crocker cook. Yes, exactly too. Now you now
chopped the ratits. Oh no, here's the joe. It's on
the floor. And it was wonderful and it liberated an
entire generation. And my mom is a perfectionist, and she
just became a great French cook. And when I say,
I mean all the things that we would never even
(15:09):
do now, like beef Wellington, you know, or kleavac of salmon,
or turnado rossini, you know, all of those things that
belong to the past of French cooking. Now she did.
And her great triumph was a grand Marnier soufle, which
to this day I would still say is the single
I will put a special golden border around the lemon
(15:31):
tarte and chocolate nemesis here at the River Cafe. But
was spectacular. And during the pandemic, when Martha and I
were alone, as all of us were, I set myself
the task of mastering my mother's gramarnieresu, Do you.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Have a recipe?
Speaker 3 (15:44):
I have her recipe?
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Did she write it down.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
For She wrote it down for me. But it's a
somewhat metaphysical recipe because the key moment in it is
she says, beat the egg whites until they are not
truly stiff and yet not entirely soft, which is a
metaphysical zone to try and arrive at right and over time,
I just did it by trial and error. And she
had one very smart you know, with the colin French
(16:08):
and Astus's hint, which is to have the oven at
four hundred degrees fahirneight and then turn it down once
this alay is in, and astonishingly it makes for it
makes for much better loft on it. But my mama
cooked every night for her six children and husband, and
she loved to shop down in Montreal. We moved to
(16:28):
Montreal when I was eleven because my parents got jobs
at McGill University. As I say, and she, you know,
I have nothing but memories of her cooking all the time.
And on my thirteenth birthday, she knew how much I
loved to eat, because I was the kid in the
family who was always greediest of all. And she said,
(16:50):
what's your favorite thing for dinner? And I said beef
strugging off because it really was my favorite thing at
that point. She said, you're going to make it for
your own birthday dinner. And she showed me each step
along the way. Startaging the peppers and the onions, and
then the beef, and making the sauce with stock and
tomato paste and sour cream, and then the sheer magic
(17:11):
of that transformation, the movement from raw to cooked and
then from raw to cooked to delicious was overwhelming for me.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Was that a rare occasion? Then to bring her children
into the kitchen?
Speaker 3 (17:23):
No, we were in there all the time. The only
problem was my mother is, bless her, an extremely impatient woman,
which is one reason why she got those things done.
And so she would always yell at you, not in
an angry way, but you know how that is. We
all do it in the kitchen. I need the salt, No,
I need it now, I need you know. And as
a consequence, very few people could quite take the emotional
(17:47):
heat in her kitchen, and I inherited all of her impatience.
And as a consequence, everyone of my immediate family have
tried to be my soux chef and they've all quit,
all walked out. And what about your father did No,
my dad didn't cook at all, but he loved my
mother's cooking.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
So you grew up in this house of six children
your parents is incredibly dynamic and interesting, and meal times
where all of you, eight of you sat down every night.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
It was part of the beauty of my upbringing, and
it's something I took with me and have been probably
unduly religious about. With my own family. We always had
dinner together, and dinner was always delicious, and it was
always a debating society, and it was always a community,
and there were always politics being played out, older children,
(18:36):
younger children, middle children, the middle children. Now I'll say
bitterly that the older children, my sister Allison, and myself
were competing for my father's attention. But whatever was going
on at the table, it was always going on. In
that sense that the dinner table is the altar and
sacrament of family life is something that I've taken forward
(18:57):
with me into my own existence. To my children's enormous frustration,
because they became accustomed. At eight fifteen am, as they
were leaving for school, bleary eyed, exhausted, barely able to
keep themselves together, I'd say, what would you like for
dinner tonight? Would you like the salmon with lentils? Or
I can do I can do a roast chicken, but
I just need to know so I can go shop
(19:18):
for it. And then they said salmon do.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
It growing up in a family where meals were taken together,
or your mother may be willing to do. You remember
leaving the comfort of home when you went to McGill
and being exposed to completely different world. What was that
like When McGill was was home, so it was I lived, say.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Martha, my wife and I were both at McGill together,
but we it's a Canadian thing, you know, go away
to school, you go nearby. But when we moved to
New York in the summer of nineteen eighty, we had
just graduated, and we got on a bus that said
New York City like in a four He's musical, and
my dad saw us off. He thought it was a
mad adventure. We were going to go live in New York.
(20:06):
And he said to me as I got on the bus,
he said, just remember when you get to New York,
never underestimate the other person's insecurities.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
As a general.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
As a general piece of advice. And it's the best
advice I've ever gotten.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
It didn't advise you where to eat.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
I thought you might say, no, you forget to go
to Louisia.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
The thing that inspired me when we got to New
York was a writer actually was Calvin Trillin, bless him,
and he wrote beautifully about sort of folk dining in
New York Russen Daughters, the Great smoke Fish impo him
the local Italian restaurants. But I arrived in New York
and I had to cook. We had a tiny basement apartment.
It was nine feet by eleven. No one believes this
(20:48):
when I tell it, but we lived there for three years.
The size of this.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Tape About the size of this room.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Yes, oh, oh my god, this room would have been
a mansion. No, it's half the size of this room. Yeah,
it's half the size of this room. I did a
one man show once where I came out cold and
lay down in blue tape, a nine by eleven rectangle.
Then I exited. I came back on and said, this
is the room my wife and I lived in for
three years when we came to New York. But I
(21:14):
was determined to do nothing but the best cooking. So
we had this tiny little stove in an unventilated nine
by eleven room, and I would do not you know,
you know, heat and serve things. I would do, you know,
tuno pav or you know, a whole roast chicken, in
this tiny eleven and the whole room would fill with smoke,
right so you'd open the one window we had and
(21:36):
the smoke would pour out onto the pavement of eighty
seventh Street.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
And you're a student at.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
You knew you wanted to be an art historian. Did
you study art?
Speaker 3 (21:48):
I did. I studied art history, and I was accepted
to a pH d program at the Institute of Fine
Arts at New York University. But for me, that was
just a mask. It was a beard. I wanted to
be a writer, an essayist in the songwriter. Those were
the two things I wanted. But it was a way
of getting to New York. I had a fellowship to
go to NYU. But then my first day, my first
(22:10):
fall at NYU, at the Institute, where I intended just
to pass through and kind of wave quickly on my
way to the New Yorker, actually I met Kirk Varnado,
who was for both of us, a best friend, who
was the most inspired I get for clemped thinking of
that now, a teacher who has ever lived. He was
a great art historian, became the chief curator of the
(22:32):
Museum of Modern Art eventually, and he was such an
inspiring teacher and mentor and model that it became a
kind of diversion in my life for the next ten
years that I actually did my degrees in art history
and we ended up doing a big show together at
the Museum of Modern Art.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Do you remember eating with him?
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Oh, my god. Kirk loved as you know, loved good food,
and he loved French culture, not just French cuisine, but
French culture. And it was the first time in my
life we would go out for dinner. And we were,
you know, kids living in a basement and Kirk was
a young professor, wasn't that he had, you know, a
lot of money or anything. And he has just gotten
married to Ellen Zimmerman, his extraordinary artist wife. And we
(23:13):
would go out for dinner and have a bottle of
white wine, champagne to start, bottle of white wine, bottle
of red wine something afterwards it was set anything.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
It sounds like, you said, a bottle of red wine.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
Well, we would go, you know, we would really we
would eat well. And there was a restaurant in Washington,
DC that we went to once called the Paviallon, like
the old French place in New York. And uh, the
Kirk loved. He loved the intensity of that, he loved
the expansiveness of it. He loved everything that a great
(23:45):
French meal stood for as a piece of the history
of the pluralism of pleasures and so on. And among
the happiest days of my life, in which I believe
you participated too, is that when we lived in France,
we had a tradition whenever Kirk and Ellen were there
that we would have Cathedral in the lunch and we
(24:05):
go up to Rance or Shark and then spend the
morning touring the cathedral. Richard was with us.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
I think they had to Shark to Sharks.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
All exactly, and Kirkwood descant brilliantly and unforgettably about the
facade and the sculpture and the changes and the meanings
and the possibilities. And then after that, you know, staggeringly
informative and illuminating morning, we'd go for a two star
or three star lunch.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
We ate in a restaurant. I think it was called
something like frost Fois.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Just to introjective I love for Kenneth Tita. Do you
remember when in the book when she said we're going
to eat in this restaurant called, and he said, any
restaurant called Shay is going to be bad.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
I refuse.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
I was going to look up for Kirk Varnadov's speech.
He died in two thousand and three, and both Adam
and I I gave eulogies for him at the Metropolitan Museum.
It brought this back nineteen seventy two, an unrelenting rainstorm
in Paris, Richard and I, Judy Bing and Bud Marshner
(25:14):
bolt for shelter into the Cafe Bozaar to meet their friend.
A gaspingly handsome man strides into the restaurant, wet and
wind swept from the ride on his motorcycle, an eight
P fifteen MOTORGUTSI. He has broad shoulders, long hair, mustache,
and big sidebirds. He tries to find a space for himself,
(25:35):
his helmet and his leather jacket. As he squeezes onto
our table. He's already launched into a story about artists
who ate here in the turn of the century. Too
big for the restaurant with a story to tell. This
was Kirk.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
It's a beautiful, beautiful description restaurant. You know he was
a man of such expanse, of authority and appetite at
the same time time. Such a great appreciator. And you know,
the two things that always come to mind for me is,
you know, he loved the brassery delille on the ill
Saint Luis, which is a classic old fashioned brasser and
(26:12):
would love the the geaurettedu porque with lentils. You know,
really basic things. But he was, as you know, he
died of ridiculously young. And you know, when Kirk was
on chemo in the last couple of years of his life,
I would go with him to the the chemo suite
as they called it, bizarrely, and he would sit because
(26:35):
he couldn't waste time, you know, he couldn't waste time
being having cancer. He would sit with the IV in
his arm and talk about art and talk about lectures
he was going to give or a lecture I was
going to get, and we bat ideas around. He was
working on a series of lectures National Gallery in Washington
about to abstract art, and he would just test them
out on me, and you know, you were kind of
(26:57):
curtained off from the other patients. And finally, after we've
been doing this for about six weeks, the Kurt and
opened is very sweet Russian guy ball from the treatment
with putting on his hat. Set. Excuse me, he said
to Kirk, you are professor, and Kirk said, yeah, yeah,
I'm a teacher. And he said, ah, he said, because
he said, every week I come here when I know
(27:20):
you're going to be here. He said, I used to
bring a book, but now I just listened to you.
And that was Kirk.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
That was Kirk.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
We were talking about. You were cooking in New York
in this one room. You were involved in the Institute
of Fine Arts with the Kirk. He was starting to
write for The New Yorker. And were you just evolved
in the restaurant scene as well in New York or
was it mostly just cooking.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Well, at the beginning, it was me attempting to cook
like my mom. For Martha. We had one. You know,
I think it's true that all you remember Tolstoy says
about happy and unhappy families. And my theory is that
all bad marriages have a new fight every day, they
find something new to fight about. Good marriages had the
same fight over and over and over and over. So
(28:04):
Martha and I have been having the same fight for
forty plus years now, and it's that I like things
done rare. That was part of the culinary esthetic of
my family. And Martha comes from a well done family.
And this is a greater abyss than if she were
Protestant and I were Catholic. But the great thing is
if you go out to eat, you find that medium
(28:25):
is a perfect word of tender resolution, right because I
can say medium rare and Martha says medium.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Well, I shock everybody here now, I think because I think,
actually an Italian cooking, you don't eat rare meat.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
No.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Richard's mother was an Italian cook from Trieste. Really didn't
like anything rare. And I think if you kind of
then take that a bit further, you really enjoy I
wouldn't say a well done, dry piece of meat, but
you do like a piece of meat falling off the bone.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
Breaze for hours, solution and everything is braising everything, So
I do you know, I do becoming a vegetarian braised
beef and you know seven hour lamb in the French ware,
you know, you slow cook a lamb, and I much
prefer that it's like this this stink.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
If you like listening to Ruthie's table for would you
please make sure to write and review the podcast on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, O, wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
If food is all that we've described, and you are
also a very socially conscious, very political person and writer,
do you have thoughts about the politics of food.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
I have been lucky to have good professors on that cause, yourself,
Alice Waters, Peter Hoffman, Dan Barber, who all feel passionately
about those subjects and to the degree that I can
honor it myself. But I go to the green market
on Union Square and buy from farmers. I try not
to be a puritan about it, because I recognize that
(30:12):
the things that we believe in can often be unobtainable
and hard to do, so I try to recognize that.
But you know, my basic view of food is, you know,
it's the most beautifully universal thing that human beings do
every stage of our lives. And if you think about it,
there's almost a universal grammar of food. Right. We all
(30:35):
like a neutral starch and a pungent protein. Right, whether
it's paper deli with mulinnaisy sauce, or it's a cassavo
root with a pungent African chili or it's curry over rice.
That's kind of the universal human meal everyone today, billion
people are going to sit down and have a neutral
starch and a pungent protein A pizza is. That's what
(30:58):
a pizza is. The beauty of that universality never ceases
to astonish me. And the degree to which our humanity
is prisoned, if you like, filtered through the meals we eat,
I think is a powerful thing. And I deeply believe
Ruthy that there's a direct connection between the pleasures we
enjoy and the politics we want. Because if there's one
(31:21):
thing that I've spent the last fifteen years writing about,
liberal democracy apparently with absolutely no success at all in
altering anybody's view, because it remains more in danger today
as we sit together than at any time in my lifetime, certainly,
But the core principle of healthy liberal democracy is pluralism.
(31:42):
There are many menus in a liberal democracy. We believe
in many menus. We'd love to go out for Indian food.
We welcome immigrants because they bring with them, whether they're
Italians or Bangladeshis, they bring with them flavors and tastes
we haven't had before. That's part of the the meaning
and the magic of a pluralistic democracy. So the pleasure
(32:06):
we take in our everyday food, the pleasure we take.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
And the ability to have it, and the ability to
have it, and we're you know, I just somebody told
me the other day that the military, a huge percentage
of people in the arm of the American Army, Navy,
Air Force are in food stamps. These people are fighting
supposedly for us, and they're not being able to eat food.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
You know, this is.
Speaker 3 (32:32):
At the same time one of the great and you know,
one of my favorite books about food is Elizabeth Leeward's
Sacred Food I think it's called, And one of the
points she makes is the peasant cultures around the world
have usually been among the most creative and productive, and
we get beautiful, universal things like rice puddings that we share.
(32:52):
So I really believe that there's no that not only
is there no distance between the pleasures of the table
and the necessities of politics, there's a direct connection. We
want to assert universality. Everyone should eat well, and we
want to assert pluralism. Everybody should be free to eat
the menu that they desire. And that isn't just true
(33:13):
about the things we have at dinner. It's true about
the things we do in bed, the people we choose
to love, the way we choose to identify pluralism is
a sign of a healthy polity.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
We often eat food for comfort, and we have a
question that we do ask everyone at the end, which
is to say, if food is sharing, and food is
remembering your parents, going to Paris, or cooking in a
one room apartment, it's also comfort. Is there something that
you would go for particularly?
Speaker 3 (33:41):
Yes, I am, and absolutely I have one comfort menu
And it came about in a nice way. When we
were living in Paris, Luca got terribly sick with salmonella poisoning.
We didn't know what it was, and I ended up
at ten o'clock the night, having literally have them in
my arms, running to the children's hospital in the in
the seventh or on small and they identified what it
(34:04):
was and they got him on the right antibiotics. So
by about midnight we finally got him home, and you know,
we had been in a state of absolute anxiety, and
we hadn't eaten, and now we took a deep breath
and I looked around what was there, and all I
had was in the cupboard was rice and some canned beans,
and I had some apples i'd gotten, and I made
Martha dinner of spicy rice and beans with the rice
(34:28):
treated with some turmeric so it would go orange. Spicy
rice and beans with a little rugeli mixed in that
I had in the fridge, and then a baked apple
with red wine and noir and walnuts. And it was
the single best meal we'd ever had because it was
the worst day of our life that was now ending decently,
and from that day to this, whenever we have a
crisis or difficulty of sunkind, I said, I'm going to
(34:51):
let's just have spicy rice and beans and a baked apple,
and I know that that will be restored.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
And yeah, thank you, Adam.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
Pleasure with Hi.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
It's Ruthie Rogers, and I'm so excited to announce that
we have a new book. Squeeze Me has forty seven
delicious lemon recipes from the River Cafe, Beautiful art by
Ed Bouchet and words by Heather Eve.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Pre Order now
Host
Ruth Rogers
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