When I think of Richard E. Grant, of course I think of his brilliant films and him as a great actor. But what I really think of is Richard and his wife Joan in the early days of The River Cafe. They were married a year before the restaurant opened and lived right across the river, coming in for lunch, always sitting at the same table, warm, lovely and absorbed in each other.
I remember their daughter Olivia being born a few years later and them bringing her in as a baby, when the restaurant was still small and starting up, just like her. Now, over thirty years later, Richard and I share something else in common: the loss of the partner we loved. We are in The River Cafe again to talk about the joy of family, food, friendship, and most of all, the joy of love.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You were listening to Ruthie's Table four in Partnership with Montclair.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
When I think of Richardy Grant, of course I think
of his brilliant films and him as a great actor.
But what I really think of is Richard and his
wife Joan in the early days of the River Cafe.
They were married a year before the restaurant opened and
lived right across the river. Coming in for lunch, are
(00:25):
we sitting at the same table. They were warm and
lovely and absorbed in each other. I remember their daughter,
Olivia being born a few years later, and then bringing
her in as a baby when the restaurant was still
small and starting up. Just like her. We all grew
up and off into our own lives. Now over thirty
(00:48):
years later, Richard and I share something else in common,
the loss of the partner we loved. People once asked me.
Someone asked me about my advice on grief, and I
have no advice on grief because it's so personal how
you do it. Whether I have a friend whose mother
went to bed for six months and never got out
because her son had died. She just took to her bed,
(01:09):
and you know, I never stopped. So we all have
different ways, And I was thinking, if we start with
the food part of that, do you eat for comfort
or did you stop eating when.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
I add for comfort? And the last once Journal was diagnosed,
and the subsequent eight months that she had left, which
we didn't know we're going to be so short, I
cooked three times a day, did you? But you know,
I'm so struck when everybody, anybody subsequent to her death
(01:42):
says to me, what would your final meal be? And
I said, well, the experience is of somebody who is
dying is that food is the last thing that they want.
That Because of the drugs that she was on for
lung cancer, everything started tasting like sam so it didn't matter.
It got to the point where it didn't matter what
(02:03):
I cooked. She would say, well, this doesn't really taste
of anything, or the texture of it is awful. So
she lost interest completely in food. But it didn't stop
having to make meals all the time. So I got
very inventive, more inventive in going through cookbooks, obviously yours,
(02:25):
trying to find things that would that she would like.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
So you were thinking of her when you were cooking.
It was not just a distraction for you to kind
of do something, because cooking can be that way. You
have to follow the recipe, you have to put the matter,
how sad you feel, you do have to put the
olive oil in the pan at a certain time. And
it does create a rhythm. It came as a method,
It came to order, almost, doesn't it. It does.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
And it's also because she said to me when she
was diagnosed, please make a promise to me, if you
can possibly keep it, that we are together all the
time and that I die with you in our house.
And I said, well, you know, I can try and
(03:10):
make that promise, but we just don't know what's down
the line. And apart from four days when she had
to go into the Royal Marsden because she got an infection,
we managed to honor that. So to go back to
your thing about cooking, it meant that, however short the
time was that I was in the kitchen, it meant
(03:31):
that it gave me some respite from dealing with her
pending imminent loss. And I suppose gave her time away
from me as well. And sometimes, you know, she would
fall asleep and then that gave me time to go
and cook. But having that routine and something to do
was incredibly important. And in terms of what you said
earlier that you can't give advice about how to deal
(03:53):
with loss or death. What I've found is when people
have said to me, oh, you get over it in time,
I really object to that because I think that I've
never wanted to get over it. It's a navigation around
it on a daily basis, and that's that really is
the way that I find that is the way that
(04:14):
I've I've coped with it that I don't have an
anticipation that is sort of a hump in the road
that I'm going to get over and the other side
it is going to be. You know, I'm now free
because I don't feel like that.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
I always thought the worst two words in the English
language was move on.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
So somebody said to me the other day, said, it's
been five years, Richard, you know you've got to move
on and you've got a man up and you've got
to start dating other people.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Yeah, that tells you more about the other person than
I think. If you can, I would say that because
I kind of went through a death experience of my
son six maybe ten years before, Richard, so I kind.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Of knew and you had no preparation for that.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
That one was that I always say there too, because
he had a seizure and yeah, it was like a
car crash.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
He was here one day.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Yeah, So the ones like you know, Richard, my Richard
and your jone is kind of being eased into that
world and the knowledge and everything. And then there's the
ones that you get a call and it's a car crash.
But I think that and so each one, you know,
for me, I couldn't cook after bo died, after the
car you know, I got the phone, I'd go in
(05:23):
the kitchen, I'd start cooking and start to cry or whatever,
you know. And actually coming in here was for me,
it was like coming home. But with Richard, we you know,
we ate all the time. We had meals around you know,
in the bed, we had meals upstairs, we had you know,
and he really loved to eat, not at all, No,
he loved yeah, you know, But but what about it?
(05:48):
What about cooking for your daughter? Where was Olivia at
this time?
Speaker 1 (05:51):
She was she came to stay with us for that
entire time. Did she eat? She yeah, and she yes,
she did, she cooked sometimes, but I think she found
it so overwhelming. Yeah, you know, dealing with what was
what was coming. And I don't know whether you found this,
but did you did you have a sense or get
(06:12):
told when Richard's life was nearing it its.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
End, not really, not until because he had brained down.
He had Richard had a fall, yeah, and he fell
on his head and he had a bleed, and then
it was a slow We were in Mexico, and that
was also interesting because Mexico to be away from my country,
away from my friends, away from well, although I was surrounded,
I never I took two rooms in a hotel and
I was never alone for four months, but I was
(06:38):
suddenly in the Mexican world of eating at a different time,
eating different foods, having no wine, but eating drinking tequila.
And there was a whole thing. And the hospital that
he was in was a beautiful place, and the food
was part of the whole. It was really important that
people would bring food and he always ate and you know,
he was a great eating Richard. So it was something
(06:59):
we share to the very end. I knew he was
going to die. Probably we knew we were coming towards
the end, probably about a month before, because he had
as true, this is after two years, but I think
it might have been a different kind of experience in
terms of JOm did she eat?
Speaker 1 (07:17):
She didn't eat. In the last week of her life,
she at almost nothing. And we had a palliative care
who would come in twice a day for ten to
fifteen minutes. And she said to me ten days before,
she said, when in her experience, when the person who
is terminally ill stops really not wanting to eat, that
(07:40):
is usually three four days. And Joan had said to
Olivia and I two weeks before she died, she said,
I know that it's the end is very near. And
she said, please let me go. And I think that
this is I've now my reading and other people who
share their experience said that that it is a very
(08:00):
common thing for people to say, let me go. They
want they want you to give them permission to not
hold on anymore. And said, you know, I'm so exhausted.
I've had a good life. I want you to, you know,
to find a pocket full of happiness in each day
and not be sad when I'm gone, she said, because
(08:23):
all of us are going to die. She said, you too, included, Yeah,
I have it. It's been a great mantra by which
to navigate grief. Ever since then, I found consciously finding
joy in things that you may have just taken for
granted beforehand. And that's been a great gift that she's
(08:45):
given me and our daughter.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
And what about work.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
I have had a huge amount of work since Joan died,
and rather than retreat, I have grabbed all of it
with great gusts.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Me too, I have I have moments where I think,
you know, how are we going to get through this?
But never that idea that I might stop or give up.
You know, I love doing this, We love writing our books.
As I said, love the podcast. Sit down and have
excuse me go on? Did you get that on camera?
(09:25):
You just lifted the plate, clicked every bit of the plate.
Why not? Why not?
Speaker 1 (09:31):
You can't really do it in a restaurant without offending people.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Do you think maybe you know, have you done it
and offended? A woman actually said I'm offended by this?
Or you could just see the.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Look accommodation and JOm used to say, for God's sake, please,
so all I would do is do this and then
do it behind or lean down pretending that I'm doing
something on the floor.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Do you think it tastes different when you look what
you're tasting looking off the plate. Is that different what
you've put in your mouth?
Speaker 1 (10:01):
I think that. I think that what it is is
like the encore at the end of a performance.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
What is an encore like at the end of a performance.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
I've only done one musical, My Fair Lady, And because
a musical there's music for people to reperform, you can
do a sort of final verse of something, but in
the theater you can't. All you can do is about it.
You can't say, oh well I'll do I'll do to
be or not to be again, you know what I mean?
(10:35):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
That's what I really love is sometimes when the end
of a musical then it's all over, and then they
come like guys and dolls will come out and do
you know lucky a lady or when you see a
guy or My fair Lady, you could come out. You
obviously played Henry Higgins.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
Higgins, what a great part, absolutely amazing role.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
What's your favorite song from My Fair Lady? I think
whenever the same as mine go on?
Speaker 1 (11:01):
What is yours?
Speaker 2 (11:03):
I've grown accustomed to her face?
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Is there a better song? No, I've grown a custom
begin I've gone accustomed.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
To the to you, she whistles nice and new smiles
her friends, her das secondment to me, now just to you.
That should be the ending of this from the beginning.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Oh, I we should sang it for my seventeenth birthday
to be, I said, that's all I want you to
do is to sing me. I've gon accustomed to it.
I do think it's a beautiful BEAUTI is amazing. Was
that the last theater that you did.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Yeah, that's the last time I did theater and I
did it in Chicago ten years ago, and then I
did it at the Sydney Opera fifteen years ago.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
I should bring it to London. I would love to
see it again. You can't do it now because of misogyny,
because yeah, tell me about that.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
McCarthy's daughters came to see it in Chicago and they
were ten and thirteen, and they were appalled by the
misogyny of it. They said, how can any woman put
up with that?
Speaker 2 (12:13):
When you were performing it, did you feel a sense.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Well, my steer on it was that Higgins is on
the spectrum, and that he is. He doesn't mean to
be as cruel as he is. He just he you know,
he says that there's no filter whatsoever, so it just
comes out, you know, you should be thrown out like
a cabbage le for whatever. And he is so joy
(12:40):
filled when Eliza gets all the words phonetically correct yees,
he embraces her. Yeah. And you know, it's no accident
to me that straight after that she sings, I could
have danced all night. And it is the way that
I interpreted it was that that was as close as
he could ever get to saying he's in love with
somebody interesting. So it was very physical and we grabbed
(13:04):
each other.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
And I think it's the first musical I ever saw.
I think I went to see it. I was saying
the other day that my dad used to take me
because we lived in upstate New York, and every sort
of big treat, maybe once every couple of months, you
would take me down to New York in the car
and we'd have lunch, and then you'd take me to
a musical, and then we would buy the record, and
then we would take it home to the country, and
(13:25):
there was nothing else to do except just listen to
it all the time.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
So I yeah, really, this is really generational that we
share on this because in the sixties, every musical that
came out, my parents had the lp of it and
played it incessantly, so our whole family knew the lyrics
of every single musical that came out. You say it
to people now, I think you're yeah, it's insane.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
But the other thing about the musicals, without being naming
any is that they don't have those two and so
much anymore. They're not as kind of hummable, are they
that you come out you can remember on the street
where you live.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
People who would argue with probably yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
But I find it, yeah, I find it slightly challenging.
But but it isn't. I haven't seen My Fair Lady ever,
probably even since I was a kid a long time ago.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Broadway.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah, I remember. I think it was Julie Andrews and
Rex Harrison. I think it was, but I was really young,
I have to say so, I think. But it was
my very first musical. And then I saw I saw
West Side Story, I saw My Fair Lady. I saw
I really one that and he used to come in here,
(14:37):
stop the world, I want to get off. Yeah, yeah,
and Leslie and Evie came here all the time. But
I used to come up to it. I remember the
first time I met him, he was with Michael Gate
and I said, I bet, I'm the only person in
this room that knows, you know, say my Miski mischial
for whatever those songs are or what kind of full
(14:59):
of And he loved and he would sing it with
me because you could see I have any chance to see.
But those, yeah, they kind of grow up with those,
you know, do you know what your first one are?
Speaker 1 (15:08):
The first one was the Sound of Music, and then
Mary Poppins. But I'd heard My Fair Lady before I
saw those, before I saw the movie, and my parents
had all the Rogers and Hammerstein, Carousel King, and I
had all of those record collection, so I knew all
of those before I ever saw the movies.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
An open kitchen in the River Cafe means we as
chefs are able to talk to our guests dining in
the restaurant, sharing how we cook their food, where the
ingredients come from, as well as hints and advice for
cooking the recipes in the books. And now we're bringing
that same ethos to our podcast, a question and answer
episode with me and our two executive chefs, Sean Winnow,
(15:58):
and Joseph Travelli. We need is to hear from you
about what you would like to know. Send a voice
note with your question to Questions at Rivercafe dot co
dot uk and you might just be our next great
guest on Ruthie's Table four.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
You were born in Swaziland, which is now called Eswatini,
which is the tiniest country in the Southern Hemisphere Southeast Africa,
below Zimbabwe besides South Africa and Mozambique.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
And why were you there?
Speaker 1 (16:35):
My father was the director of education for the British government,
so that's why we were there, and that's why I
went to school there.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Yeah, and tell you it was az Tell me about
your dad, what did he he was?
Speaker 1 (16:45):
He was incredibly charming good man by day and then
a very violent, unrecognizable alcoholic by night, because after my
mother cuckolded and left him for his best friend. Yeah
that or did you? No? No?
Speaker 2 (17:03):
I stayed with my father as an only child.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
I had a younger brother. But I think my mother
was Her argument was that she didn't want to take
me away from everything that was familiar to me and
living at home. She was not a very maternal person.
I think she's one of those people that you might yeah,
if you unkind, would call it narcissism. Shouldn't really have
(17:28):
had children?
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Did she marry very young?
Speaker 1 (17:30):
I think in that time, that generation, she got married
at twenty four, which was when people got married in
Jane Austin, not that she was in Jane Olson time.
But by the time you were twenty six, you were
an old maid.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
You're exactly exactly what are we going to do?
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Yeah, so twenty four was not when when was your
mother married to your father?
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Yeah? Probably the same, maybe even younger.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
And I was young.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
I was married when I was twenty. Well, I met
Richard when I was nineteen and then was married, had
my first kid at twenty four, so I started very
very y. That was a baby. But so did your
mother move down the street or did she know?
Speaker 1 (18:06):
She moved to another country, another country, another country, and
then that man got transferred to Peru, and then she
came back to Swaziland and was treated like she may
as well have adulters. Yeah, and so people it was
that awful situation where I would meet, you know, in
the Saturday market where people were buying fruit and vegetables.
(18:29):
I would be with my mother on her weekend visit
twice a month, and people would speak to me who
were her former friends and would literally blank her. It
was it felt very cruel.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
So what was food like my mother?
Speaker 1 (18:43):
My mother had no interest in cooking, so she we
had a cook who she taught to cook seven meals,
so I know every day of the week.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
You say seven meals, seven as in seven days.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
And they did not rotate and they did not altar.
So every Monday tin fish was on a Friday. Okay,
so fishy fish on Fridays. No fresh fresh fish. There,
beef on a Monday, pork on a Tuesday, chicken on
a Wednesday, lamb on a Thursday, fish on a Friday,
(19:18):
and then we'd have roast beef again on the Saturday,
and then a barbecue on Sunday unless we went to Mozambique,
which we would then have Peri Pery prawns, prawns with
Perry Perry sauce on them.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
That's Perry Pery sauce.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Oh, it's the stuff that the Nando's chain have based
all their fortune on. It's a very very hot sauce.
Rectal fire basically for your head. What did you say,
rectal fire? Yeah, Yeah, you have to sit on an
inner tube. If you have no sensitivity, if you have
no tolerance for spice like I don't, you have to
sit on an inner tube for about three days. It
(19:57):
is brutal.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Yeah, before we leave the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday was the
Tinfish cook exactly the same way there.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Exactly the same as tin tuna cooked with a fresh today.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
You looked forward to more in when you dreaded.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
No, because if you don't know anything else, then you're
used to that. And then my father remarried when I
was twelve and my stepmother cooked spaghetti for the first time.
I'd never seen spaghetti, had a spaghetti. So in nineteen
sixty nine I had spaghetti and I was absolutely appalled.
I thought that it looked like white worms in a bowl,
(20:34):
and how could you possibly eat that? I mean, that's
how provincial and isolated we were.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
So you grew up there when you came to London.
Back to London.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
I came to London in nineteen eighty two when I
was twenty five years old.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
To see he grew up in Africa college there.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
I went to college in University in Cape Town, which
is the nearest by twelve hundred miles that you could
do a combined English degree as well as a theaterre diploma,
because my father said he wouldn't pay for me to
just go to a drama school in England.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
At what age that you wanted to be an actor?
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Well, I made shoe box theaters with cutouts and when
I was seven, and then when I was nine I
made clove puppets and then when I was twelve I
got some marionettes. So and then I had full scale
marionette theater in my parents garage and did school you know,
plays in the school holidays.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
For kids who well encourage you to do actor to have.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
To some extent. And there was an amateur theater club
in swarzil Ad, so I was a member of that.
So it was you know, the line of when I
look back on it is very very clear that I
think it chooses you. But the notion of saying that
you were going to be an actor where I grew
up was you know people's.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
You know, father was head of education. You would have
thought it was an educationalist that he would have encouraged
the edu know the education that you would.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Think, but he said, you know, you were a good
brain and you have good school results, why waste it
on becoming an active because ninety nine percent of their
unemployed from what I've statistically read. And he said, you know,
I dread that you're going to spend your life destitute,
wearing tights, makeup and avoiding a buggery.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Did he enjoy the theater that?
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Yeah? He loved it. Yeah. Whenever we came back to
England every three years, he would take me to every
single show that was on. So I remember when I
came when I was seven, and then especially when I
was twelve years old, I saw just a huge variety
of things. I saw Oliver the Musical in the in
(22:41):
the theater, I saw Ginger Rogers do Auntie Mame and
Jory Lane.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Yeah. Wow, so what year is that?
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Nineteen sixty nine?
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Did she dance?
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Yeah? She did dance outside wow.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Anti Ma, did you feel like, in food terms and
real terms that you were always a foreigner in another
country growing.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Because all the food that I had was English food,
where I grew up was English, and all the people
that I grew up with were English. So they were yes,
so they weren't all the expat community there were essentially
mainly from England. So or people that had been on
the colonial circuit that if they had lived in India
had then coming to Kenya. It was as it was
(23:26):
then called then Kenya, then to Rhodesia was then became Zimbabwe.
It was like this sort of the trail of the
last country is becoming independent one by one from the
British Empire. And the people who couldn't face coming back
to live in England had got so enamored of a
colonial life ended up in Swaziland.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
So do you remember what the food of Swaziland, apart
from the prons which you described, was there a kind
of cultural.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Maze people maize which is corn and it was made
into a kind of polanta type mixture with gravy and
a small amount of meat. Yeah, that was the traditional food.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
And that was whether vegetables or fruits or anything exotic that.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
You were There were amazing subtropical fruit there, light cheese
or we called the lee cheese mangoes. But it was
all seasonal. You couldn't you know. That is what is
so extraordin about living in London is that you can
get all of this stuff all year around for the
most part.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
But started going to the market where your mother was snubbed.
Do you remember the market?
Speaker 1 (24:33):
Oh? Yeah, it was big. What was it like? It
was a big, open air market and all the people
running the market were Swazi women and they had piled
up stores of fresh fruit and vegetables, and you bartered
and every every person arrived at the basket and bought
(24:57):
their stuff. And there was there was one supermarket as well,
but going to the market on Saturday was an absolute ritual.
And I think that going to the market, my mother
would buy these vegetables. She didn't cook them, of course,
but she would buy all the produce. And it was
also a very social thing that you got to meet
everybody else. And then she stopped going when all these
(25:18):
people snubbed her.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
And what was the move like to Cape Town because
then you were in university there. Yeah, it was you
have your own place.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
It was. Yeah. It was nineteen seventy six, and it
was the year that black South African students rioted against
being taught in Afrikaans. So you felt that it was
the kind of crucible of revolution, and being nineteen years
old at that I just thought it's all going to happen.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Now.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
The whole thing is going to change because I've been
Nelson Mandela's daughter, cinzian Zenni were at school with me
in Swazia and I did school plays with them. So
we really felt that this was this was the moment
that apart it would end. And of course it took
another Did you never never met her, No, because they
(26:05):
used to. They used to come to Swazland by by
bus from South Africa and then go back by bus.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Then you were taking drama courses? What was that like?
It was?
Speaker 1 (26:17):
I found doing the academic part extremely tiresome because all
I wanted to do was the practical theater stuff. But
in order to appease my father to get a degree
because he said, you know, without that, there's no guarantee
that you could have a job at the other end.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Maybe he was right, Yeah, maybe he was right, so
partly right.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Yeah, he heedged his bets, but I think he was What.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Was the other degree? I can't remember.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
You said, oh, does an English drama degree? And then
I did a theatre diploma. Yeah, I love doing it.
I co founded a multiracial theater company in Cape Town
for a year for the true Theater Company.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Was that a challenge for you.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
The the what is so contradictory and a knack chronistic
about the apartheid system was that you could in the theater,
you could work with black actors and you could socialize together,
but you couldn't live in the same place, and you
couldn't go to the same restaurants, which was really bizarre.
(27:18):
So people could shag each other, and you know, if
people came to stay that I was at school with
neighbors in the apartment block that I was living in
reported us and said there were black people staying in
a white area. So I then had to go every
two weeks to police station to take my up Swazland
and British passports and hand them over and make a
(27:41):
declaration that I was not harboring any subversives or terrorists.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
The theater company did well, Yeah, did really well.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
We were the right people at the right time. Yeah,
did both.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Do you remember any of the players you put on?
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Oh, we did. The first play that we did we launched,
was a play about the Communist revolution in nineteen forty
seven by David Hare called Fanshan, and he very graciously
because of the politics, all other British playwrights said embargoed.
Their weren't being done in South Africa, and he allowed
it because he thought that a play about social change
(28:17):
was apt for that country. And they flew the censorship
board from Pretoria, twelve hundred miles away to Cape Town
to come and watch this said. So this bunch of
very grumpy looking men in suits sat watching us playing
Chinese peasants.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
So yeah, and when you went to Cape Town, you
were on your own, and you didn't have that Monday
Monday beef. Monday beef, I know, the tinfish on Friday?
What did you eat?
Speaker 1 (28:47):
I moved in with two other students who could cook,
and I used to barter with them, so I will
do other things. I'll do the shopping is as long
as you do the cooking. So that's that's sort of
how it worked. But when I came to England, I
couldn't I couldn't cook.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
How old are you then?
Speaker 1 (29:04):
I have twenty five? I couldn't even boil an egg kitchen.
My first job in London was as a waiter at
Touttan's Brasserie Garden. Ye still there? So I was there
for seven months and worked as a waiter and I
never got fired. Because I didn't drink allergic to alcohol,
and I didn't steal because the amount of stealing that
went on was just extortiny. People take sort a wheel
(29:25):
of cheese and a winter coat and say, come on mate,
just get that out, or take this bottle for me.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
What did you learn from working in a restaurant? Oh?
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Just the entitlement of some guests was absolutely extraordinary. And
if people were very rude, their service became even slower.
And then you could always blame the kitchen and say,
I'm ly sorry, but oh your food is cold, or
oh it isn't the full order or whatever. There are
ways of torturing people.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
How long did you work there? Seven months? And was
that the only restaurant job you had?
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Yeah, and a strong job.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
And then I started getting work as an actor, And tell.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Me about those days. Did you have your own apartment?
Speaker 1 (30:07):
I had a bedsit on Blenham Crescent number eighty nine,
which was thirty pounds a week. You could put your
hands out either side and touch both walls. It had
a loo, a tiny cubicle for a shower, and a
kitchenette beneath a bed that was upper ladder, so the
(30:28):
width of the bed was the width of the kitchenette underneath.
Because it was parallel to Portobello Road. And at the
end of the market day we didn't have much money.
You could go and get you'd get the throwaway and
the leftover. It's very, very cheap, all for free. So
I lived.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
I lived on that, and so acting and starting what
year are we in now?
Speaker 1 (30:51):
Nineteen eighty three I met the person who I then married.
It did, yeah, And she was a brilliant court absolutely
amazing cook and rarely followed recipe books, but if she did,
it was a kind of what do you call a blueprint,
and then she would improvise on top of that.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
So this became a cooking eating relationship.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
And when we got married, she said, you have to
cook every other night out one night you cooked the
other night. You have to be an evolved twentieth century
late twentieth century man. You have to cook as much
as I do.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
And did you go for that?
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she also insisted that when we
got married she'd been married before, that we cook for
our own wedding party. So we had one hundred people
and we cooked the day before, well for two days before.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Remember the things we cooked.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Everything was cold, but we cooked poach, salmon and chicken
and beefillt. All of this stuff was done in advance.
She had one rule that whatever party we had, specially
a Christmas party, she said, every guest has to know
a minimum of two other people. Otherwise you're not going
(32:04):
to get harmony in a group of people. And I
found that pretty fool proof, a safeguard for getting people together.
Although it's always interesting to have people that don't know
each other at all, but for that real buzz of
an event, knowing people some of the people knowing each
other really helps, I think. And so and she also
(32:26):
thought that cooking for people that people appreciated it more
than if you got in a cater or somebody to
help you. Joe used to make your chocolate Nemesis every
single Christmas party we had, and she'd make two of them.
And I think the combination of that is must be
thirty six eggs exactly who is I used to make
(32:48):
it with her?
Speaker 2 (32:49):
What about food and film?
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Oh, the first film I was ever in with now
and I Richard Griffiths, who was playing Uncle Monte. My
uncle had arrived from Italy had been filming there with
the Hunchild and had not done any he hadn't learnt
the lines terribly well, and Paul McGann and I had
had a ten days of rehearsal, so we knew the
script back to front, and Richard kept fluffing his lines
(33:13):
in this Cumbrian cottage where we were filming, And because
my character had not supposedly eaten for three days, I
had to eat very very fast a Sunday lunch of
roast lamb and roast potatoes, and I think I got
through four legs of lamb, and I don't know how
many kilos of potatoes. Eventually had to have a vomit
bucket next next to me because I couldn't keep it down.
(33:36):
So I've never eaten lamb willingly since then. But that
is my That is an extreme experience of eating on set.
But we used to join and I used to do
a movie night once a month where if we did
The Godfather, we had spaghetti. Yeah, we did China Town,
we had Chinese food, watched Cabaret, we had German food.
(33:59):
So we do food according to the thing slender excuse
to to rewatch a great movie and also he delicious food.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
We did a podcast with Francis a couple of I
know recently, and it was you know, he went into
great detail about the food and the Godfather, yeah, and
making the past sauce. There was a movie called The
Grand Bouf Did you Receive? It was about the many yourself,
you know.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
And I was in couple ofs dracked with Gary Olden
one hundred years ago and we were all staying at
the Napa Valley estate at his house for a week
of rehearsals because the sony wouldn't pay for them. And
every night he would cook. There must have been fifteen
sixteen people. And I asked him whether he ever cooked
(34:49):
just for his wife, and he said he didn't know
how to cook for two people. He could only cook
for fifteen to thirty people.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
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(35:22):
really care for them with the gift. Visit our website
shop the Rivercafe dot co UK to place your order. Now, So, Richard,
we are going to talk about food because I would
ask you, having watched the make crabblinguenie, would you like
(35:44):
to read the recipe for crabblingueni because I have it here.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Linguini with crabs of ten two large live mail crabs cooked.
The don't know how you distablished their mail. Yeah, that's
the River Cafe recipe. Three fresh red chilies, seeded and
finely chopped, juice of four lemons, three clothes of garlic
peeled and grown to a paste. Two hundred and fifty
miles of olive oil, five hundred grams of linguini. Remove
(36:10):
the claws and legs from the crabs, break the bodies open, carefully,
remove the brown meat from inside the shell, and transfer,
along with any juice, to a large bowl. I get
rid of most of the brown meat. Remove the white
meat from the claws and eggs, and add to the
brown meat in the bowl and mix together a tiny amount.
Add the chili, is, the lemon juice and the garlic
to the crab. Mikejuke, you have have enough of those
(36:30):
season well, lots of molden salt, stirring the olive oil.
The sauce should be quite liquid. Cook the linguini and
a generous amount of boiling salted water. Then drain thoroughly,
stir into the crab sauce, but do not reheat. Serve
immediately and stuff your face.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
So tell me what you saw differently in rast doing
it with you? Did it well?
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Ross? I mean, he's so brilliantly fast at doing everything.
And he put in dried chili, and he put in
fae as well, which I'd never had. I'd never used that,
and it isn't specified in your on your recipe changes.
And he added a little bit of the liquid that
the pastor was cooked in into the sauce, which gave
(37:15):
it its cre Yeah, maybe whatever it does or the
magic of science. And it was absolutely delicious.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
So did you miss the coriander? And did you miss? No?
Speaker 1 (37:24):
No means the version.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
There you go, And that's about cooking, isn't it. Let's
compare a recipe to a script. So when you're verrising
your lines, tell me about the difference between a kind
of script and.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
The exact same way. You have the recipe in front
of you. But then something inspires you to add something,
or though you're you go of in a tangent, do
you ask if the director or the writer are open
to an adjunct to something, or an addition or an
improvisation of round sections. So it means that it evolves,
is not? Unless it's Shakespeare. You can't improve on a genius. Really,
(38:02):
I don't think so. And because of the rhythm and
the meter of it, you would be doing a disservice,
I think if you tried to extemporize on it.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Do you remember cooking for Olivia as a baby? It
was important? Does she cook?
Speaker 1 (38:16):
She cooks fantastic.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Yeah, she loves her mother's influence.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Yeah, so we do still do cook together.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
And she's working on your fragrance.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
She does. Oh I was. I've been obsessed with smelling
everything all my life, and I don't understand why everybody doesn't.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
Can you remember the smells of the markets?
Speaker 1 (38:36):
And oh yeah you can? Yeah, And if you go
into an old fashioned green groser that there's one still
in twicken Them that I go to every other other week,
where you can smell the soil and you can smell
vegetables and fruits in a way that is completely non
existent in a supermarket. You have to go to French
(38:58):
or Italian street markets together that as you know all
too well. So I remember that that smell very much.
But I've had a mad crush on the first American
that I'd ever met in nineteen sixty nine, called Betsy
Clap with a double pa and Armstrong had just landed
on the Moon that July, so everything American was so exotic.
(39:21):
I'd never met an American, you know, I'd seen them
in the movies, so it had this gum chewing, fast talking.
Taught me out a French kiss, and I thought, well,
I'd try and make her perfume for her birthday, And
of course I boiled up rose and gardenia petals into
boiled sugar water, and of course it didn't turn it
(39:42):
to osmos itself into beautiful scent, just into a stink bomb.
And then forty years later, I was on holiday in
the Caribbean and a fellow house guest, Annie Heinmarch, said,
I've never seen anybody so obsessed with smelling everything and
scent as you are. Try and make do one professionally,
So that's what inspired me to do.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
So are those smells that you can't be in the
rooms if you smell it. You can't be with cheese.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
When the cheese course comes out, I will I'll just
remove myself, do you Yeah, I think it's the most putrid,
almost all cheese. Yeah. I can tolerate a caesar salad
because it is delicious, but that's about as smell as
I can go.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
And so if you have a pastor, you'll never have
parmesan on it.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
And I'll never eat a pizza with cheese. Yeah. Chocolate
is another thing that I find that the smell of
it is not so it's a bit claggy, but the
taste of it is absolutely repellent to me.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
I see that smells and music, You know, I can
remember the song. If I hear a song, I can remember,
you know, what I was wearing, where I was when
I was with.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
Scent is exactly the same, the same. Scent is the
shortest synaptic leap in your brain to your memory. So
you can smell something that you haven't smell for forty
years and it will like music, it will instantly take
you back to the place where you first smelled.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
That is there a smell that if you need comfort
that you want to smell. What is yours tomato sauce?
When my son died and we were all ran back
to the house, everybody was everywhere, and so all the
other children and my husband we got to the house
and I was going up the steps into our bedroom
and one of my kids came in and I said, Abe,
(41:27):
put tomato sauce on. I need to smell tomato sauce
cooking that I just needed to have that smell in
the house, that somehow there was a continuation was whatever
it was. So I think that smelled to me always
is a sense of comfort.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
What is yours Christmas pudding?
Speaker 2 (41:44):
Ah?
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Which I eat once a month? You don't, I do?
You don't?
Speaker 2 (41:47):
You don't wait up all year for Christmas?
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Can't wait that long. I'd need one once a week,
but I'd explode. And in January every store and shop
is literally throwing them like footballs at such a scant
to get So I got twenty seven waiting in my
pantry at the moment.
Speaker 2 (42:03):
So we have your smell, your favorite smell Christmas pudding?
What is your comfort food?
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Baked beans? Oh?
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Is it? Tell me about that?
Speaker 1 (42:10):
Oh? Just baked beans, because I've had them my entire life,
and you just heat them up and put them on
a piece of toast. What's yours probably does.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
If I feel a sense of stress or pandic, I
do want chocolate. I do find a piece of chocolate.
It's that crave. I crave a piece of chocolate. But
then again, for me, it would be tomato pasta. Yeah,
that if I can have, even if it's cold the
next morning, I can have. If I have that carb
of the of the pasta with tomato sauce, I'm a
(42:43):
happy person.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
Have you always said tomato sauce instead of tomato? So
I go back and forth, you do?
Speaker 2 (42:48):
It just depends on my where I am. But I'll say, yeah,
you say tomato asking tomatow Okay, but let's definitely not
call the whole thing off.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
Okay. Thank you, Richard, thank you, thank you for listening
to Ruthie's Table for in partnership with Montclair
You were listening to Ruthie's Table four in Partnership with Montclair.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
When I think of Richardy Grant, of course I think
of his brilliant films and him as a great actor.
But what I really think of is Richard and his
wife Joan in the early days of the River Cafe.
They were married a year before the restaurant opened and
lived right across the river. Coming in for lunch, are
(00:25):
we sitting at the same table. They were warm and
lovely and absorbed in each other. I remember their daughter,
Olivia being born a few years later, and then bringing
her in as a baby when the restaurant was still
small and starting up. Just like her. We all grew
up and off into our own lives. Now over thirty
(00:48):
years later, Richard and I share something else in common,
the loss of the partner we loved. People once asked me.
Someone asked me about my advice on grief, and I
have no advice on grief because it's so personal how
you do it. Whether I have a friend whose mother
went to bed for six months and never got out
because her son had died. She just took to her bed,
(01:09):
and you know, I never stopped. So we all have
different ways, And I was thinking, if we start with
the food part of that, do you eat for comfort
or did you stop eating when.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
I add for comfort? And the last once Journal was diagnosed,
and the subsequent eight months that she had left, which
we didn't know we're going to be so short, I
cooked three times a day, did you? But you know,
I'm so struck when everybody, anybody subsequent to her death
(01:42):
says to me, what would your final meal be? And
I said, well, the experience is of somebody who is
dying is that food is the last thing that they want.
That Because of the drugs that she was on for
lung cancer, everything started tasting like sam so it didn't matter.
It got to the point where it didn't matter what
(02:03):
I cooked. She would say, well, this doesn't really taste
of anything, or the texture of it is awful. So
she lost interest completely in food. But it didn't stop
having to make meals all the time. So I got
very inventive, more inventive in going through cookbooks, obviously yours,
(02:25):
trying to find things that would that she would like.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
So you were thinking of her when you were cooking.
It was not just a distraction for you to kind
of do something, because cooking can be that way. You
have to follow the recipe, you have to put the matter,
how sad you feel, you do have to put the
olive oil in the pan at a certain time. And
it does create a rhythm. It came as a method,
It came to order, almost, doesn't it. It does.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
And it's also because she said to me when she
was diagnosed, please make a promise to me, if you
can possibly keep it, that we are together all the
time and that I die with you in our house.
And I said, well, you know, I can try and
(03:10):
make that promise, but we just don't know what's down
the line. And apart from four days when she had
to go into the Royal Marsden because she got an infection,
we managed to honor that. So to go back to
your thing about cooking, it meant that, however short the
time was that I was in the kitchen, it meant
(03:31):
that it gave me some respite from dealing with her
pending imminent loss. And I suppose gave her time away
from me as well. And sometimes, you know, she would
fall asleep and then that gave me time to go
and cook. But having that routine and something to do
was incredibly important. And in terms of what you said
earlier that you can't give advice about how to deal
(03:53):
with loss or death. What I've found is when people
have said to me, oh, you get over it in time,
I really object to that because I think that I've
never wanted to get over it. It's a navigation around
it on a daily basis, and that's that really is
the way that I find that is the way that
(04:14):
I've I've coped with it that I don't have an
anticipation that is sort of a hump in the road
that I'm going to get over and the other side
it is going to be. You know, I'm now free
because I don't feel like that.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
I always thought the worst two words in the English
language was move on.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
So somebody said to me the other day, said, it's
been five years, Richard, you know you've got to move
on and you've got a man up and you've got
to start dating other people.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Yeah, that tells you more about the other person than
I think. If you can, I would say that because
I kind of went through a death experience of my
son six maybe ten years before, Richard, so I kind.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Of knew and you had no preparation for that.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
That one was that I always say there too, because
he had a seizure and yeah, it was like a
car crash.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
He was here one day.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Yeah, So the ones like you know, Richard, my Richard
and your jone is kind of being eased into that
world and the knowledge and everything. And then there's the
ones that you get a call and it's a car crash.
But I think that and so each one, you know,
for me, I couldn't cook after bo died, after the
car you know, I got the phone, I'd go in
(05:23):
the kitchen, I'd start cooking and start to cry or whatever,
you know. And actually coming in here was for me,
it was like coming home. But with Richard, we you know,
we ate all the time. We had meals around you know,
in the bed, we had meals upstairs, we had you know,
and he really loved to eat, not at all, No,
he loved yeah, you know, But but what about it?
(05:48):
What about cooking for your daughter? Where was Olivia at
this time?
Speaker 1 (05:51):
She was she came to stay with us for that
entire time. Did she eat? She yeah, and she yes,
she did, she cooked sometimes, but I think she found
it so overwhelming. Yeah, you know, dealing with what was
what was coming. And I don't know whether you found this,
but did you did you have a sense or get
(06:12):
told when Richard's life was nearing it its.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
End, not really, not until because he had brained down.
He had Richard had a fall, yeah, and he fell
on his head and he had a bleed, and then
it was a slow We were in Mexico, and that
was also interesting because Mexico to be away from my country,
away from my friends, away from well, although I was surrounded,
I never I took two rooms in a hotel and
I was never alone for four months, but I was
(06:38):
suddenly in the Mexican world of eating at a different time,
eating different foods, having no wine, but eating drinking tequila.
And there was a whole thing. And the hospital that
he was in was a beautiful place, and the food
was part of the whole. It was really important that
people would bring food and he always ate and you know,
he was a great eating Richard. So it was something
(06:59):
we share to the very end. I knew he was
going to die. Probably we knew we were coming towards
the end, probably about a month before, because he had
as true, this is after two years, but I think
it might have been a different kind of experience in
terms of JOm did she eat?
Speaker 1 (07:17):
She didn't eat. In the last week of her life,
she at almost nothing. And we had a palliative care
who would come in twice a day for ten to
fifteen minutes. And she said to me ten days before,
she said, when in her experience, when the person who
is terminally ill stops really not wanting to eat, that
(07:40):
is usually three four days. And Joan had said to
Olivia and I two weeks before she died, she said,
I know that it's the end is very near. And
she said, please let me go. And I think that
this is I've now my reading and other people who
share their experience said that that it is a very
(08:00):
common thing for people to say, let me go. They
want they want you to give them permission to not
hold on anymore. And said, you know, I'm so exhausted.
I've had a good life. I want you to, you know,
to find a pocket full of happiness in each day
and not be sad when I'm gone, she said, because
(08:23):
all of us are going to die. She said, you too, included, Yeah,
I have it. It's been a great mantra by which
to navigate grief. Ever since then, I found consciously finding
joy in things that you may have just taken for
granted beforehand. And that's been a great gift that she's
(08:45):
given me and our daughter.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
And what about work.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
I have had a huge amount of work since Joan died,
and rather than retreat, I have grabbed all of it
with great gusts.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Me too, I have I have moments where I think,
you know, how are we going to get through this?
But never that idea that I might stop or give up.
You know, I love doing this, We love writing our books.
As I said, love the podcast. Sit down and have
excuse me go on? Did you get that on camera?
(09:25):
You just lifted the plate, clicked every bit of the plate.
Why not? Why not?
Speaker 1 (09:31):
You can't really do it in a restaurant without offending people.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Do you think maybe you know, have you done it
and offended? A woman actually said I'm offended by this?
Or you could just see the.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Look accommodation and JOm used to say, for God's sake, please,
so all I would do is do this and then
do it behind or lean down pretending that I'm doing
something on the floor.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Do you think it tastes different when you look what
you're tasting looking off the plate. Is that different what
you've put in your mouth?
Speaker 1 (10:01):
I think that. I think that what it is is
like the encore at the end of a performance.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
What is an encore like at the end of a performance.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
I've only done one musical, My Fair Lady, And because
a musical there's music for people to reperform, you can
do a sort of final verse of something, but in
the theater you can't. All you can do is about it.
You can't say, oh well I'll do I'll do to
be or not to be again, you know what I mean?
(10:35):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
That's what I really love is sometimes when the end
of a musical then it's all over, and then they
come like guys and dolls will come out and do
you know lucky a lady or when you see a
guy or My fair Lady, you could come out. You
obviously played Henry Higgins.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
Higgins, what a great part, absolutely amazing role.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
What's your favorite song from My Fair Lady? I think
whenever the same as mine go on?
Speaker 1 (11:01):
What is yours?
Speaker 2 (11:03):
I've grown accustomed to her face?
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Is there a better song? No, I've grown a custom
begin I've gone accustomed.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
To the to you, she whistles nice and new smiles
her friends, her das secondment to me, now just to you.
That should be the ending of this from the beginning.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Oh, I we should sang it for my seventeenth birthday
to be, I said, that's all I want you to
do is to sing me. I've gon accustomed to it.
I do think it's a beautiful BEAUTI is amazing. Was
that the last theater that you did.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Yeah, that's the last time I did theater and I
did it in Chicago ten years ago, and then I
did it at the Sydney Opera fifteen years ago.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
I should bring it to London. I would love to
see it again. You can't do it now because of misogyny,
because yeah, tell me about that.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
McCarthy's daughters came to see it in Chicago and they
were ten and thirteen, and they were appalled by the
misogyny of it. They said, how can any woman put
up with that?
Speaker 2 (12:13):
When you were performing it, did you feel a sense.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Well, my steer on it was that Higgins is on
the spectrum, and that he is. He doesn't mean to
be as cruel as he is. He just he you know,
he says that there's no filter whatsoever, so it just
comes out, you know, you should be thrown out like
a cabbage le for whatever. And he is so joy
(12:40):
filled when Eliza gets all the words phonetically correct yees,
he embraces her. Yeah. And you know, it's no accident
to me that straight after that she sings, I could
have danced all night. And it is the way that
I interpreted it was that that was as close as
he could ever get to saying he's in love with
somebody interesting. So it was very physical and we grabbed
(13:04):
each other.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
And I think it's the first musical I ever saw.
I think I went to see it. I was saying
the other day that my dad used to take me
because we lived in upstate New York, and every sort
of big treat, maybe once every couple of months, you
would take me down to New York in the car
and we'd have lunch, and then you'd take me to
a musical, and then we would buy the record, and
then we would take it home to the country, and
(13:25):
there was nothing else to do except just listen to
it all the time.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
So I yeah, really, this is really generational that we
share on this because in the sixties, every musical that
came out, my parents had the lp of it and
played it incessantly, so our whole family knew the lyrics
of every single musical that came out. You say it
to people now, I think you're yeah, it's insane.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
But the other thing about the musicals, without being naming
any is that they don't have those two and so
much anymore. They're not as kind of hummable, are they
that you come out you can remember on the street
where you live.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
People who would argue with probably yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
But I find it, yeah, I find it slightly challenging.
But but it isn't. I haven't seen My Fair Lady ever,
probably even since I was a kid a long time ago.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Broadway.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah, I remember. I think it was Julie Andrews and
Rex Harrison. I think it was, but I was really young,
I have to say so, I think. But it was
my very first musical. And then I saw I saw
West Side Story, I saw My Fair Lady. I saw
I really one that and he used to come in here,
(14:37):
stop the world, I want to get off. Yeah, yeah,
and Leslie and Evie came here all the time. But
I used to come up to it. I remember the
first time I met him, he was with Michael Gate
and I said, I bet, I'm the only person in
this room that knows, you know, say my Miski mischial
for whatever those songs are or what kind of full
(14:59):
of And he loved and he would sing it with
me because you could see I have any chance to see.
But those, yeah, they kind of grow up with those,
you know, do you know what your first one are?
Speaker 1 (15:08):
The first one was the Sound of Music, and then
Mary Poppins. But I'd heard My Fair Lady before I
saw those, before I saw the movie, and my parents
had all the Rogers and Hammerstein, Carousel King, and I
had all of those record collection, so I knew all
of those before I ever saw the movies.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
An open kitchen in the River Cafe means we as
chefs are able to talk to our guests dining in
the restaurant, sharing how we cook their food, where the
ingredients come from, as well as hints and advice for
cooking the recipes in the books. And now we're bringing
that same ethos to our podcast, a question and answer
episode with me and our two executive chefs, Sean Winnow,
(15:58):
and Joseph Travelli. We need is to hear from you
about what you would like to know. Send a voice
note with your question to Questions at Rivercafe dot co
dot uk and you might just be our next great
guest on Ruthie's Table four.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
You were born in Swaziland, which is now called Eswatini,
which is the tiniest country in the Southern Hemisphere Southeast Africa,
below Zimbabwe besides South Africa and Mozambique.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
And why were you there?
Speaker 1 (16:35):
My father was the director of education for the British government,
so that's why we were there, and that's why I
went to school there.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Yeah, and tell you it was az Tell me about
your dad, what did he he was?
Speaker 1 (16:45):
He was incredibly charming good man by day and then
a very violent, unrecognizable alcoholic by night, because after my
mother cuckolded and left him for his best friend. Yeah
that or did you? No? No?
Speaker 2 (17:03):
I stayed with my father as an only child.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
I had a younger brother. But I think my mother
was Her argument was that she didn't want to take
me away from everything that was familiar to me and
living at home. She was not a very maternal person.
I think she's one of those people that you might yeah,
if you unkind, would call it narcissism. Shouldn't really have
(17:28):
had children?
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Did she marry very young?
Speaker 1 (17:30):
I think in that time, that generation, she got married
at twenty four, which was when people got married in
Jane Austin, not that she was in Jane Olson time.
But by the time you were twenty six, you were
an old maid.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
You're exactly exactly what are we going to do?
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Yeah, so twenty four was not when when was your
mother married to your father?
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Yeah? Probably the same, maybe even younger.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
And I was young.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
I was married when I was twenty. Well, I met
Richard when I was nineteen and then was married, had
my first kid at twenty four, so I started very
very y. That was a baby. But so did your
mother move down the street or did she know?
Speaker 1 (18:06):
She moved to another country, another country, another country, and
then that man got transferred to Peru, and then she
came back to Swaziland and was treated like she may
as well have adulters. Yeah, and so people it was
that awful situation where I would meet, you know, in
the Saturday market where people were buying fruit and vegetables.
(18:29):
I would be with my mother on her weekend visit
twice a month, and people would speak to me who
were her former friends and would literally blank her. It
was it felt very cruel.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
So what was food like my mother?
Speaker 1 (18:43):
My mother had no interest in cooking, so she we
had a cook who she taught to cook seven meals,
so I know every day of the week.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
You say seven meals, seven as in seven days.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
And they did not rotate and they did not altar.
So every Monday tin fish was on a Friday. Okay,
so fishy fish on Fridays. No fresh fresh fish. There,
beef on a Monday, pork on a Tuesday, chicken on
a Wednesday, lamb on a Thursday, fish on a Friday,
(19:18):
and then we'd have roast beef again on the Saturday,
and then a barbecue on Sunday unless we went to Mozambique,
which we would then have Peri Pery prawns, prawns with
Perry Perry sauce on them.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
That's Perry Pery sauce.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Oh, it's the stuff that the Nando's chain have based
all their fortune on. It's a very very hot sauce.
Rectal fire basically for your head. What did you say,
rectal fire? Yeah, Yeah, you have to sit on an
inner tube. If you have no sensitivity, if you have
no tolerance for spice like I don't, you have to
sit on an inner tube for about three days. It
(19:57):
is brutal.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Yeah, before we leave the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday was the
Tinfish cook exactly the same way there.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Exactly the same as tin tuna cooked with a fresh today.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
You looked forward to more in when you dreaded.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
No, because if you don't know anything else, then you're
used to that. And then my father remarried when I
was twelve and my stepmother cooked spaghetti for the first time.
I'd never seen spaghetti, had a spaghetti. So in nineteen
sixty nine I had spaghetti and I was absolutely appalled.
I thought that it looked like white worms in a bowl,
(20:34):
and how could you possibly eat that? I mean, that's
how provincial and isolated we were.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
So you grew up there when you came to London.
Back to London.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
I came to London in nineteen eighty two when I
was twenty five years old.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
To see he grew up in Africa college there.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
I went to college in University in Cape Town, which
is the nearest by twelve hundred miles that you could
do a combined English degree as well as a theaterre diploma,
because my father said he wouldn't pay for me to
just go to a drama school in England.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
At what age that you wanted to be an actor?
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Well, I made shoe box theaters with cutouts and when
I was seven, and then when I was nine I
made clove puppets and then when I was twelve I
got some marionettes. So and then I had full scale
marionette theater in my parents garage and did school you know,
plays in the school holidays.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
For kids who well encourage you to do actor to have.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
To some extent. And there was an amateur theater club
in swarzil Ad, so I was a member of that.
So it was you know, the line of when I
look back on it is very very clear that I
think it chooses you. But the notion of saying that
you were going to be an actor where I grew
up was you know people's.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
You know, father was head of education. You would have
thought it was an educationalist that he would have encouraged
the edu know the education that you would.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Think, but he said, you know, you were a good
brain and you have good school results, why waste it
on becoming an active because ninety nine percent of their
unemployed from what I've statistically read. And he said, you know,
I dread that you're going to spend your life destitute,
wearing tights, makeup and avoiding a buggery.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Did he enjoy the theater that?
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Yeah? He loved it. Yeah. Whenever we came back to
England every three years, he would take me to every
single show that was on. So I remember when I
came when I was seven, and then especially when I
was twelve years old, I saw just a huge variety
of things. I saw Oliver the Musical in the in
(22:41):
the theater, I saw Ginger Rogers do Auntie Mame and
Jory Lane.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Yeah. Wow, so what year is that?
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Nineteen sixty nine?
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Did she dance?
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Yeah? She did dance outside wow.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Anti Ma, did you feel like, in food terms and
real terms that you were always a foreigner in another
country growing.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Because all the food that I had was English food,
where I grew up was English, and all the people
that I grew up with were English. So they were yes,
so they weren't all the expat community there were essentially
mainly from England. So or people that had been on
the colonial circuit that if they had lived in India
had then coming to Kenya. It was as it was
(23:26):
then called then Kenya, then to Rhodesia was then became Zimbabwe.
It was like this sort of the trail of the
last country is becoming independent one by one from the
British Empire. And the people who couldn't face coming back
to live in England had got so enamored of a
colonial life ended up in Swaziland.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
So do you remember what the food of Swaziland, apart
from the prons which you described, was there a kind
of cultural.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Maze people maize which is corn and it was made
into a kind of polanta type mixture with gravy and
a small amount of meat. Yeah, that was the traditional food.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
And that was whether vegetables or fruits or anything exotic that.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
You were There were amazing subtropical fruit there, light cheese
or we called the lee cheese mangoes. But it was
all seasonal. You couldn't you know. That is what is
so extraordin about living in London is that you can
get all of this stuff all year around for the
most part.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
But started going to the market where your mother was snubbed.
Do you remember the market?
Speaker 1 (24:33):
Oh? Yeah, it was big. What was it like? It
was a big, open air market and all the people
running the market were Swazi women and they had piled
up stores of fresh fruit and vegetables, and you bartered
and every every person arrived at the basket and bought
(24:57):
their stuff. And there was there was one supermarket as well,
but going to the market on Saturday was an absolute ritual.
And I think that going to the market, my mother
would buy these vegetables. She didn't cook them, of course,
but she would buy all the produce. And it was
also a very social thing that you got to meet
everybody else. And then she stopped going when all these
(25:18):
people snubbed her.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
And what was the move like to Cape Town because
then you were in university there. Yeah, it was you
have your own place.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
It was. Yeah. It was nineteen seventy six, and it
was the year that black South African students rioted against
being taught in Afrikaans. So you felt that it was
the kind of crucible of revolution, and being nineteen years
old at that I just thought it's all going to happen.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Now.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
The whole thing is going to change because I've been
Nelson Mandela's daughter, cinzian Zenni were at school with me
in Swazia and I did school plays with them. So
we really felt that this was this was the moment
that apart it would end. And of course it took
another Did you never never met her, No, because they
(26:05):
used to. They used to come to Swazland by by
bus from South Africa and then go back by bus.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Then you were taking drama courses? What was that like?
It was?
Speaker 1 (26:17):
I found doing the academic part extremely tiresome because all
I wanted to do was the practical theater stuff. But
in order to appease my father to get a degree
because he said, you know, without that, there's no guarantee
that you could have a job at the other end.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Maybe he was right, Yeah, maybe he was right, so
partly right.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Yeah, he heedged his bets, but I think he was What.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Was the other degree? I can't remember.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
You said, oh, does an English drama degree? And then
I did a theatre diploma. Yeah, I love doing it.
I co founded a multiracial theater company in Cape Town
for a year for the true Theater Company.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Was that a challenge for you.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
The the what is so contradictory and a knack chronistic
about the apartheid system was that you could in the theater,
you could work with black actors and you could socialize together,
but you couldn't live in the same place, and you
couldn't go to the same restaurants, which was really bizarre.
(27:18):
So people could shag each other, and you know, if
people came to stay that I was at school with
neighbors in the apartment block that I was living in
reported us and said there were black people staying in
a white area. So I then had to go every
two weeks to police station to take my up Swazland
and British passports and hand them over and make a
(27:41):
declaration that I was not harboring any subversives or terrorists.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
The theater company did well, Yeah, did really well.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
We were the right people at the right time. Yeah,
did both.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Do you remember any of the players you put on?
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Oh, we did. The first play that we did we launched,
was a play about the Communist revolution in nineteen forty
seven by David Hare called Fanshan, and he very graciously
because of the politics, all other British playwrights said embargoed.
Their weren't being done in South Africa, and he allowed
it because he thought that a play about social change
(28:17):
was apt for that country. And they flew the censorship
board from Pretoria, twelve hundred miles away to Cape Town
to come and watch this said. So this bunch of
very grumpy looking men in suits sat watching us playing
Chinese peasants.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
So yeah, and when you went to Cape Town, you
were on your own, and you didn't have that Monday
Monday beef. Monday beef, I know, the tinfish on Friday?
What did you eat?
Speaker 1 (28:47):
I moved in with two other students who could cook,
and I used to barter with them, so I will
do other things. I'll do the shopping is as long
as you do the cooking. So that's that's sort of
how it worked. But when I came to England, I
couldn't I couldn't cook.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
How old are you then?
Speaker 1 (29:04):
I have twenty five? I couldn't even boil an egg kitchen.
My first job in London was as a waiter at
Touttan's Brasserie Garden. Ye still there? So I was there
for seven months and worked as a waiter and I
never got fired. Because I didn't drink allergic to alcohol,
and I didn't steal because the amount of stealing that
went on was just extortiny. People take sort a wheel
(29:25):
of cheese and a winter coat and say, come on mate,
just get that out, or take this bottle for me.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
What did you learn from working in a restaurant? Oh?
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Just the entitlement of some guests was absolutely extraordinary. And
if people were very rude, their service became even slower.
And then you could always blame the kitchen and say,
I'm ly sorry, but oh your food is cold, or
oh it isn't the full order or whatever. There are
ways of torturing people.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
How long did you work there? Seven months? And was
that the only restaurant job you had?
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Yeah, and a strong job.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
And then I started getting work as an actor, And tell.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Me about those days. Did you have your own apartment?
Speaker 1 (30:07):
I had a bedsit on Blenham Crescent number eighty nine,
which was thirty pounds a week. You could put your
hands out either side and touch both walls. It had
a loo, a tiny cubicle for a shower, and a
kitchenette beneath a bed that was upper ladder, so the
(30:28):
width of the bed was the width of the kitchenette underneath.
Because it was parallel to Portobello Road. And at the
end of the market day we didn't have much money.
You could go and get you'd get the throwaway and
the leftover. It's very, very cheap, all for free. So
I lived.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
I lived on that, and so acting and starting what
year are we in now?
Speaker 1 (30:51):
Nineteen eighty three I met the person who I then married.
It did, yeah, And she was a brilliant court absolutely
amazing cook and rarely followed recipe books, but if she did,
it was a kind of what do you call a blueprint,
and then she would improvise on top of that.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
So this became a cooking eating relationship.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
And when we got married, she said, you have to
cook every other night out one night you cooked the
other night. You have to be an evolved twentieth century
late twentieth century man. You have to cook as much
as I do.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
And did you go for that?
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she also insisted that when we
got married she'd been married before, that we cook for
our own wedding party. So we had one hundred people
and we cooked the day before, well for two days before.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Remember the things we cooked.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Everything was cold, but we cooked poach, salmon and chicken
and beefillt. All of this stuff was done in advance.
She had one rule that whatever party we had, specially
a Christmas party, she said, every guest has to know
a minimum of two other people. Otherwise you're not going
(32:04):
to get harmony in a group of people. And I
found that pretty fool proof, a safeguard for getting people together.
Although it's always interesting to have people that don't know
each other at all, but for that real buzz of
an event, knowing people some of the people knowing each
other really helps, I think. And so and she also
(32:26):
thought that cooking for people that people appreciated it more
than if you got in a cater or somebody to
help you. Joe used to make your chocolate Nemesis every
single Christmas party we had, and she'd make two of them.
And I think the combination of that is must be
thirty six eggs exactly who is I used to make
(32:48):
it with her?
Speaker 2 (32:49):
What about food and film?
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Oh, the first film I was ever in with now
and I Richard Griffiths, who was playing Uncle Monte. My
uncle had arrived from Italy had been filming there with
the Hunchild and had not done any he hadn't learnt
the lines terribly well, and Paul McGann and I had
had a ten days of rehearsal, so we knew the
script back to front, and Richard kept fluffing his lines
(33:13):
in this Cumbrian cottage where we were filming, And because
my character had not supposedly eaten for three days, I
had to eat very very fast a Sunday lunch of
roast lamb and roast potatoes, and I think I got
through four legs of lamb, and I don't know how
many kilos of potatoes. Eventually had to have a vomit
bucket next next to me because I couldn't keep it down.
(33:36):
So I've never eaten lamb willingly since then. But that
is my That is an extreme experience of eating on set.
But we used to join and I used to do
a movie night once a month where if we did
The Godfather, we had spaghetti. Yeah, we did China Town,
we had Chinese food, watched Cabaret, we had German food.
(33:59):
So we do food according to the thing slender excuse
to to rewatch a great movie and also he delicious food.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
We did a podcast with Francis a couple of I
know recently, and it was you know, he went into
great detail about the food and the Godfather, yeah, and
making the past sauce. There was a movie called The
Grand Bouf Did you Receive? It was about the many yourself,
you know.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
And I was in couple ofs dracked with Gary Olden
one hundred years ago and we were all staying at
the Napa Valley estate at his house for a week
of rehearsals because the sony wouldn't pay for them. And
every night he would cook. There must have been fifteen
sixteen people. And I asked him whether he ever cooked
(34:49):
just for his wife, and he said he didn't know
how to cook for two people. He could only cook
for fifteen to thirty people.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
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each delivery. It's a perfect way to bring some River
Cafe flavor into your home, or to show someone you
(35:22):
really care for them with the gift. Visit our website
shop the Rivercafe dot co UK to place your order. Now, So, Richard,
we are going to talk about food because I would
ask you, having watched the make crabblinguenie, would you like
(35:44):
to read the recipe for crabblingueni because I have it here.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Linguini with crabs of ten two large live mail crabs cooked.
The don't know how you distablished their mail. Yeah, that's
the River Cafe recipe. Three fresh red chilies, seeded and
finely chopped, juice of four lemons, three clothes of garlic
peeled and grown to a paste. Two hundred and fifty
miles of olive oil, five hundred grams of linguini. Remove
(36:10):
the claws and legs from the crabs, break the bodies open, carefully,
remove the brown meat from inside the shell, and transfer,
along with any juice, to a large bowl. I get
rid of most of the brown meat. Remove the white
meat from the claws and eggs, and add to the
brown meat in the bowl and mix together a tiny amount.
Add the chili, is, the lemon juice and the garlic
to the crab. Mikejuke, you have have enough of those
(36:30):
season well, lots of molden salt, stirring the olive oil.
The sauce should be quite liquid. Cook the linguini and
a generous amount of boiling salted water. Then drain thoroughly,
stir into the crab sauce, but do not reheat. Serve
immediately and stuff your face.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
So tell me what you saw differently in rast doing
it with you? Did it well?
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Ross? I mean, he's so brilliantly fast at doing everything.
And he put in dried chili, and he put in
fae as well, which I'd never had. I'd never used that,
and it isn't specified in your on your recipe changes.
And he added a little bit of the liquid that
the pastor was cooked in into the sauce, which gave
(37:15):
it its cre Yeah, maybe whatever it does or the
magic of science. And it was absolutely delicious.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
So did you miss the coriander? And did you miss? No?
Speaker 1 (37:24):
No means the version.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
There you go, And that's about cooking, isn't it. Let's
compare a recipe to a script. So when you're verrising
your lines, tell me about the difference between a kind
of script and.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
The exact same way. You have the recipe in front
of you. But then something inspires you to add something,
or though you're you go of in a tangent, do
you ask if the director or the writer are open
to an adjunct to something, or an addition or an
improvisation of round sections. So it means that it evolves,
is not? Unless it's Shakespeare. You can't improve on a genius. Really,
(38:02):
I don't think so. And because of the rhythm and
the meter of it, you would be doing a disservice,
I think if you tried to extemporize on it.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Do you remember cooking for Olivia as a baby? It
was important? Does she cook?
Speaker 1 (38:16):
She cooks fantastic.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Yeah, she loves her mother's influence.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Yeah, so we do still do cook together.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
And she's working on your fragrance.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
She does. Oh I was. I've been obsessed with smelling
everything all my life, and I don't understand why everybody doesn't.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
Can you remember the smells of the markets?
Speaker 1 (38:36):
And oh yeah you can? Yeah, And if you go
into an old fashioned green groser that there's one still
in twicken Them that I go to every other other week,
where you can smell the soil and you can smell
vegetables and fruits in a way that is completely non
existent in a supermarket. You have to go to French
(38:58):
or Italian street markets together that as you know all
too well. So I remember that that smell very much.
But I've had a mad crush on the first American
that I'd ever met in nineteen sixty nine, called Betsy
Clap with a double pa and Armstrong had just landed
on the Moon that July, so everything American was so exotic.
(39:21):
I'd never met an American, you know, I'd seen them
in the movies, so it had this gum chewing, fast talking.
Taught me out a French kiss, and I thought, well,
I'd try and make her perfume for her birthday, And
of course I boiled up rose and gardenia petals into
boiled sugar water, and of course it didn't turn it
(39:42):
to osmos itself into beautiful scent, just into a stink bomb.
And then forty years later, I was on holiday in
the Caribbean and a fellow house guest, Annie Heinmarch, said,
I've never seen anybody so obsessed with smelling everything and
scent as you are. Try and make do one professionally,
So that's what inspired me to do.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
So are those smells that you can't be in the
rooms if you smell it. You can't be with cheese.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
When the cheese course comes out, I will I'll just
remove myself, do you Yeah, I think it's the most putrid,
almost all cheese. Yeah. I can tolerate a caesar salad
because it is delicious, but that's about as smell as
I can go.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
And so if you have a pastor, you'll never have
parmesan on it.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
And I'll never eat a pizza with cheese. Yeah. Chocolate
is another thing that I find that the smell of
it is not so it's a bit claggy, but the
taste of it is absolutely repellent to me.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
I see that smells and music, You know, I can
remember the song. If I hear a song, I can remember,
you know, what I was wearing, where I was when
I was with.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
Scent is exactly the same, the same. Scent is the
shortest synaptic leap in your brain to your memory. So
you can smell something that you haven't smell for forty
years and it will like music, it will instantly take
you back to the place where you first smelled.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
That is there a smell that if you need comfort
that you want to smell. What is yours tomato sauce?
When my son died and we were all ran back
to the house, everybody was everywhere, and so all the
other children and my husband we got to the house
and I was going up the steps into our bedroom
and one of my kids came in and I said, Abe,
(41:27):
put tomato sauce on. I need to smell tomato sauce
cooking that I just needed to have that smell in
the house, that somehow there was a continuation was whatever
it was. So I think that smelled to me always
is a sense of comfort.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
What is yours Christmas pudding?
Speaker 2 (41:44):
Ah?
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Which I eat once a month? You don't, I do?
You don't?
Speaker 2 (41:47):
You don't wait up all year for Christmas?
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Can't wait that long. I'd need one once a week,
but I'd explode. And in January every store and shop
is literally throwing them like footballs at such a scant
to get So I got twenty seven waiting in my
pantry at the moment.
Speaker 2 (42:03):
So we have your smell, your favorite smell Christmas pudding?
What is your comfort food?
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Baked beans? Oh?
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Is it? Tell me about that?
Speaker 1 (42:10):
Oh? Just baked beans, because I've had them my entire life,
and you just heat them up and put them on
a piece of toast. What's yours probably does.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
If I feel a sense of stress or pandic, I
do want chocolate. I do find a piece of chocolate.
It's that crave. I crave a piece of chocolate. But
then again, for me, it would be tomato pasta. Yeah,
that if I can have, even if it's cold the
next morning, I can have. If I have that carb
of the of the pasta with tomato sauce, I'm a
(42:43):
happy person.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
Have you always said tomato sauce instead of tomato? So
I go back and forth, you do?
Speaker 2 (42:48):
It just depends on my where I am. But I'll say, yeah,
you say tomato asking tomatow Okay, but let's definitely not
call the whole thing off.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
Okay. Thank you, Richard, thank you, thank you for listening
to Ruthie's Table for in partnership with Montclair
Host
Ruth Rogers
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