May 22, 2023 • 39 mins
Food is key to life. And today, more than ever, journalism is also key to life. Our guests, Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel are two brilliant, inspiring journalists who bring us news, analyse news, and present news, helping us determine our lives and the choices we make. They're smart, they're warm, they're funny, and they tell me they are always hungry.
These two journalists crave food. This chef craves journalism. Join us on today’s episode to hear us talk about food, memories and more.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and
Adamized Studios.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Food is key to life and to day. More than ever,
journalism is also key to life. Our guests, Emily Maitlis
and John Sopel, are too brilliant, inspiring journalists who bring
us news, analyze news, present news, helping us determine our
lives and the choices we make. They are smart, they
are warm, they are funny, and they tell me they
(00:32):
are always hungry. Emily was lead anchor for the BBC
presenter of Newsnight and now produces documentaries. John spent four
decades at the BBC as chief political correspondent and its
North American editor. A year ago they launched The Newsagents,
(00:54):
which is definitely my favorite podcast, well maybe my second favorite.
These two journalists crave food. This chef craves journalism. They've
just come from the River Cafe pastry kitchen, having made
a prune and almond tart, and now we're going to
sit down talk about food, memories and more.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
So lovely.
Speaker 4 (01:24):
My name's Bella Toobs.
Speaker 5 (01:26):
I'm the head pater chef at the River Cafe and
I'm here with Emily Maitlist and John soapolk.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Okay, so we're going to make a prune and almond tart.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
It's a bit of a how to blue Peter.
Speaker 5 (01:38):
That's a really useful, usually sad thing to do.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Prune and almond tart, which.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
I had last Friday here and it was sensational. I mean,
normally pair on the rare occasions I overcome here, but
it was incredible.
Speaker 5 (01:56):
I think you've already given yourself away.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Well so, so you've just made a prune and almond tart.
But before we talk about that experience and what you did,
would you like to read the recipe for it.
Speaker 5 (02:10):
Prune and almond tart serves fourteen sixteen prunes stoned, three
hundred grams almonds, finally ground, one el grade tea bag,
one hundred mills of brandy, three hundred grams of unsalted butter,
three hundred grams cast a sugar, three large eggs, one
preheated sweet pastry start shell. Pre Heat the oven to
(02:31):
one hundred and fifty degrees.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Pour enough boiling water over the prunes to cover, then
add the tea bag.
Speaker 5 (02:36):
Leave for one hour. Remove the prunes from the tea,
pour the brandy over them.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Using an electric mixer. Beat the butter and sugar together
until pale and light.
Speaker 5 (02:46):
Add the ground almonds, Then add the eggs one by one.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Finally, add one hundred mills of the brandy prune juices.
Speaker 5 (02:53):
Pour this mixture into the tart shell. Push the prunes
into the mixture, Bake in the preheated oven for forty minutes.
Speaker 4 (03:01):
Cool and remove from the tin.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Brillier. Hi, how about that's a little do it? So
tell me about Meggi and what was it like in
the pastry kitchen.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
It was spotlessly clean, It was brilliantly well organized. And
the smell when you walk in, of the baking of
the breads of Christini, of everything else that's going on
in there is just fabulous, and of course the almonds,
which just smell so rich and sweet.
Speaker 5 (03:28):
I was shown a magic trick it actually blew my mind,
which was instead of pushing the pastry into the tin,
you grate it on a normal sort of greater and
you take all the tiny bits and then push them
sort of gradually around the back, which apparently makes it
finer and shorter and more delicate. And so I'm going
to take that away and say this is what I learned.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
At the river.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
As well as it being spotlessly clean, I have never
seen a greater looking so totally knackered. It has been
through so much and it looks absolutely oh my god.
You wouldn't get a penny for that in a jungle sale.
But it's obviously still doing its job.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Much times are harder than we're saving up for a
greater But actually you do get a kind of sentimental
attachment to certain things that you use in the kitchen.
Speaker 5 (04:18):
I don't know if you do, but I'm a spatchelor
girl here is so if somebody gives me the wrong
kind of spatulor I have favorites in My favorite is
the purple spatulate.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Tell us about the Verbel spatu.
Speaker 5 (04:29):
It's just it just fits your hand right, It's that's
the point. There's nothing special about it. It's it's not unique.
It's just that it's it's become part of it's I
feel like Edwards's hands, but with spatchul it's the extension
of my arm.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Now do you have kitchen equipment when you've inherited from
your family?
Speaker 1 (04:47):
There was a kitchen knife that has been so sharpened
that it bows because there's so little of it left.
And that was my mother's favorite kitchen knife, and she
had it since she was a girl.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
And I mean, unfortunately, it's kind of it met.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Its end because there was just nothing left of it
because it had been sharpened so many times over the
years that it had been filed down.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Have you got it above the fireplace.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
Exactly?
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Do you have one that was handed down?
Speaker 5 (05:18):
Not? Really, No. I think it's more the practices of
my mum was my big is my big inspiration actually
in terms of cooking. And it's more the way she
does things and the way she talks to herself as
she cooks that I do now and I think I
pass on to my children.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Did you cook with her always?
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Yea?
Speaker 2 (05:39):
And did she work or did she come home and cook?
Speaker 5 (05:41):
She worked a lot at home, so she did a
lot of her work at home. And I remember the
rituals actually of her cooking and just how.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
I mean, she was very funny. She was always ahead
of the curve. I say she was.
Speaker 5 (05:55):
She's very much alive and we'll be listening to this,
but she was. I think she was quite ahead of
the curve and the kind of ingredients that she used
and the kind of things that she made, and occasionally
she'd go into obsessions. So she had an obsession about
an Indian dessert called gullub Jarman, and she decided she
had to perfect it, and instead of making it once,
she made it like every day for about six weeks
(06:18):
until we were just begging her to stop. But she
also taught me my sort of Yeah, the recipes that
I that I've passed down now that I've taken on she.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Cooked, You have them in her writing? Did she write them?
Speaker 5 (06:31):
She has all her recipes still. And funny you say that,
But I've just done a cookbook for my son. He
went off to university last year, and I did that
really embarrassing mother thing.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Where I took pictures of all the dishes.
Speaker 5 (06:42):
That I thought he'd miss, and I wrote all the
recipes out and I put it all together for him.
And then I saw his room, and of course there's
like one burner and a mini fridge, and he just
looked at me and is like, I'm never ever going
to cook any of that stuff in here.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
You know that, don't you know that he will? But
one day he.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Will a lot of grand This cook book with grandmother's recipes,
a lot of people do people.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
It was always a roller decks a little That's what
my mum keeps it. And every recipe is like do.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
You know what I mean?
Speaker 5 (07:09):
Like a little square thing and it's all in her rising.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Yeah, very similar story. My mother worked and she'd had
polio as a child and so was left pretty badly
disabled by it. And I used to go and meet
her from the tube station to carry the shopping home
because she would bring the shopping home and then she
would cook the dinner and I think, probably like Emily's mum,
you know, presentation of it was kind of really important.
(07:34):
She loved food to look appetizing as well as to
taste appetizing. So it was fun just doing the pastry
where I was having to put the prunes on the
tart and to make it look neat, And that was
the sort of thing that I did at home. And
also my mother loved cooking and loved handing the recipes down,
and funnily enough, she died about fifteen years ago. My
(07:55):
second cousin sent me on WhatsApp a photo of a
recipe that my mother had written out for her for passover,
and there it was, you know, my mum's handwriting, and
I suddenly got this whatsapped message and all those things
bring back such memories of childhood and growing up.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yeah, I found that. The other thing it's interesting is
how many people talk almost more, maybe not the two
of you, but more about their grandmother's cooking than their mothers.
Speaker 5 (08:23):
My grandmother was. She had certain key recipes that she
would repeat. One was Locktion pudding. I haven't met anyone
since then that does Locktion pudding, which is literally it's
like noodles. It's a pasta dessert and it's kind of
pasta and cream and raisins and more cream. I think
it's probably the heaviest thing in the entire world, and
(08:44):
it's got a crispy top. I've literally never seen on
the menu, but it must just be the most.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
So my mother was, I mean, my mother had an
extraordinary life story. She was illegitimate child in the Northeast
to a Russian Jewish family and had to escape because
of the shame that had been brought to the family.
And she ends up in a farming community in East Anglia,
which you know, which was Protestant, and so she kind
of grew up making suet pudding and Yorkshire puddings and
all the rest of the kind of English cookbook if
(09:16):
you want. When I was going up until I was
a sort of teenager, you had to be home Friday,
even Friday night, Friday night, can the bread, the wine,
all the rest of it, and then we'd eat non
kashy food and we just thought that was perfectly normal.
Speaker 5 (09:29):
I mean, my mother would not dream of cooking pork,
but would have plenty of palmer Ham.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
English rose.
Speaker 5 (09:39):
Pork wouldn't be anywhere near the table. I don't remember
her ever doing that, but if it was palmham or prawn,
so that would be fo.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Food and tradition and memories and family and Friday nights.
Did you reject having to stay home on a Friday
night when you could be out partying.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
I think by the time I got to sixteen, it
got a bit kind of I'm sorry, I'm going out
and going to the pub, you know.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
Yeah, so I started to bell at that stage.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
But I love the idea of at least one night
a week, the family coming together and everyone sitting around
the table. Maybe not always getting on brilliantly, but there
is a kind of sense that this is what we
do as a fact do you do it?
Speaker 2 (10:12):
And now your generation, do you deal with your kids?
Do you deal with yours?
Speaker 1 (10:15):
I mean might have grown up, but when we can, Yes,
we do. I mean normally Sunday evenings actually because everyone's
got it's either a school day or work day the
next and you just kind of, you know, that's the
I like.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
A Sunday nights. What about you? Yeah, you deal with
your kids?
Speaker 5 (10:28):
We do Friday night. We like the candles, we say,
if the kids are together, you know, And normally it
involves me being about to cook and Sudday going, oh
it's Friday.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
Quick.
Speaker 5 (10:40):
So we do that, not in a big demonstrative way,
but just in a kind of recognition a few moments
at the beginning of the evening.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Yeah, growing up, did you always sit around the table?
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Yes, we did. I mean it was that was very much.
It was no one had TV.
Speaker 4 (10:54):
Dinners, no grazing. It was kind of.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
You'd sit down at the table together, the four of you.
And yeah, that was kind of pretty much on school
nights every night.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (11:05):
Then and to the point where we all everyone had
a set place. I mean that's how the pecking order
is established. I was the youngest of three sisters.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
I had the least.
Speaker 5 (11:14):
Comfortable chair sort of squashed into the corner where you
had to get between the sort of dresser and the
and the and the edge of the table. And I
sort of think of it like that. That was how
you knew your plate, literally knowing your place right, And did.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
You get an easier time than your older sisters. And
they were resentful because they thought Emily's come along and
we had to do this, but she doesn't.
Speaker 5 (11:37):
No, My sisters worked out very early that they could
make me run errands for them if they offered to
time me doing something like can you post this letter,
I'll time you, and I would run all the way
down to the bottom of the road, run all the
way back. My sister would have gone off and done
something completely different that she'd suddenly look at her watch
and go, oh, amazing forty five and I'd be like, wow.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Was that better than last time? So that was how.
Speaker 5 (12:04):
But the seating was very much And then Sunday. Sunday
was a big deal because we had it in the
dining room and there is a bottle of Coca Cola
in the table and it was the only time of
the week we got fizzy drinks, and it was, you know,
the real iconic Coca Cola bottle, and that was how
you the.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Other times you ate in the kitchen. The dining room
is a lost. Do you have a dining room in
your house?
Speaker 4 (12:28):
We do?
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Do you have one?
Speaker 5 (12:30):
We have a dining room that comes from the kitchen.
So I don't know that I like the idea of
a Yeah, I don't want a bright red dining room.
That's kind of like right now, have a row about something.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
I like the sense of sudden.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
You can also be like regulated to the kitchen, you know,
so everybody's becomes much more of a performance.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Did you have Yeah, we had it in the kitchen.
There was a little table, but Friday nights it was
round the dining room table. It was the you know,
because that was the posh dinner. And we also I
remember as a kid the Corona man and Corona used
to come around with bottles of fizzy drinks. It was
like a milk delivery, and the Corona man would do
deliveries and you could have cherry aid or lemonade or
(13:14):
soda water. And I just loved the days when we
could have some cherry aid because that seemed such an
exotic thing. Well, I grew up in London, but I
mean my parents were residential social workers, so we lived in.
Speaker 4 (13:27):
This huge commune kind of type place in the East Den.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
But where my mother grew up was in Essex and
we had the house there and we used to go
there at weekends and the Corona man would come to
this house in East Anglia, near Colchester and deliver kind
of off the back of the lorry these different bottles
of Corona fizzy drinks.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
We had one of my grants that had this great
idea when we were in a hotel in France. He said,
I'd like to do like the cheese trolley, but ride
it around Highbury and it's Lindn and just knock up
people and they can say I have a bit of Camembert,
I have a bet of every night.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
It's sort of six quite entrepreneurially idea.
Speaker 5 (14:06):
This is taking meals and wheels, very sophisticated level tally where.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
I think there's a huge change. I mean, both my
parents have died now, but you know, so there was
these silver tea sets which were seen I think in
the nineteen fifties must have looked so impressive and proper
on the table that who has a solid silver teapot
or a solid silver hot for the hot water, and
(14:31):
it just there's all of that sort of stuff.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
Very formal Cuverry.
Speaker 5 (14:35):
I think it's hard. I can't live with and you,
if you're not careful, you inherit. It's rather big, heavy
sort of service. He ever calls it a dinner service anymore.
I just want you, just want plates that make you happy.
My plates make me so happy, right, And I don't
look good, and you know, I got mine from this
(15:00):
amazing potter in France, and it's just bright, beautiful colors
and it just makes me happy to look at it.
But I don't want anything that is like gold leaf
or edging, or I don't want to intimidate myself or guests.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Terrified if you break on. We did one with Nancy Pelosi,
and guess what. She never has had a meal without
a tablecloth. No, yes, her father, it was the mayor
of Baltimore. They had a huge family, but she said
they always had a tablecloth. And I was just thinking
about that, about the laundry, the ironing, all that goes
into having a tablecloth. It is nice to have a tablecloth.
Speaker 5 (15:36):
Well, we had no kind of you know which which
nobody you know, we all had an actual napkin and
a napkin ring ring with your thing. Mine was a
little brown one.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Guess what in Italy they like in hotels we used
to go, They used to you had the during napkin.
They can't wash them, don't think we every night, right,
and then you put them back the door, and then
you'd have but.
Speaker 4 (16:01):
One of them.
Speaker 5 (16:02):
That's the point of the ring, right. It's like a
hanky that you don't change every day.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
My actual rebelliousness when I was a kid growing up,
because I knew it would upset my mother, was to
put a milk bottle on the table, because you yeah,
from a juck. Goodness.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
Even now, when I've got a.
Speaker 4 (16:21):
Milk bottle on the table, I think.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
So many rules And what about restaurants. So now in
the River Cafe, we see kids all the time. We
see kids at Friday night dinners or Saturday lunches or
Sunday lunches. We see people bring their children. And when
I was a kid, we went out for a special occasion,
you know, we went out for the birthdays or the anniversaries,
and we were told to look at the right hand
(16:45):
side of the menu, and I don't know, it's obviously
so economic thing. What was going to restaurants like in
your family when you were growing up, Emily.
Speaker 5 (16:53):
Yeah, much more, much more seldom. Actually, we grew up
in Sheffield and there was amazing restaurant called Fishes, which
is on the edge of Bakewell and it's beautiful. Everything
about it is exquisite, you know, just the sense of
arrival and destination and beautiful herbs in the garden. And
I remember that was like very very special occasions. You
(17:16):
had to basically be getting engaged, married or giving birth
at Fishes, but it did have that sense of absolute occasion.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Yeah. And do you go out now with your kids
to restaurants? So is it also that way?
Speaker 5 (17:31):
Funny enough, we don't go out that often to restaurants
with my kids because we do a lot of sort
of cooking and just eating at home when they're home.
And I feel like when your kids don't live at home,
they're actually really happy. It's almost turned round. I think
now that my kids have to fend for themselves. They live,
you know, one lives at university ones away. They'll be
(17:52):
doing a lot of kind of like cheap and cheerful
takeaways or whatever. And so actually the treat now is
to come home and to have home cooked food. Sort
of turned around.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
I think we used to go out for special occasions
and there would be about three or four restaurants in
London that you know my parents love.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Do you remember them?
Speaker 1 (18:11):
Well? One of them actually I now live around the
corner too. I mean it became my mother's favorite restaurant,
which was a Greek restaurant in Primrose Hill and Liamonia.
So you know, we used to go there and meet
my mother there, but they were kind of they weren't
terribly grand, you know, there was nothing overly flash about them.
They were just good places where good food was served.
(18:35):
And somebody was saying, you know, the kind of food
that we ate at home that was, you know, was
much more continental, and so my mother would love. There
was a delicatessen in Linton that she used to love
going to on Liverpool Road, which kind of was full
of it seems so exotic.
Speaker 5 (18:52):
So this is exactly what My dad would come down
to London for work and we lived in Sheffield and
he would visit Berwick Street. Next street was the first fresh.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
Ravioli and amazing.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
Yeah, it was a delicatessant and he would bring them
back to Sheffield and it was like this, Oh my god,
what's dad got from London?
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Now, yeah, a big deal.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
As both of you have talked a lot about your mother's,
did either of your father to cook?
Speaker 4 (19:17):
Fun enough?
Speaker 1 (19:17):
My dad? So, my dad was a lot older. My
dad was born in nineteen ten, so my dad was
a lot lot older than my mum. Had grown up
in the East End of London and had never really
left the East End of London. And there were two
favorite dishes that he cooked and I both found both
of them absolutely inedible. He would have he would make
(19:39):
porridge for breakfast, but he would he would put salt
in it. He didn't sweeten it. It was just kind
of salt. And I just thought, this is really hard work.
And he used to cook egg and onions, so he
would do he would make scrambled eggs with spring onions
at breakfast, and I just thought, who, so that didn't
really do it? So fa The reason I've spoken about
(20:01):
my mother's cooking more hers was more delicious.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Did your dad cook?
Speaker 5 (20:06):
He was a real foodie. He didn't cook a lot
but actually, looking back, he was a chemist, right, so
he was very obsessed with the science of getting food right,
getting cooking right, and so he'd be the one who'd say,
never put meat onto a grill unless it's hotter than
you dare you know, useful. He'd be the one who'd say,
(20:26):
never put the spaghetti in until it's massively salted, massively boiling,
and you never break it. And so I sort of
think back, I was like, I listened to him very seriously,
and I don't think I've ever broken his rules, you know,
but it was more as a scientist probably than as
a cook.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
So it stays with you.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yeah, yeah, you know, you like you've did for Milo.
I mean for my mother when I was sixteen and
I was going off. You know, I went off camping, right,
you're going to learn to cook on one part, and
you know, I learned how to make rattetuia, learned how
to make speable and NAIs and then how to do
stews and you know.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Stuff like that she told you before you ran.
Speaker 4 (21:05):
Yeah, she taught me.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
And when lockdown came and the ghastlings of COVID, my
wife had moved back from America because she's got a
very elderly mother. I was in DC by myself, and
suddenly the restaurants are shut.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
I am cooking every night.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
It was great because I found that I could still
do it.
Speaker 5 (21:19):
Yeah, and did you Yeah, of course, I mean I
cooked right through lockdown. I didn't really mind it. I
was still working at these night. My week was very
much divided because I was out on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday's
not coming back till midnight, you know, one o'clock in
the morning.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
And so actually the rest of.
Speaker 5 (21:34):
The week felt like I sort of earned my lockdown yea,
and earned my you know, time to cook.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Living home, you know this this home with the food
in the dining room and your mother's and gathering around
the table. What happened? Did you go to university straight
from home?
Speaker 1 (22:02):
I took a gap year, and so I sort of traveled.
I went to the great picking harvest in the Bougelot region,
and then I travel around Europe, and I spent some
time on your books in Israel.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
What was food like in that yeard?
Speaker 3 (22:14):
You discover?
Speaker 1 (22:15):
I loved French food, I absolutely grew to love for
and I thought France then was the most sophisticated kind
of Wow, this food is just amazing. Actually, I spent
four years in Paris as the Paris correspondent for the BBC,
and I kind of thought, actually, it's very conservative. A
lot of the cooking and some of it is really
quite pedestrian. Whatever restaurant you went to, you got a
(22:38):
version of the same menu every time. I just thought,
you know, and everyone was like, oh my god, I
bet you ate fantastically. Well, there were more interesting restaurants
in London. So this was around two thousand, that's when
we were there, and that London was just fantastic new
rep you know, Peruvian food, food, you know, it was
(23:00):
from all over the world. And you'd go, you can
only eat French cheese because no other cheese exists in
the world, and you can only drink French wine because
no other wine exists in the one.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
And that was just there was a chauvinism I.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Think that I found in France then that they wouldn't
acknowledge that there was other ways of doing completely.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
You agree, did you likee You've ever lived in Paris
or France.
Speaker 5 (23:20):
I've lived in France and I love it as a
sort of this is what we do and this is
the way you do it, but God forbidding if you
break any rules.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
Actually, and I think it's at least the same.
Speaker 5 (23:29):
You know, a friend of mine who is the Roman correspondent,
was saying, you know, if you if you try and
open a sort of Thai restaurant or a sort of
different culture, there's actually quite a lot of pushback because
it's not how you know, sis, how we do things,
you know. And so I think maybe because we were
behind on our own cuisine, I do think Britain has
(23:53):
been much more accepting and really good at accepting other
cultures and other fusions, and just a bit more adventurous.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Actually, I don't know.
Speaker 5 (24:02):
I don't know anyone who says I will not try
you know that nationalities food, I will.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Not eat that.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Did you go to university?
Speaker 5 (24:10):
I went to university and then I went off to
Hong Kong and that just completely opened my mind to
Southeast Asian food in a very different way. And I
would say, now, you know, anything that's got sort of
prawns and lime and chili, lemon, grass, lemon, all this,
I just love. I love Vietnamese flavors, I love coriander,
(24:32):
I love mint. I love handfuls of herbs as almost salad.
I am absolutely obsessed with herbs. I'm obsessed with you
grow them. I grow so many, I've got a jungle.
So yeah, it was a great time for me. In
Sunday Nights on the Beach and Checko in Hong Kong.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
I said that when you go to a city and
you go straight to the market, it tells you a
lot about the city you're in, the culture you're in,
whether there's you know, a lot of greens, whether people
are shouting it's full. You know what's in season, don't
you say?
Speaker 4 (25:03):
You know the journalistic lives that we've been lucky to leave.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
You have taken us all over the world, and so
you suddenly immersed in Afghanistan.
Speaker 4 (25:10):
Or somewhere like that tells you a lot.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Oh yeah, and you have no option but to eat
what the kind of international food happens to be.
Speaker 4 (25:18):
And that's just been joyous.
Speaker 5 (25:20):
We were in Bulgaria last year, funny enough, and I
always just took my son there for you know, three days,
little break. A little kind of rented place was right
next to the market, and I was I sound sort
of like shocking, but I was so surprised by just
how magnificent the sort of produce was, and the fruit
and the vege. And I think I still have this
(25:42):
very Soviet sort of thought in my head of everything
being a bit sort of pale and gray and gristly,
and you suddenly realize the richness.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Of what they've actually, Yeah, probably very seasonal as well
fantastic these places. They do fly raspberries and from New
Zealand in the winter, or grapes some Souf Africa in
the role season.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
And look, we live in a country in the UK
where there is plenty and we are blessed that we
live in it. But then you go to America and
you go into one of the big supermarkets and you
see this kind of rows of brightly colored vegetables. It
all looks fabulous and just doesn't taste.
Speaker 5 (26:16):
It's when you learn that big strawberries are normally tasted
of strawberries.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Water, And that's sort of that realization that you've got everything,
but it doesn't taste as good as in many places
where if you went to the small local market you're
going to get fabulous fresh fruit and vegetables.
Speaker 5 (26:34):
I also think they over chill everything like American restaurants
serve everything too cold and so you can't taste it,
and I think I must serve everything more or less
like Ted.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
I say that in Italy the only thing that really
they care about being hard is pasta because you can
even have a blito misto and it's kind of room temperature,
and a lot of soups are not hotright, And I
agree with you. As Americans, I would say that things
are really really.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
Do you think it's true that?
Speaker 1 (27:02):
I mean, the thing that struck me really when I
was living there was that sweet things were over sweet,
so that you would have bread and you could almost
literally taste the taste it.
Speaker 4 (27:12):
Yeah, you can really taste it.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
And the savory things are over salted, so there's far
too much, you know, like buying a packet of crisps
or chips as they would call them in the US,
and the salt levels in them would be on a
different scale to what would be served here.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
No, I agree. I think as an American, I don't
even want to leap to the defense because I think
you're absolutely right. But if you go down to Union Square,
you know there's a Union Square market and there's rocket
from some County in Upstate New York, and there's broccoli
that's been grown on Long Island, and I think certainly
in California there's a whole movement of farm to table,
(27:48):
and as a chef, I just know that there's a
lot of that going on. But how you translate that
into schools to you know, b city as we know
you see that there I am getting political again, but
you know it is food and politics and sustainability.
Speaker 4 (28:03):
And you've been in England too long. When you call
it rocket and not a regular I mean I just
oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Well that was the other thing that was interesting is
how when we Rose and I opened the River Cafe
in nineteen eighty seven, we'd put a Papa pomodor or
a Rugela salad, and you know, people would say, I'm
not paying those days, shockingly three pounds fifty for this soup.
You know, it's just bread and tomatoes. And then you know,
sometimes I give credit to Freddy Laker who all the
cheap airlines which actually got people out of England and
(28:33):
to Italy and to France and to Greece, and then
you know, everybody started eating in these foreign countries, and
then it came back and we're interested in eating here.
Speaker 5 (28:41):
But I do remember my mum in the nineteen seventies
making a lasagnya for the neighbors that had just moved in,
and nobody had heard of it. Yeah, it was just computing.
She was ahead of a time, and she took them
out and they were like, what do I do with him?
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (28:56):
Now, you know, nobody would believe you'd made it yourself
and just assume it of a packet. Ye, She's brought
it around, and you know, she just thought that's a
warming dish for a family that are moving in. But
in the nineteen seventies, people hadn't even had past they
haven't even heard a pastor.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
But you know, as you were saying, you did have
Indian restaurants, you had Chinese takeaway. So it's just I
was amazed, again coming from upstate New York, that there
were all these people who know how to make a curry.
I mean, you know, everybody could make a curry. They
might not be able to make a lasagna, or they
might not be able to, you know, make a risotta,
but there they were making some sort of amazing curry,
(29:33):
you know. And so I think that that goes in
and when you travel now for your work, would you
check out the restaurants first? Would you think I'm going
to Prague? Does anybody know where I should eat? Or
I would going to Venice?
Speaker 4 (29:45):
You were I'm going to Venice in June. We've already
booked restaurants.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Oh good, where you go?
Speaker 1 (29:51):
I actually the friend that we're going with his booked restaurants,
so I know that we're going to one absolutely sensational
place on Saturday night.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
I could find out the name VI if.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
You were going or is this okay? That's all right?
You'reing together very often in the office.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
In the office, I know that he likes you know, yeah,
the press.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Now you have to write it down.
Speaker 5 (30:20):
But this is not his favorite. I think that would
be kind of slightly undermining.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
And it's not my favorite. It's convenient. She has it's
too chicken soup noodles.
Speaker 5 (30:30):
I like that. Yeah, it's convenience, it's quick, it's not
too unhealthy.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Do you feel about eating at your desk? We were
talking about it here.
Speaker 5 (30:38):
About the problem with the newsagents. I mean, there are
very few problems, but I would say structurally, the big
problem is that we tend to record between twelve and two.
So you either have to have a very Spanish lunch.
You have to have a brunch yeh, a sort of
eleven eleven thirty brunch. And we're still working out with
(30:59):
it's best to be sort of spilling soup on your
nose at.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
Eleven thirty and laptop.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
Yeah, on your laptop.
Speaker 5 (31:06):
We have an office, an office editors who's managed to
spill coffee on four people.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
Very smart.
Speaker 5 (31:14):
But if you wait till three, there's a chance you
get quite tetchy when you're recording.
Speaker 4 (31:17):
And well that's me.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
And if you and if you get wait till three
to have lunch, but then you've got a dinner in
the evening at seven. I don't feel like dinner, but
I need something between.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Yeah, so I suggest you reschedule the podcast or do
you have to do it during people.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
We want to get it so that people receive it
when they're on their journey home. And if the podcast
goes up online, say an hour later, listening figures go
down because we're doing a daily news.
Speaker 5 (31:47):
But if we were properly Italian about this, we would
just basically lay out the table and all eat and record, you.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
Know, and just sort of make.
Speaker 5 (31:58):
Put the meal in the center of it and record
the podcast around the edges, which you know, I always
ask actors.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
You know, if you're doing a matinee or even you know,
do you eat before or do you eat after? I
mean most of the actors that I know play, they say,
come meet me, you know, after the show, and we'll
go out and have something to eat. But then do
they snack before?
Speaker 1 (32:17):
You know?
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Do they wait that.
Speaker 4 (32:19):
Long if you've just had a meal.
Speaker 5 (32:25):
Problems? Probably they are, they're our podcast timing, But it
is would you talk about that?
Speaker 2 (32:30):
Yeah, it's importantly, it is important. What do you think
chances favorite dishes?
Speaker 5 (32:45):
I'm going to do? I think I've got mine really wrong.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Okay, I feel like we asked I'm sure we ask
you what is your favorite dish? Well, we're going to
say what what did you guess is his favorite?
Speaker 1 (32:59):
So first, because I'm I'm going to say what you
tell me what I think it would be something sea
bassie prawns with a spicy kind of sauce.
Speaker 4 (33:11):
That would be yeah, kind of have a flavor of
the Far East too.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Very good.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Yeah, I'd go with that.
Speaker 4 (33:19):
Yeah. Yeah, And what have you got for me?
Speaker 5 (33:21):
Well, I think it's a bit too sort of matcho
for you, because I don't think you're really matching your food.
But I have gone for Philips, state mushrooms, fat chips,
truffle butter or bonnets and green beans.
Speaker 4 (33:32):
Yeah there are.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Okay, should we just talk for one minute about these agents?
When I said it's my favorite, I do think it's
a great program. Do you want to tell the world.
Speaker 5 (33:48):
What you do?
Speaker 1 (33:49):
We started, you know, as every podcast starts, with zero
subscribers and zero listeners, and we were trying to create
something that was not a million miles away from our
BBC backgrounds, but was maybe just a tiny bit bolder,
and you know, we would really call stories as we
saw them. And I don't want this to sound pompous,
(34:10):
because I don't think we feel pompous about it at all,
but you know, almost try to reinvent, you know, the
idea of public service broadcasting and that we are kind
of giving people, hopefully something interesting that they hadn't thought
about a story and maybe makes them think, ah, I
get it now, I get why this issue is so
important or I hadn't thought about that.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
That's what we're trying to do.
Speaker 5 (34:30):
Our editor would at this point kill us if we
didn't say we are now the biggest daily podcast in
the UK get so that he doesn't sort of, but
that's a kind of a big a surprise to us,
I think, as it would be to our listeners in
the sense that it was a very tiny acorn, you know.
(34:53):
It was sort of three of us just wanting to
work with our mates and create something that we wanted
to enjoy doing. And yeah, it's really lovely when people
say it feels close to public service because we do
things that we think actually are really worth discussing that
you don't always get everywhere else. And we've been really
(35:14):
lucky with our interviewees, fantastic people who've come on the newsagents,
and I think we're still finding our way, you know,
we want to sort of work out what the next
step is in terms of who we're reaching now and
who we're talking to.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
You know, we're recording this and it is the day
before the coronation, and there is a certain tone and
timbre to the coverage at the moment on a lot
of the mainstream outlets, and I think we are asking
different questions, not being anti monarchists, but just asking you know,
more interesting questions maybe about some of this, which maybe
the main broadcasters would be fearful.
Speaker 4 (35:51):
Of going to.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
The Other thing is that, you know, when I was
in Washington and I'm doing the ten o'clock news, the
audience on average would be over six years old. We're
getting a lot of young people, and so this whole
idea that young people aren't interested in news, I.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Think is both.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
I think that we're getting a lot of people who
but they just want it done differently, and that's what
we're trying to do.
Speaker 5 (36:14):
Yeah, my favorite line came yesterday from a friend who said,
I'm a much much better kind of dog owner as
a result, because he used to be really grumpy with
his sweet whippet Wolf, and you know, if Wilf want
to go out, it's kind of, oh, come on, then
let's do it.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
And he said, now it's my time.
Speaker 5 (36:34):
You know, I get in with the newsagents and Wolf
is happier, and I'm happier, and we get back.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Exhausted and it goes really quickly.
Speaker 5 (36:40):
So if we've made dogs happier as a result of
this podcast, that our work is done with, I think.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
It's you know, as I said, you know, it's about informing.
It's about telling us. If we know about news, if
we know about what is happening, it helps us make choices.
It helps us plan our lives. Our day is what's happening.
You know, That's why at some point, and that's what
you do. And I don't want to compare food to
information and you know what we're all doing, but it is.
(37:09):
It gives us knowledge, gives us nourishment. It gets to
nourishment and energy, like you know, food and news. And
so at the end of this really great conversation, thank
you for coming. It's so nice that you came on.
Before you have lunch, maybe you can have your prune
and almond tar. Just have one more question. What would
(37:29):
be the food that you return to if you needed comfort?
Speaker 5 (37:34):
Well, I guess I'd say put aside your you know,
the SeaBASS, prawns and the chili. My favorite food is
fresh bread and butter and strawberry jam.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
And I don't.
Speaker 5 (37:46):
Indulge in that very often because it feels like, you know,
if I started with bread, I would never stop.
Speaker 3 (37:52):
But I just love it.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
A couple of years ago, I was flying back from Australia.
My son lives in Australia and I caught COVID being
very on trend. I got back to London, tested positive,
felt absolutely dreadful, and I realized the food I wanted
I hadn't had since I was a child. And it's
so such a cliche to say it. I wanted chicken
soup and moncibles and it's the kind of almost it's
(38:17):
the punchline of so many Jewish jokes. Give him some
chicken soup. Yeah, And that's what I felt I wanted.
And I suddenly realized I knew you were going to
ask this question, so I kind of thought, what is
the food that I think? Oh, and that was what
I needed. Then we kind of found some chicken soup.
Linda made some chicken soup and I was just oh,
that was tasted so fabulous.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Well, thank you very much. It was great to have
you here. Let's go have munch. Thank you very much.
If you like listening to Ruthie's Table for would you
please make sure to rate and review the podcast on
(38:58):
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get
your podcasts. Thank you,
Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and
Adamized Studios.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Food is key to life and to day. More than ever,
journalism is also key to life. Our guests, Emily Maitlis
and John Sopel, are too brilliant, inspiring journalists who bring
us news, analyze news, present news, helping us determine our
lives and the choices we make. They are smart, they
are warm, they are funny, and they tell me they
(00:32):
are always hungry. Emily was lead anchor for the BBC
presenter of Newsnight and now produces documentaries. John spent four
decades at the BBC as chief political correspondent and its
North American editor. A year ago they launched The Newsagents,
(00:54):
which is definitely my favorite podcast, well maybe my second favorite.
These two journalists crave food. This chef craves journalism. They've
just come from the River Cafe pastry kitchen, having made
a prune and almond tart, and now we're going to
sit down talk about food, memories and more.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
So lovely.
Speaker 4 (01:24):
My name's Bella Toobs.
Speaker 5 (01:26):
I'm the head pater chef at the River Cafe and
I'm here with Emily Maitlist and John soapolk.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Okay, so we're going to make a prune and almond tart.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
It's a bit of a how to blue Peter.
Speaker 5 (01:38):
That's a really useful, usually sad thing to do.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Prune and almond tart, which.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
I had last Friday here and it was sensational. I mean,
normally pair on the rare occasions I overcome here, but
it was incredible.
Speaker 5 (01:56):
I think you've already given yourself away.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Well so, so you've just made a prune and almond tart.
But before we talk about that experience and what you did,
would you like to read the recipe for it.
Speaker 5 (02:10):
Prune and almond tart serves fourteen sixteen prunes stoned, three
hundred grams almonds, finally ground, one el grade tea bag,
one hundred mills of brandy, three hundred grams of unsalted butter,
three hundred grams cast a sugar, three large eggs, one
preheated sweet pastry start shell. Pre Heat the oven to
(02:31):
one hundred and fifty degrees.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Pour enough boiling water over the prunes to cover, then
add the tea bag.
Speaker 5 (02:36):
Leave for one hour. Remove the prunes from the tea,
pour the brandy over them.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Using an electric mixer. Beat the butter and sugar together
until pale and light.
Speaker 5 (02:46):
Add the ground almonds, Then add the eggs one by one.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Finally, add one hundred mills of the brandy prune juices.
Speaker 5 (02:53):
Pour this mixture into the tart shell. Push the prunes
into the mixture, Bake in the preheated oven for forty minutes.
Speaker 4 (03:01):
Cool and remove from the tin.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Brillier. Hi, how about that's a little do it? So
tell me about Meggi and what was it like in
the pastry kitchen.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
It was spotlessly clean, It was brilliantly well organized. And
the smell when you walk in, of the baking of
the breads of Christini, of everything else that's going on
in there is just fabulous, and of course the almonds,
which just smell so rich and sweet.
Speaker 5 (03:28):
I was shown a magic trick it actually blew my mind,
which was instead of pushing the pastry into the tin,
you grate it on a normal sort of greater and
you take all the tiny bits and then push them
sort of gradually around the back, which apparently makes it
finer and shorter and more delicate. And so I'm going
to take that away and say this is what I learned.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
At the river.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
As well as it being spotlessly clean, I have never
seen a greater looking so totally knackered. It has been
through so much and it looks absolutely oh my god.
You wouldn't get a penny for that in a jungle sale.
But it's obviously still doing its job.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Much times are harder than we're saving up for a
greater But actually you do get a kind of sentimental
attachment to certain things that you use in the kitchen.
Speaker 5 (04:18):
I don't know if you do, but I'm a spatchelor
girl here is so if somebody gives me the wrong
kind of spatulor I have favorites in My favorite is
the purple spatulate.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Tell us about the Verbel spatu.
Speaker 5 (04:29):
It's just it just fits your hand right, It's that's
the point. There's nothing special about it. It's it's not unique.
It's just that it's it's become part of it's I
feel like Edwards's hands, but with spatchul it's the extension
of my arm.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Now do you have kitchen equipment when you've inherited from
your family?
Speaker 1 (04:47):
There was a kitchen knife that has been so sharpened
that it bows because there's so little of it left.
And that was my mother's favorite kitchen knife, and she
had it since she was a girl.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
And I mean, unfortunately, it's kind of it met.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Its end because there was just nothing left of it
because it had been sharpened so many times over the
years that it had been filed down.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Have you got it above the fireplace.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
Exactly?
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Do you have one that was handed down?
Speaker 5 (05:18):
Not? Really, No. I think it's more the practices of
my mum was my big is my big inspiration actually
in terms of cooking. And it's more the way she
does things and the way she talks to herself as
she cooks that I do now and I think I
pass on to my children.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Did you cook with her always?
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Yea?
Speaker 2 (05:39):
And did she work or did she come home and cook?
Speaker 5 (05:41):
She worked a lot at home, so she did a
lot of her work at home. And I remember the
rituals actually of her cooking and just how.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
I mean, she was very funny. She was always ahead
of the curve. I say she was.
Speaker 5 (05:55):
She's very much alive and we'll be listening to this,
but she was. I think she was quite ahead of
the curve and the kind of ingredients that she used
and the kind of things that she made, and occasionally
she'd go into obsessions. So she had an obsession about
an Indian dessert called gullub Jarman, and she decided she
had to perfect it, and instead of making it once,
she made it like every day for about six weeks
(06:18):
until we were just begging her to stop. But she
also taught me my sort of Yeah, the recipes that
I that I've passed down now that I've taken on she.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Cooked, You have them in her writing? Did she write them?
Speaker 5 (06:31):
She has all her recipes still. And funny you say that,
But I've just done a cookbook for my son. He
went off to university last year, and I did that
really embarrassing mother thing.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Where I took pictures of all the dishes.
Speaker 5 (06:42):
That I thought he'd miss, and I wrote all the
recipes out and I put it all together for him.
And then I saw his room, and of course there's
like one burner and a mini fridge, and he just
looked at me and is like, I'm never ever going
to cook any of that stuff in here.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
You know that, don't you know that he will? But
one day he.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Will a lot of grand This cook book with grandmother's recipes,
a lot of people do people.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
It was always a roller decks a little That's what
my mum keeps it. And every recipe is like do.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
You know what I mean?
Speaker 5 (07:09):
Like a little square thing and it's all in her rising.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Yeah, very similar story. My mother worked and she'd had
polio as a child and so was left pretty badly
disabled by it. And I used to go and meet
her from the tube station to carry the shopping home
because she would bring the shopping home and then she
would cook the dinner and I think, probably like Emily's mum,
you know, presentation of it was kind of really important.
(07:34):
She loved food to look appetizing as well as to
taste appetizing. So it was fun just doing the pastry
where I was having to put the prunes on the
tart and to make it look neat, And that was
the sort of thing that I did at home. And
also my mother loved cooking and loved handing the recipes down,
and funnily enough, she died about fifteen years ago. My
(07:55):
second cousin sent me on WhatsApp a photo of a
recipe that my mother had written out for her for passover,
and there it was, you know, my mum's handwriting, and
I suddenly got this whatsapped message and all those things
bring back such memories of childhood and growing up.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yeah, I found that. The other thing it's interesting is
how many people talk almost more, maybe not the two
of you, but more about their grandmother's cooking than their mothers.
Speaker 5 (08:23):
My grandmother was. She had certain key recipes that she
would repeat. One was Locktion pudding. I haven't met anyone
since then that does Locktion pudding, which is literally it's
like noodles. It's a pasta dessert and it's kind of
pasta and cream and raisins and more cream. I think
it's probably the heaviest thing in the entire world, and
(08:44):
it's got a crispy top. I've literally never seen on
the menu, but it must just be the most.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
So my mother was, I mean, my mother had an
extraordinary life story. She was illegitimate child in the Northeast
to a Russian Jewish family and had to escape because
of the shame that had been brought to the family.
And she ends up in a farming community in East Anglia,
which you know, which was Protestant, and so she kind
of grew up making suet pudding and Yorkshire puddings and
all the rest of the kind of English cookbook if
(09:16):
you want. When I was going up until I was
a sort of teenager, you had to be home Friday,
even Friday night, Friday night, can the bread, the wine,
all the rest of it, and then we'd eat non
kashy food and we just thought that was perfectly normal.
Speaker 5 (09:29):
I mean, my mother would not dream of cooking pork,
but would have plenty of palmer Ham.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
English rose.
Speaker 5 (09:39):
Pork wouldn't be anywhere near the table. I don't remember
her ever doing that, but if it was palmham or prawn,
so that would be fo.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Food and tradition and memories and family and Friday nights.
Did you reject having to stay home on a Friday
night when you could be out partying.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
I think by the time I got to sixteen, it
got a bit kind of I'm sorry, I'm going out
and going to the pub, you know.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
Yeah, so I started to bell at that stage.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
But I love the idea of at least one night
a week, the family coming together and everyone sitting around
the table. Maybe not always getting on brilliantly, but there
is a kind of sense that this is what we
do as a fact do you do it?
Speaker 2 (10:12):
And now your generation, do you deal with your kids?
Do you deal with yours?
Speaker 1 (10:15):
I mean might have grown up, but when we can, Yes,
we do. I mean normally Sunday evenings actually because everyone's
got it's either a school day or work day the
next and you just kind of, you know, that's the
I like.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
A Sunday nights. What about you? Yeah, you deal with
your kids?
Speaker 5 (10:28):
We do Friday night. We like the candles, we say,
if the kids are together, you know, And normally it
involves me being about to cook and Sudday going, oh
it's Friday.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
Quick.
Speaker 5 (10:40):
So we do that, not in a big demonstrative way,
but just in a kind of recognition a few moments
at the beginning of the evening.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Yeah, growing up, did you always sit around the table?
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Yes, we did. I mean it was that was very much.
It was no one had TV.
Speaker 4 (10:54):
Dinners, no grazing. It was kind of.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
You'd sit down at the table together, the four of you.
And yeah, that was kind of pretty much on school
nights every night.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (11:05):
Then and to the point where we all everyone had
a set place. I mean that's how the pecking order
is established. I was the youngest of three sisters.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
I had the least.
Speaker 5 (11:14):
Comfortable chair sort of squashed into the corner where you
had to get between the sort of dresser and the
and the and the edge of the table. And I
sort of think of it like that. That was how
you knew your plate, literally knowing your place right, And did.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
You get an easier time than your older sisters. And
they were resentful because they thought Emily's come along and
we had to do this, but she doesn't.
Speaker 5 (11:37):
No, My sisters worked out very early that they could
make me run errands for them if they offered to
time me doing something like can you post this letter,
I'll time you, and I would run all the way
down to the bottom of the road, run all the
way back. My sister would have gone off and done
something completely different that she'd suddenly look at her watch
and go, oh, amazing forty five and I'd be like, wow.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Was that better than last time? So that was how.
Speaker 5 (12:04):
But the seating was very much And then Sunday. Sunday
was a big deal because we had it in the
dining room and there is a bottle of Coca Cola
in the table and it was the only time of
the week we got fizzy drinks, and it was, you know,
the real iconic Coca Cola bottle, and that was how
you the.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Other times you ate in the kitchen. The dining room
is a lost. Do you have a dining room in
your house?
Speaker 4 (12:28):
We do?
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Do you have one?
Speaker 5 (12:30):
We have a dining room that comes from the kitchen.
So I don't know that I like the idea of
a Yeah, I don't want a bright red dining room.
That's kind of like right now, have a row about something.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
I like the sense of sudden.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
You can also be like regulated to the kitchen, you know,
so everybody's becomes much more of a performance.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Did you have Yeah, we had it in the kitchen.
There was a little table, but Friday nights it was
round the dining room table. It was the you know,
because that was the posh dinner. And we also I
remember as a kid the Corona man and Corona used
to come around with bottles of fizzy drinks. It was
like a milk delivery, and the Corona man would do
deliveries and you could have cherry aid or lemonade or
(13:14):
soda water. And I just loved the days when we
could have some cherry aid because that seemed such an
exotic thing. Well, I grew up in London, but I
mean my parents were residential social workers, so we lived in.
Speaker 4 (13:27):
This huge commune kind of type place in the East Den.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
But where my mother grew up was in Essex and
we had the house there and we used to go
there at weekends and the Corona man would come to
this house in East Anglia, near Colchester and deliver kind
of off the back of the lorry these different bottles
of Corona fizzy drinks.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
We had one of my grants that had this great
idea when we were in a hotel in France. He said,
I'd like to do like the cheese trolley, but ride
it around Highbury and it's Lindn and just knock up
people and they can say I have a bit of Camembert,
I have a bet of every night.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
It's sort of six quite entrepreneurially idea.
Speaker 5 (14:06):
This is taking meals and wheels, very sophisticated level tally where.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
I think there's a huge change. I mean, both my
parents have died now, but you know, so there was
these silver tea sets which were seen I think in
the nineteen fifties must have looked so impressive and proper
on the table that who has a solid silver teapot
or a solid silver hot for the hot water, and
(14:31):
it just there's all of that sort of stuff.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
Very formal Cuverry.
Speaker 5 (14:35):
I think it's hard. I can't live with and you,
if you're not careful, you inherit. It's rather big, heavy
sort of service. He ever calls it a dinner service anymore.
I just want you, just want plates that make you happy.
My plates make me so happy, right, And I don't
look good, and you know, I got mine from this
(15:00):
amazing potter in France, and it's just bright, beautiful colors
and it just makes me happy to look at it.
But I don't want anything that is like gold leaf
or edging, or I don't want to intimidate myself or guests.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Terrified if you break on. We did one with Nancy Pelosi,
and guess what. She never has had a meal without
a tablecloth. No, yes, her father, it was the mayor
of Baltimore. They had a huge family, but she said
they always had a tablecloth. And I was just thinking
about that, about the laundry, the ironing, all that goes
into having a tablecloth. It is nice to have a tablecloth.
Speaker 5 (15:36):
Well, we had no kind of you know which which
nobody you know, we all had an actual napkin and
a napkin ring ring with your thing. Mine was a
little brown one.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Guess what in Italy they like in hotels we used
to go, They used to you had the during napkin.
They can't wash them, don't think we every night, right,
and then you put them back the door, and then
you'd have but.
Speaker 4 (16:01):
One of them.
Speaker 5 (16:02):
That's the point of the ring, right. It's like a
hanky that you don't change every day.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
My actual rebelliousness when I was a kid growing up,
because I knew it would upset my mother, was to
put a milk bottle on the table, because you yeah,
from a juck. Goodness.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
Even now, when I've got a.
Speaker 4 (16:21):
Milk bottle on the table, I think.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
So many rules And what about restaurants. So now in
the River Cafe, we see kids all the time. We
see kids at Friday night dinners or Saturday lunches or
Sunday lunches. We see people bring their children. And when
I was a kid, we went out for a special occasion,
you know, we went out for the birthdays or the anniversaries,
and we were told to look at the right hand
(16:45):
side of the menu, and I don't know, it's obviously
so economic thing. What was going to restaurants like in
your family when you were growing up, Emily.
Speaker 5 (16:53):
Yeah, much more, much more seldom. Actually, we grew up
in Sheffield and there was amazing restaurant called Fishes, which
is on the edge of Bakewell and it's beautiful. Everything
about it is exquisite, you know, just the sense of
arrival and destination and beautiful herbs in the garden. And
I remember that was like very very special occasions. You
(17:16):
had to basically be getting engaged, married or giving birth
at Fishes, but it did have that sense of absolute occasion.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Yeah. And do you go out now with your kids
to restaurants? So is it also that way?
Speaker 5 (17:31):
Funny enough, we don't go out that often to restaurants
with my kids because we do a lot of sort
of cooking and just eating at home when they're home.
And I feel like when your kids don't live at home,
they're actually really happy. It's almost turned round. I think
now that my kids have to fend for themselves. They live,
you know, one lives at university ones away. They'll be
(17:52):
doing a lot of kind of like cheap and cheerful
takeaways or whatever. And so actually the treat now is
to come home and to have home cooked food. Sort
of turned around.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
I think we used to go out for special occasions
and there would be about three or four restaurants in
London that you know my parents love.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Do you remember them?
Speaker 1 (18:11):
Well? One of them actually I now live around the
corner too. I mean it became my mother's favorite restaurant,
which was a Greek restaurant in Primrose Hill and Liamonia.
So you know, we used to go there and meet
my mother there, but they were kind of they weren't
terribly grand, you know, there was nothing overly flash about them.
They were just good places where good food was served.
(18:35):
And somebody was saying, you know, the kind of food
that we ate at home that was, you know, was
much more continental, and so my mother would love. There
was a delicatessen in Linton that she used to love
going to on Liverpool Road, which kind of was full
of it seems so exotic.
Speaker 5 (18:52):
So this is exactly what My dad would come down
to London for work and we lived in Sheffield and
he would visit Berwick Street. Next street was the first fresh.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
Ravioli and amazing.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
Yeah, it was a delicatessant and he would bring them
back to Sheffield and it was like this, Oh my god,
what's dad got from London?
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Now, yeah, a big deal.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
As both of you have talked a lot about your mother's,
did either of your father to cook?
Speaker 4 (19:17):
Fun enough?
Speaker 1 (19:17):
My dad? So, my dad was a lot older. My
dad was born in nineteen ten, so my dad was
a lot lot older than my mum. Had grown up
in the East End of London and had never really
left the East End of London. And there were two
favorite dishes that he cooked and I both found both
of them absolutely inedible. He would have he would make
(19:39):
porridge for breakfast, but he would he would put salt
in it. He didn't sweeten it. It was just kind
of salt. And I just thought, this is really hard work.
And he used to cook egg and onions, so he
would do he would make scrambled eggs with spring onions
at breakfast, and I just thought, who, so that didn't
really do it? So fa The reason I've spoken about
(20:01):
my mother's cooking more hers was more delicious.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Did your dad cook?
Speaker 5 (20:06):
He was a real foodie. He didn't cook a lot
but actually, looking back, he was a chemist, right, so
he was very obsessed with the science of getting food right,
getting cooking right, and so he'd be the one who'd say,
never put meat onto a grill unless it's hotter than
you dare you know, useful. He'd be the one who'd say,
(20:26):
never put the spaghetti in until it's massively salted, massively boiling,
and you never break it. And so I sort of
think back, I was like, I listened to him very seriously,
and I don't think I've ever broken his rules, you know,
but it was more as a scientist probably than as
a cook.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
So it stays with you.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yeah, yeah, you know, you like you've did for Milo.
I mean for my mother when I was sixteen and
I was going off. You know, I went off camping, right,
you're going to learn to cook on one part, and
you know, I learned how to make rattetuia, learned how
to make speable and NAIs and then how to do
stews and you know.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Stuff like that she told you before you ran.
Speaker 4 (21:05):
Yeah, she taught me.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
And when lockdown came and the ghastlings of COVID, my
wife had moved back from America because she's got a
very elderly mother. I was in DC by myself, and
suddenly the restaurants are shut.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
I am cooking every night.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
It was great because I found that I could still
do it.
Speaker 5 (21:19):
Yeah, and did you Yeah, of course, I mean I
cooked right through lockdown. I didn't really mind it. I
was still working at these night. My week was very
much divided because I was out on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday's
not coming back till midnight, you know, one o'clock in
the morning.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
And so actually the rest of.
Speaker 5 (21:34):
The week felt like I sort of earned my lockdown yea,
and earned my you know, time to cook.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Living home, you know this this home with the food
in the dining room and your mother's and gathering around
the table. What happened? Did you go to university straight
from home?
Speaker 1 (22:02):
I took a gap year, and so I sort of traveled.
I went to the great picking harvest in the Bougelot region,
and then I travel around Europe, and I spent some
time on your books in Israel.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
What was food like in that yeard?
Speaker 3 (22:14):
You discover?
Speaker 1 (22:15):
I loved French food, I absolutely grew to love for
and I thought France then was the most sophisticated kind
of Wow, this food is just amazing. Actually, I spent
four years in Paris as the Paris correspondent for the BBC,
and I kind of thought, actually, it's very conservative. A
lot of the cooking and some of it is really
quite pedestrian. Whatever restaurant you went to, you got a
(22:38):
version of the same menu every time. I just thought,
you know, and everyone was like, oh my god, I
bet you ate fantastically. Well, there were more interesting restaurants
in London. So this was around two thousand, that's when
we were there, and that London was just fantastic new
rep you know, Peruvian food, food, you know, it was
(23:00):
from all over the world. And you'd go, you can
only eat French cheese because no other cheese exists in
the world, and you can only drink French wine because
no other wine exists in the one.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
And that was just there was a chauvinism I.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Think that I found in France then that they wouldn't
acknowledge that there was other ways of doing completely.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
You agree, did you likee You've ever lived in Paris
or France.
Speaker 5 (23:20):
I've lived in France and I love it as a
sort of this is what we do and this is
the way you do it, but God forbidding if you
break any rules.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
Actually, and I think it's at least the same.
Speaker 5 (23:29):
You know, a friend of mine who is the Roman correspondent,
was saying, you know, if you if you try and
open a sort of Thai restaurant or a sort of
different culture, there's actually quite a lot of pushback because
it's not how you know, sis, how we do things,
you know. And so I think maybe because we were
behind on our own cuisine, I do think Britain has
(23:53):
been much more accepting and really good at accepting other
cultures and other fusions, and just a bit more adventurous.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Actually, I don't know.
Speaker 5 (24:02):
I don't know anyone who says I will not try
you know that nationalities food, I will.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Not eat that.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Did you go to university?
Speaker 5 (24:10):
I went to university and then I went off to
Hong Kong and that just completely opened my mind to
Southeast Asian food in a very different way. And I
would say, now, you know, anything that's got sort of
prawns and lime and chili, lemon, grass, lemon, all this,
I just love. I love Vietnamese flavors, I love coriander,
(24:32):
I love mint. I love handfuls of herbs as almost salad.
I am absolutely obsessed with herbs. I'm obsessed with you
grow them. I grow so many, I've got a jungle.
So yeah, it was a great time for me. In
Sunday Nights on the Beach and Checko in Hong Kong.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
I said that when you go to a city and
you go straight to the market, it tells you a
lot about the city you're in, the culture you're in,
whether there's you know, a lot of greens, whether people
are shouting it's full. You know what's in season, don't
you say?
Speaker 4 (25:03):
You know the journalistic lives that we've been lucky to leave.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
You have taken us all over the world, and so
you suddenly immersed in Afghanistan.
Speaker 4 (25:10):
Or somewhere like that tells you a lot.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Oh yeah, and you have no option but to eat
what the kind of international food happens to be.
Speaker 4 (25:18):
And that's just been joyous.
Speaker 5 (25:20):
We were in Bulgaria last year, funny enough, and I
always just took my son there for you know, three days,
little break. A little kind of rented place was right
next to the market, and I was I sound sort
of like shocking, but I was so surprised by just
how magnificent the sort of produce was, and the fruit
and the vege. And I think I still have this
(25:42):
very Soviet sort of thought in my head of everything
being a bit sort of pale and gray and gristly,
and you suddenly realize the richness.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Of what they've actually, Yeah, probably very seasonal as well
fantastic these places. They do fly raspberries and from New
Zealand in the winter, or grapes some Souf Africa in
the role season.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
And look, we live in a country in the UK
where there is plenty and we are blessed that we
live in it. But then you go to America and
you go into one of the big supermarkets and you
see this kind of rows of brightly colored vegetables. It
all looks fabulous and just doesn't taste.
Speaker 5 (26:16):
It's when you learn that big strawberries are normally tasted
of strawberries.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Water, And that's sort of that realization that you've got everything,
but it doesn't taste as good as in many places
where if you went to the small local market you're
going to get fabulous fresh fruit and vegetables.
Speaker 5 (26:34):
I also think they over chill everything like American restaurants
serve everything too cold and so you can't taste it,
and I think I must serve everything more or less
like Ted.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
I say that in Italy the only thing that really
they care about being hard is pasta because you can
even have a blito misto and it's kind of room temperature,
and a lot of soups are not hotright, And I
agree with you. As Americans, I would say that things
are really really.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
Do you think it's true that?
Speaker 1 (27:02):
I mean, the thing that struck me really when I
was living there was that sweet things were over sweet,
so that you would have bread and you could almost
literally taste the taste it.
Speaker 4 (27:12):
Yeah, you can really taste it.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
And the savory things are over salted, so there's far
too much, you know, like buying a packet of crisps
or chips as they would call them in the US,
and the salt levels in them would be on a
different scale to what would be served here.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
No, I agree. I think as an American, I don't
even want to leap to the defense because I think
you're absolutely right. But if you go down to Union Square,
you know there's a Union Square market and there's rocket
from some County in Upstate New York, and there's broccoli
that's been grown on Long Island, and I think certainly
in California there's a whole movement of farm to table,
(27:48):
and as a chef, I just know that there's a
lot of that going on. But how you translate that
into schools to you know, b city as we know
you see that there I am getting political again, but
you know it is food and politics and sustainability.
Speaker 4 (28:03):
And you've been in England too long. When you call
it rocket and not a regular I mean I just
oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Well that was the other thing that was interesting is
how when we Rose and I opened the River Cafe
in nineteen eighty seven, we'd put a Papa pomodor or
a Rugela salad, and you know, people would say, I'm
not paying those days, shockingly three pounds fifty for this soup.
You know, it's just bread and tomatoes. And then you know,
sometimes I give credit to Freddy Laker who all the
cheap airlines which actually got people out of England and
(28:33):
to Italy and to France and to Greece, and then
you know, everybody started eating in these foreign countries, and
then it came back and we're interested in eating here.
Speaker 5 (28:41):
But I do remember my mum in the nineteen seventies
making a lasagnya for the neighbors that had just moved in,
and nobody had heard of it. Yeah, it was just computing.
She was ahead of a time, and she took them
out and they were like, what do I do with him?
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (28:56):
Now, you know, nobody would believe you'd made it yourself
and just assume it of a packet. Ye, She's brought
it around, and you know, she just thought that's a
warming dish for a family that are moving in. But
in the nineteen seventies, people hadn't even had past they
haven't even heard a pastor.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
But you know, as you were saying, you did have
Indian restaurants, you had Chinese takeaway. So it's just I
was amazed, again coming from upstate New York, that there
were all these people who know how to make a curry.
I mean, you know, everybody could make a curry. They
might not be able to make a lasagna, or they
might not be able to, you know, make a risotta,
but there they were making some sort of amazing curry,
(29:33):
you know. And so I think that that goes in
and when you travel now for your work, would you
check out the restaurants first? Would you think I'm going
to Prague? Does anybody know where I should eat? Or
I would going to Venice?
Speaker 4 (29:45):
You were I'm going to Venice in June. We've already
booked restaurants.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Oh good, where you go?
Speaker 1 (29:51):
I actually the friend that we're going with his booked restaurants,
so I know that we're going to one absolutely sensational
place on Saturday night.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
I could find out the name VI if.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
You were going or is this okay? That's all right?
You'reing together very often in the office.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
In the office, I know that he likes you know, yeah,
the press.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Now you have to write it down.
Speaker 5 (30:20):
But this is not his favorite. I think that would
be kind of slightly undermining.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
And it's not my favorite. It's convenient. She has it's
too chicken soup noodles.
Speaker 5 (30:30):
I like that. Yeah, it's convenience, it's quick, it's not
too unhealthy.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Do you feel about eating at your desk? We were
talking about it here.
Speaker 5 (30:38):
About the problem with the newsagents. I mean, there are
very few problems, but I would say structurally, the big
problem is that we tend to record between twelve and two.
So you either have to have a very Spanish lunch.
You have to have a brunch yeh, a sort of
eleven eleven thirty brunch. And we're still working out with
(30:59):
it's best to be sort of spilling soup on your
nose at.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
Eleven thirty and laptop.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
Yeah, on your laptop.
Speaker 5 (31:06):
We have an office, an office editors who's managed to
spill coffee on four people.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
Very smart.
Speaker 5 (31:14):
But if you wait till three, there's a chance you
get quite tetchy when you're recording.
Speaker 4 (31:17):
And well that's me.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
And if you and if you get wait till three
to have lunch, but then you've got a dinner in
the evening at seven. I don't feel like dinner, but
I need something between.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Yeah, so I suggest you reschedule the podcast or do
you have to do it during people.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
We want to get it so that people receive it
when they're on their journey home. And if the podcast
goes up online, say an hour later, listening figures go
down because we're doing a daily news.
Speaker 5 (31:47):
But if we were properly Italian about this, we would
just basically lay out the table and all eat and record, you.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
Know, and just sort of make.
Speaker 5 (31:58):
Put the meal in the center of it and record
the podcast around the edges, which you know, I always
ask actors.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
You know, if you're doing a matinee or even you know,
do you eat before or do you eat after? I
mean most of the actors that I know play, they say,
come meet me, you know, after the show, and we'll
go out and have something to eat. But then do
they snack before?
Speaker 1 (32:17):
You know?
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Do they wait that.
Speaker 4 (32:19):
Long if you've just had a meal.
Speaker 5 (32:25):
Problems? Probably they are, they're our podcast timing, But it
is would you talk about that?
Speaker 2 (32:30):
Yeah, it's importantly, it is important. What do you think
chances favorite dishes?
Speaker 5 (32:45):
I'm going to do? I think I've got mine really wrong.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Okay, I feel like we asked I'm sure we ask
you what is your favorite dish? Well, we're going to
say what what did you guess is his favorite?
Speaker 1 (32:59):
So first, because I'm I'm going to say what you
tell me what I think it would be something sea
bassie prawns with a spicy kind of sauce.
Speaker 4 (33:11):
That would be yeah, kind of have a flavor of
the Far East too.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Very good.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Yeah, I'd go with that.
Speaker 4 (33:19):
Yeah. Yeah, And what have you got for me?
Speaker 5 (33:21):
Well, I think it's a bit too sort of matcho
for you, because I don't think you're really matching your food.
But I have gone for Philips, state mushrooms, fat chips,
truffle butter or bonnets and green beans.
Speaker 4 (33:32):
Yeah there are.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Okay, should we just talk for one minute about these agents?
When I said it's my favorite, I do think it's
a great program. Do you want to tell the world.
Speaker 5 (33:48):
What you do?
Speaker 1 (33:49):
We started, you know, as every podcast starts, with zero
subscribers and zero listeners, and we were trying to create
something that was not a million miles away from our
BBC backgrounds, but was maybe just a tiny bit bolder,
and you know, we would really call stories as we
saw them. And I don't want this to sound pompous,
(34:10):
because I don't think we feel pompous about it at all,
but you know, almost try to reinvent, you know, the
idea of public service broadcasting and that we are kind
of giving people, hopefully something interesting that they hadn't thought
about a story and maybe makes them think, ah, I
get it now, I get why this issue is so
important or I hadn't thought about that.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
That's what we're trying to do.
Speaker 5 (34:30):
Our editor would at this point kill us if we
didn't say we are now the biggest daily podcast in
the UK get so that he doesn't sort of, but
that's a kind of a big a surprise to us,
I think, as it would be to our listeners in
the sense that it was a very tiny acorn, you know.
(34:53):
It was sort of three of us just wanting to
work with our mates and create something that we wanted
to enjoy doing. And yeah, it's really lovely when people
say it feels close to public service because we do
things that we think actually are really worth discussing that
you don't always get everywhere else. And we've been really
(35:14):
lucky with our interviewees, fantastic people who've come on the newsagents,
and I think we're still finding our way, you know,
we want to sort of work out what the next
step is in terms of who we're reaching now and
who we're talking to.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
You know, we're recording this and it is the day
before the coronation, and there is a certain tone and
timbre to the coverage at the moment on a lot
of the mainstream outlets, and I think we are asking
different questions, not being anti monarchists, but just asking you know,
more interesting questions maybe about some of this, which maybe
the main broadcasters would be fearful.
Speaker 4 (35:51):
Of going to.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
The Other thing is that, you know, when I was
in Washington and I'm doing the ten o'clock news, the
audience on average would be over six years old. We're
getting a lot of young people, and so this whole
idea that young people aren't interested in news, I.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Think is both.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
I think that we're getting a lot of people who
but they just want it done differently, and that's what
we're trying to do.
Speaker 5 (36:14):
Yeah, my favorite line came yesterday from a friend who said,
I'm a much much better kind of dog owner as
a result, because he used to be really grumpy with
his sweet whippet Wolf, and you know, if Wilf want
to go out, it's kind of, oh, come on, then
let's do it.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
And he said, now it's my time.
Speaker 5 (36:34):
You know, I get in with the newsagents and Wolf
is happier, and I'm happier, and we get back.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Exhausted and it goes really quickly.
Speaker 5 (36:40):
So if we've made dogs happier as a result of
this podcast, that our work is done with, I think.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
It's you know, as I said, you know, it's about informing.
It's about telling us. If we know about news, if
we know about what is happening, it helps us make choices.
It helps us plan our lives. Our day is what's happening.
You know, That's why at some point, and that's what
you do. And I don't want to compare food to
information and you know what we're all doing, but it is.
(37:09):
It gives us knowledge, gives us nourishment. It gets to
nourishment and energy, like you know, food and news. And
so at the end of this really great conversation, thank
you for coming. It's so nice that you came on.
Before you have lunch, maybe you can have your prune
and almond tar. Just have one more question. What would
(37:29):
be the food that you return to if you needed comfort?
Speaker 5 (37:34):
Well, I guess I'd say put aside your you know,
the SeaBASS, prawns and the chili. My favorite food is
fresh bread and butter and strawberry jam.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
And I don't.
Speaker 5 (37:46):
Indulge in that very often because it feels like, you know,
if I started with bread, I would never stop.
Speaker 3 (37:52):
But I just love it.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
A couple of years ago, I was flying back from Australia.
My son lives in Australia and I caught COVID being
very on trend. I got back to London, tested positive,
felt absolutely dreadful, and I realized the food I wanted
I hadn't had since I was a child. And it's
so such a cliche to say it. I wanted chicken
soup and moncibles and it's the kind of almost it's
(38:17):
the punchline of so many Jewish jokes. Give him some
chicken soup. Yeah, And that's what I felt I wanted.
And I suddenly realized I knew you were going to
ask this question, so I kind of thought, what is
the food that I think? Oh, and that was what
I needed. Then we kind of found some chicken soup.
Linda made some chicken soup and I was just oh,
that was tasted so fabulous.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Well, thank you very much. It was great to have
you here. Let's go have munch. Thank you very much.
If you like listening to Ruthie's Table for would you
please make sure to rate and review the podcast on
(38:58):
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get
your podcasts. Thank you,
Host
Ruth Rogers
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