You were listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair. Whenever I'm with Bella Freud, which isn't often enough, I always wish I could see more of her. She's in fashion and I'm in food. A meal is a moment, and an outfit changes daily. Right now, I'm wearing Bella's iconic nineteen seventy sweater. A few years ago she created an Nemesis sweater for the River Cafe, and one of my most treasured possessions is a Bella sweater, saying Bella, this,
Bella that. In our early years, Bella's father, Lucien Freud, came almost every day to the River Cafe. When with Bella, we were told never to interrupt, as this was their precious time. Now, when Bella comes with her friends.
I always wish I could whisk her.
Away and have her all to myself. Today, on Table four, I finally am.
Thank you, Ruthie. It's so nice to have you here. And it is true you did come with your dad.
Yeah, and sometimes he do risk me away when I'm here and I don't know. I love it. You beckon to me and say come here, and then we stand behind a corner. Are they talking?
What are they doing? In this world?
We have to talk or just talk about each other. What are your memories of your dad coming here?
I remember we came here when it first started. We jump in the car, and then he drove very fast, terribly terrifyingly. I'm very good at kind of masquerading a calmness, and some of it's learnt from sitting next to him while he drove in this petrifying way. He'd drive very fast towards something and then swerve suddenly, so then we'd arrive and.
Lived another moment. Great food.
And I remember he also used to come here with Lee. Barry and Lee used to learn all about food from eating out with Dad and coming here. And I always remember this moment him saying, yes, the poach pears are very good. It was so lovely.
I remember one day he came and we had a sign on the door because we were painting the restaurant. We closed for lunch. We only opened for lunch, and I said, listen, I'm really really sorry that you know we're closed today, but I'll cook you something and he said, I have a better idea. I'm going to take you out to lunch, and yeah, he took me to Kensington
Place and we had lunch. He was just fantastic, you know, spontaneous and kind and just caring and talking to me and asking me about me, you know, and it was very It was one of the great moments in my life.
Yeah, he was fun.
He was such a good company and he made you feel so special.
I used to come in those trousers with Peter all over them, and you know, he was great.
It was exciting.
It's very interesting you were saying that a lot of your experience of eating with him was in restaurants.
I remember going because I lived in the country and i'd camp to London and all my sort of encounters with him as I got to know him when I was little were we used to go to marine IC's when I was very small, and then he would take us to this Greek restaurant in notting Hill. But it was always a meeting to do with being in a restaurant and the food. I would be quite nervous, so the food was probably secondary, but that was the context.
And then you know, when i'd sit for him. When I moved to London when I was sixteen, we'd work and have this break and zoom out, go somewhere very fast and come back. But then sometimes he would cook, and he was a very good cook, and it was very different from how my mother cooked. It was well, I mean, we just didn't have very much food. And when you asked me to be on this podcast, I was like, oh my god, I didn't. In the sixties and seventies, there wasn't much food around, and then my
mother she didn't have There was no food abundance. And my overriding memory was the food we did have took about a day or two, like it was lentils, it was hippie food. There were no snacks, there was no nothing to eat, and I was hungry quite a lot of the time. So I have a kind of strange attitude to I think. So let's go about your mum in the sixties.
She would have been hold.
She was eighteen when I was born, so very young, and she wasn't married and her parents didn't even know she had children until me and my sister esther were about I think I was four, and someone saw us walking down the street and told her parents, who lived in Ireland, and so it was very you know, she had a that's tough, yeah, having to be have two children.
But your father was an art involved it was.
They lit up when I was two, and he wasn't at all hands on or she made an effort to make sure that we saw him. And he was always very responsive as a father and very affectionate, and that was, you know, kind of a lifeline, even though I don't you know, she had to sort of take care of us without his help or very little help. When I was six, my mother decided that we would go and live in Morocco. I think a lot of people were going there and she thought, oh, my money will go
further there, we can have an interesting time. She was interested in Soufiism and music and she was an amazing person and very sound. Yeah, she was very courageous. So we drove there.
We drove from from from Tunbridge Wells to Mary care or did she have another partner.
There was this couple, this man and his wife. I think anyway, she was sat in the back of this van going crazy. Literally she didn't speak and he drove and he was he was kind of really bad tempered and stuff. I didn't really like. I was six when we left, so she was four, and we drove and the van kept breaking down. It was kind of.
She took you out of school age six.
Yeah, so I must have been at nursery so I'd learned to read, so I had a few books and stuff, and that was always a big thing for me. There was a boat that you took and you landed in Morocco, and I remember us throwing peach stones into the sea and watching all these fish come and eat.
All the fruit.
And then when we arrived there, we moved around a lot.
But the food was.
Interesting because in the square in Marrakesh there were these these men who would sell little tin cups of spicy broth with snails, and they were great. Threw you into an advent. You must have been hungry. Yeah, what you were eating, I mean not very many six year olds.
I know, they were really good. I mean that's there wasn't much going, you know. I loved those snails.
But I love the food of Morocco.
But as a six year olds had come from London in a car that Yeah.
I was talking to my sister esther before saying, do you remember what we ate? You know, we didn't, and then she remembered there used to be these stalls in the main square and they sold this soup called bisara, and it was most delicious thing. I just remember. It was just incredible, this beige soup with a they'd pour a tiny bit of olive oil and have a bit of paprika, and it was it was just like it was just like a kind of blood transfuture. It was, and we loved it.
It ap probably was, you know, because Ramadan you don't eat at all, and then you just see when the sun sets everybody, you know, because you've been fasting all day, and it is the soups, isn't it. Yeah. I have a very strong association with being in Marrakesh and Morocco and soups.
Yeah, they were really good. And then there would be this kind of European breakfast, so my mother would sit in a cafe and maybe with some friends and they'd have this milky coffee and then croissants, I think, and it was very dreamy those moments. And then I remember something that I got a gum infection where I couldn't
eat anything and it was so agonizing. They also used to sell in the square these little bottles of yogurt, and one was white and one was fluorescent pink, and that was the only thing I could eat because if I even tasted a tiny bit of sponge cake, it was like broken glass. And did you go to a dentist? I don't know.
I've spent a lot of time in Marrifsh, but they used to have a dentists and square that you could actually sit on a blanket too.
Bold or whatever.
And then you know that the vine with the storytellers and fortune tellers.
And I remember walking past sometimes and you'd see a dentist place and there was no door and you'd just hear people screaming. So I was quite keen to not go, and I kind of developed a pain management where I
would just I would just internalize and go silent. Yeah, that sort of stayed my whole life, really, but I and so I remember this moment where I had my first bite of toast with marmalade, and it was just my mother used to eat toast with marmalade at breakfast, and it was just like it was the most It was just like a king's meal, I remember, And I've
been obsessed with toasts and marmalade my whole life. And then you know a lot of the some of the time we didn't have any food, and I remember we went encamped by this lake in the country and there was we had no food, and then this fisherman gave us some fish and cooking it over a fire. And so there would be periods where we just didn't really have things, but somehow we always got something in the end.
And do you think your mother did she herself not care whether she ate or not, or do you think she also wasn't aware or was she I think she thought this would be okay, you know.
I think you know, it wasn't very often that that happened, that we literally there wasn't anything, and I remember there was a lot of worry about God, we really haven't got a single thing to eat. And then suddenly it was like Jesus and the fish, you know, this fisherman and we had this huge meal and it was all really exciting. And people were very very kind in Morocco as well, and they were kind to us, you know.
Yeah, you know, the museum tells you about culture, and architecture tells you about culture, but that is also the way people respond to food and sharing.
And yeah, a generosity is to do I think.
With culture, I know, it really is sort of strange how you remember those moments to do with people, you know. I remember this one time that we were traveling and we were we'd got a lift on a donkey cart and it was starting to get dark. The only thing we had was someone had given us these fresh eggs, and so we made a fire and then we put these hot stones in the fire and tried to fry eggs on them, and it was really exciting. But then the eggs just slithered off immediately, and then it was
kind of worrying. It was getting dark. And then the man who dropped us off came back and said, come to our house. And we went to his house and they had this wonderful food and we sat in the garden and then we stayed and we I remember we rolled up in carpets. They gave us carpets, and we slept outside in the orchard and it was it was incredible. It was so long ago, and I'll never forget.
Yeah, yeah, can you smell the food.
There's a certain smell of Morocco that is like the smell of sun touching the grass.
And this is a kind of nomadic life. That you heard. How long did it last?
I think we were there for two years.
Two years.
Yeah, your sister wrote a book. Yeah, she wrote it Hideous Kinkyou they made a.
Film of it.
Yeah, they made a really good film. It was wonderful. And yeah, Esthera wrote her first novel called Hideous Kinky because we would get sort of quite bored, and hideous kinky were our favorite words, and we just used to charm them. So the adults, these young people sort of in their early twenties, would be sitting around in the cafes and me and Esta would just be chanting hideous kinky, hideous kinky, and then we'd go faster and faster and then slower and just.
Was your father in touch at all? Did yeah? Send us things?
And I remember we'd get a care package. Sometimes I'd go to the post office for like a couple of weeks before it would arrive, and then there might be a mass bow. I remember there was a bar of chocolate that I just ate before I got home. I felt rather guilty about that.
Imagine a state bottled olive oil, chosen and bottled for the River Cafe, arriving at your door every month. Our subscription is available for six or twelve months, with each oil chosen personally by our head chefs and varying with each delivery. It's a perfect way to bring some River Cafe flavor into your home or to show someone you really care for them with the gift. Visit our website shop the Rivercafe dot co uk to place your order. Now, when did you come home?
So? Then we came home in nineteen sixty nine and we moved to Sussex, and Mum wanted us to go to this Stiner school. I became obsessed with food, and I would my friends would have all these cute lunches and in like sandwiches and like special things. One girl had tinned fruit in a little container, and I used to just stare at them like a dog, and just stare like and the first until they gave me some of their food. And then I'd go and visit them, and the first thing I'd say is.
Got any food? And then I would just eat anything. Everything I could get. I would just and then I'd have started having these terrible stomach aches. I'd lie under the table just like me some pudding, so I'd be in terrible pain, but I didn't want to miss any food, but my mother would. I was talking to I was remembering with esta the things that she made, and she used to make these tuna fish souflet, which sounds awful, but it was so good, sort of creamy.
It was tasty. And my mother was perfectly sort of adequate cook, but things didn't taste much like. She was interested in health food, you know, beans that took like a week.
To silk them.
And then Yea was Lucy in a success. It was he the recognized painter at that time.
That not really, I mean he there was very very little anything, and it wasn't really until much later that he became suddenly more known. And he was extremely private. So we had these two years of moving and then we moved in to this quite nice house and shared where we were the lodge of this family, a father with three daughters who then my mother and he started a relationship and I really didn't like him. I got on really badly with him, but he was a very
good cook. And we had this kind of nice place, you know, we had our own rooms and it knew
about what age, so I was eleven. Yeah, they had an arga and they had this argur cookbook, and I started cooking and making things, and he would make really delicious food and lasagna we'd never had lazagne, you know, and hornbread, and so I got interested in other things, and I learned how to cook stuff as well, and I learned about taste and how much that mattered more than anything, really, the sort of difference in food with my mother, and then going to my father's I remember
he was very keen on oysters. When I was fourteen, he took me to Wheelers and I thought, well, I'd better have these oysters, and I hope I like them, because if I don't like the oysters, maybe he will be really disappointed in me. And then I loved the oysters, and I was so happy.
If you had snails and rocco, yeah, oysters, and you were starting to cook, then food must have been a part of your curiosity about life. Yeah, what, you were ready to go on that adventure when you finished school?
Did you finish school?
No? I didn't. I left home when I was sixteen and I moved to London and I shared a My dad got me a flat that I shared with my half sister Rose. I went to do my A levels but I only I just dropped out and then I started sitting for dads and that was the order in my life. So everything revolved around that, and even though my life was very chaotic and unmanageable, I would always
be there for him. He was thank God, you know he It was like this reason I had to be, you know, have some semblance of order and keep going and not drop off the face of the earth in a way.
You began working in fashion. Was it when you started thinking that clothes mattered?
Do you think the.
Earlier? I remember as a child thinking how much clothes mattered, because people really sort of noticed you if you weren't wearing normal clothes. And my mother, she dressed in a sort of hippie where she was incredibly beautiful, but we were looked down, and so I was conscious that we were different and people like noticed us in a way
that sometimes just exhausting. And so I was aware that certain clothes made me feel really great, Like what I'm wearing today, this shirt tie and of v neck jumper. That's really what I wanted. And we didn't have a school uniform, so I longed for this order. I didn't mind being turbulent within but I wanted some sort of encasement so I didn't feel like I was going to well.
Fashion as a shield itself. Yeah, it's a shield, it can be. I mean, it is a bit like food, and there is a relationship of how you identify yourself. You know, we all need to wear clothes to keep us warm, and we all need to eat to keep us healthy. And yes, choices though involve a lot of other decisions, because you can who you.
Want to be exactly.
Because I started to notice that if I had clothes on that I liked, I could feel much less self conscious. I always remember this moment. I had this scoop neck top on. I must have been eleven or ten the mom had made with balloon sleeves, and I looked in the mirror and thought, I really don't like this. I want to shut up with a collar. And I'd go to jumble cells and buy boys clothes and wear those. And I really liked to be contained to feel safe.
Yeah.
Well, as a designer, it's like you have someone's back. Literally you're dressing them when you're protecting them with your clothes, and you're imbuing them with all everything to bring out their best qualities and.
Sort of care for them.
And then I would always notice the difference, especially like with my father. He would when here working, sometimes we'd go out and he'd just be in his painting clothes and taxis wouldn't stop because they think he was a tramp. And then he would if we went somewhere like Annabel's, he'd put on a Huntsman suit and it was just you know, Cinderellas, we'll go to the wall, you know.
He he looked so good, and he looked I loved the change.
And so I've always been interested in that sort of thing where you have one piece, like you have walking down Portobello and the guys who'd have shops down there or just hanging out in track suits with a tailored jacket, and they just look so cool. And I love this thing that a tailored jacket could give you this magic, this fairy dust sprinkle. And I've always been kind of obsessed with suits and uniforms, like how bus conductors dress
and used to dress information a uniform. When did you actually start to brand?
Yeah, so I started in nineteen ninety and I started working from home, and because I didn't really have money to pay anyone much.
We would have lunch in the kitchen every day and someone would cook. Sometimes I'd cook, because when I was working for Vivian Westward, and I'd been living in Italy before then and I moved back to London started working for her, and I'd cook her lunch.
Do you know her? Had you know her before?
I worked in her shop when I was a teen.
About Vivian Westward, so that we know who.
So, Vivian Westwood was an incredibly influential avant garde designer. She was very much the designer of punk. She created fashion from punk and designed things that people had never
seen before. And she had a shop in King's Road and with her her partner Malcolm McLaren, who was the manager of the Sex Pistoles, and she designed all the clothes they wore, and they had these amazing clothes and it was the first time I had experienced any sort of agency as a person through wearing these clothes that she designed. And suddenly people were like slightly intimidated and it was really exciting.
And what did you do with her?
So I, first of all, I worked in her shop when I was seventeen, and when I lived in Italy. She was also working in Italy and she would come stay with me in Rome sometimes and we became friends. And then when I left Rome, i was studying fashion there. I came back to London and then I worked as her assistant and at that time we just worked from her.
She teach you that she taught you that you and her fashion is. Does it still influence you. It's different, it's very different. But what she taught me was to go beyond yourself whenever you possibly can, never give up really, and it's that's what I learned from watching my father work as well. If something goes wrong, you can't let that stop. You have to work through something.
When I work for Vivian, I learned everything I did, all the different jobs, so production press, sort of working on ideas and.
What is the skill of being a fashion designed that you have to We have chefs that have never been to cooking school and we teach them life skills they learn. You know, I was never taught Rose, my partner was never taught. And I look in one on some of the young people with their what they can do and sometimes what they can't, and how when we have a skill as a profession then you hell.
Because Vivian she was self to and I think that the real skill of a designer, the sort of kitchen as it were, is to fit. Because Vivian didn't learn how to make patterns, but she would make something work through instinct and fitting and you know, I know what to pull up the suppression where it will result in the change of how it fits on a body. And
I think that's the most important thing. That you can shape something literally and then it doesn't really matter what it's made of or but if you have that kind of recognizable way of editing something, people are drawn to that. And then I sometimes it's so circumstantial because when I was living in Rome, I met this woman who had a knitting machine in her flat in a tower block. So I used to go and visit her and started
designing knitwear just because that was something. And then I was always interested in record covers and what people water on protest marches, this kind of how one thing could mean so much and say so much, and language was always really important. I think as being a girl, you don't have physical power, so you have to use your words. And I was very keen to express my contempt for a lot of things, and I honed it as much as I could.
The River Cafe Winter Said Lunch is now running from Monday to Thursday. Reserve a booking at www. River cafet co uk or give us a call. Would you like to read the recipe for sea bass? Do you want to tell me why you chose this recipe? But I quite often cook dinner for myself just me. I sort
of prefer cooking just for myself. And it's sea bass over potatoes, and I sort of mess about with it a bit, but essentially feel free filets of sea bass, cherry tomatoes, and I do as you say in the recipe and squeeze out the juice, and then five hundred grams of potatoes, some ba leaves and a lemon, and then sometimes I put some olives in as well.
So I love the.
Thing that you say to do, which is bring the potatoes to the boil till they're almost perfectly cooked but not quite, and then slice them in thick slices, and then drizzle a roasting.
Tray with olive oil and cover the sliced potatoes and tomato halves, and put the bas leaves on top. And sometimes I put rosemary, because I love rosemary. Put the sea bass filets on top and drizzle with olive oil and roast for six minutes, and then pull it out and put the lemon juice over and roast for another six minutes. If there's some white wine, I'll put some
of that on. I mean, what I love about this recipe is that it's there aren't too many ingredients, because if I see too many, I just panic and then I think, oh, I'll just have some toast. But this is wonderful and it's nurtured me many a time.
When you started out in the introduction about talking about your podcast, well.
It's call fashion Neurosis, and my guest like, in a way, the way you talk about food, and it's a kind of clue to someone's internal life. Fashion neurosis is someone's clothing is their clue. It's the gateway. And some people we talk a lot about clothes, and some people we talk hardly at all. But also I've always been interested in the stories in the fashion world that people never hear about. I think it's very badly seen or it's
not really seen at all in the media. It's always a certain way camp bitchy competitive, fairly facile, whereas the people I've met in the fashion world are so resourceful and remarkable, and there's a lot of real friendship and you know, looking out for each other. It's so difficult being criticized in the way that the cycle of fashion
sort of is just normal to do that. So my guest lies on the couch, well, I thought, well, when I was first figuring out how it would look, I thought I need a prop and then I thought, Okay, if they lie on the couch and I sit in this chair, everyone will know it's this and then I can have a kind of cheeky nod to Sigmund Freud, who's my great grandfather, kind of tongue in cheek.
Well, food and fashion there are very interesting parallels, just saying it gives you a sense of adventure what you're wearing, it gives you a sense of safety, and it gives you a sense very often of comfort. Yeah, if you do seek food for comfort, is there something you would go for?
I've got two things. One is, when I'm really tired, I often crave something very salty and very hot. And not that I get this almost ever, but I crave boiling hot consumme and caviat because I feel like it will charge me up. But then when I think about what is real emotional comfort, it's bread and cheese, and
it's still well. In an ideal world, I'd have bread with some fruit in like you know that kind of French bread, that heavy bread, slightly toasted, and then some slices of something like manchego that just starts to soften on it. And then I can feel my whole nervous system relaxing at the thought of that. I don't eat that very often because it doesn't particularly agree with me, but that I feel my whole body melting at the
thought of bread and cheese. And in my childhood, bread and cheese was just so wonderful.
It was just great.
And Mum used to make cheese on toast for breakfast sometimes and it just made our family feel complete. It was a really important thing.
Let's go have some bread and cheese in the river, pasta and cheese or soothed and cheese.
Thank you, Thank you
Rudy, Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair