You are listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair.
In the past weeks, a phrase has been said to me over and over again, Ruthie, you are going to love Griffin Dunn. Of course, being an independent spirit wishing to make up my own mind, I've been listening to Griffin's interviews, watching his films, and most of all, reading his beautiful new memoir The Friday Afternoon Club. With stories of growing up and a family full of story tellers. Cooking a recipe is also about telling a story. Eating together is telling a story. Going to a food market
in Naples is telling a story. When Griffin told his brother Alex he was going to write a book about their family, he responded, you can say anything you want, but say it from a place of love. Today, Griffin and I are going to talk about food and family, food and friends, food and memories. So we have a recipe for Tagaleradi, with which you chose from all our books.
Yes I did.
The ingredients are one hundred grams of panchetta, six hundred grams of veal minced, twenty five grams butter, one red onion, one small leak, one celery heart and two cloves of garlic, one teaspoon, time and sage, three hundred milli liters of chicken broth, one hundred and fifty milli liters of milk, peel of half a lemon. Finely chop the red onion, leak, celery, and garlic. Heat the olive oil in a heavy pan over a medium heat. Fry the panchetta for five minutes.
Add the butter, onion, leak, celery, garlic, and thyme, and season with salt and pepper. Fry for fifteen minutes, stirring. Often add the veal in sage and cook until the veal is no longer pink. Stir in the hot froth milk and lemon peel and bring to a boil. Simmer for one hour until most of the liquid has evaporated. Set aside in a pan of boiling salted water. Cook the tagli orini until al dente. Drain and combine the pasta with the sauce.
Serve. It's a story in itself.
That's a story.
It's a story in itself.
We have Sean, our head chef, who's here to tell us about this wonderful pasta.
Well, actually, what we did instead of this exact recipe. We actually substituted white wine rather than milk. Oh, I'm shop that's okay because we do it in different ways. But meat sauces are quite nice in the summer because it always remind you if your summer holidays in Tuscany or do you think how you kind of on a hot Obviously it's not a hot day today, but if it was a hot day, you might find that kind of replenishing to have something like that.
I feel very.
Also, the things you know when you think about American where we grew up, you know, spaghetti and meatpoles, you know bolines sauce. It's kind heavy and it's kind of the tomato and meat and meatballs. And then in the pasta and this is very delicate. It's much more like it's delicious. Okay, So going to the beginning of the beginning, what was the food like in your house? Who? Your mother was Mexican?
My mother was half Mexican. My grandmother was fully Mexican.
Was she present in your life? Your grandma very much.
She married my grandfather, My grandfather wooed her away from a man in Mexico City.
He was a banker, a very prominent man.
So he went to Mexico, and he.
Was in Mexico City and he was coming into No Gallas, where my grandmother lived, and she fell in love with my grandfather, and to make sure that the wedding would be called off because he was on his way to marry her. There were about twenty five to thirty stops from Mexico City to Nogallas.
Where's no Gallas, is it No, It's right.
On the border of Arizona and Mexico. And she was on the Mexican side, and she was so worried that he would show up, so she sent a telegram to every stop from Mexico City all the way to Nogallas, of which they were about thirty and every time there was a stop, they go telegram for signor Gomez.
Do not come to the wedding. Stop. The wedding is called off. I planned to marry.
Thomas Griffin and finally had a stack of about twenty eight and then he went.
He got the hint.
He did get them.
He got them all, and then he turned and went back to Mexico City a single man, and my grandmother married Tom Griffin, who was from a very prominent family. In Chicago, they had the Griffin Wheel Company, and the Griffin wheels were on every pullman car in America. But he didn't want to be in that business. He wanted to be a rancher. And he came to Arizona as
a young boy at pulmonary problems. And he came back and he left somebody at the altar too, a lot of scandal in my family, and settled on a ranch and he was sort of cut out of the will and a lot of brought up. It was quite a scandal that he left the society woman on the altar in Chicago. So when I was growing up, food was not really a priority my mother, except for the meal that we had almost every day, was always cooked by our housekeeper, a woman named Carmen, and she made free poles and rice.
So she was Mexican.
She's a Mexican.
We grew up on rice and beans, and we loved rice. We never to this day. I'm never tired of rice and bean. If I cook for myself, I always make rice and beans. It's just a stable of our diet.
But do you think your grandmother she sounds She came from a probably privileged family as well. So maybe she didn't go in the kitchen either.
She did not.
She was Her family were going back generations were like real estate barons. They had silver mines. But when the Mexican Revolution happened Pancho Villa, they were on the wrong side of the revolution. They were aristocrats, and that's how they ended up in Nogallas on the Arizona side. He drove them out and took all their holdings. But then my grandmother's side of the family they built up their real estate business and ended up owning a lot of property at Nogallas.
When I did an interview with Alfonso Korn, you know Alfonso, he was saying that the Mexican the class structure was that when you had more wealth. So in America, if you have more wealth, you have bigger houses, bigger cars, more cars, bigger refrigerators, bigger everything. And he said in Mexico, with greater wealth, you didn't have bigger everything, but you had more domestic staff.
Yes, my mother liked the comfort of how she grew up. You know, in those days when you hired someone to cook and look after your children, they stayed in your lives. Yeah, she was such an old Carmen who cooked for us. She was so old by the time she finally retired.
Did you feel quite connected to home?
Oh?
Yeah, it was just so comforting, you know. And she was the one who would spank us. She was the one who would, you know, discipline us.
And she had children of her own, she did not, and.
She would always go whenever we were exacerbating her patients, she go, I kim ochocho it. Oh you horrible little boy, and you know you're driving me crazy.
Is you g So your grandmother spoke Spanish? Obviously, did your mother?
My mother spoke Spanish well. To my regret, I had a bucket list. One was to write a book. I did that, and the other was to finally master Spanish. And recently I have a problem being in California, Mexican Spanish was the language of domestics, and I think my father was a bit of a snob at that period in his life before he evolved, so we weren't really encouraged to speak Spanish. And in fact, when I started school from the first grade, you know, they had us
take French. Yeah, and here I had, you know, so I spoke of pigeon Spanish that I learned from Carmen and what else.
Going back to the food, do you ever sit.
Down for a fact, No, No, We would have meals always in restaurants when we ever we ate together. We never sat at a table in our home. And we would go to a place on Sunday nights. There were three restaurants. One was called the Bistro, the other was called Chasins, and the other was the Brown Derby. And
our favorite was Chasins. And we'd have to get dressed up, and it was every Sunday night and we'd be there and you'd see Alfred Hitchcock at one table and mister and missus Jimmy Stewart at another.
And it was a very you know, good people move around.
Well, it was very social, you know, but everybody had their own sort of table. My brother and sister and I loved Chasins because they made a dish called a butterfly steak.
I can imagine it's opened up.
They open it up and it's just covered in butter, and it was so delicious. And we would always go on about the butterfly steak.
Do you think they put the butter on so you get it? And then there would be a lump of butter on it that would melt.
Over there and you'd see the lump and then you'd see it spread and it would just and you could cut. You could rest the knife on top of the steak, not even apply pressure, that would just sort of cut. And there was a bathroom at Chasin's, the men's room, and I think one of my earliest I guess sort of not to overshare, but earliest erotic memories of this place was there was in the bathroom at the urinal
was a picture of a man drowning in bosoms. He was a tiny figure and then it was just surrounded by bosoms.
And I bet that picture is there anymore?
Is no?
In fact, you know, the business Chasins went out of business and they had an aux and I found out too late, but I wanted to know what happened to the bosom picture. I wanted to have that bosom picture to where it is. I don't know who happened.
Maybe it's gone to the Metropolitan Museum.
Yeah, I don't know if it's worthy of that.
Of times in a change. So you go to Chase and said where the other did you go to other restaurants? So did you wasn't just I mean other restaurant meals, or were it you in school Monday to Friday and then Sunday night, you want to Monday.
Monday through Friday, we would sit at the table and be served just my brother, sister and I the the rice and beans, and you know, we had another unusual thing, and we had a pantry in our house.
Just to show you how.
Irreverent we were about food. We had stacks and stacks of spam and a can and when we would I would go for lunch. They would make to school. In our lunch bags were spam sandwiches. Now they're disgusting spam, but it's I happen to love that taste. It probably tastes like dog food, if you like dog food.
When they entertained, would you be sort of like sitting on the stairs watching these sparkling.
Got it exactly, And you know, then there would be the moment at the beginning of the party before the adults really got hammered, and yeah, it got kind of wild. You know, we'd be called down and we'd you know, my brother and I would have matching bathrobes, and my sister wore like one of those little caps you see in like dickens a nightgown, and we'd say good night, and my brother and I would bow, and my sister would curtsey, and the adults would go ooh and on.
It was a little spectacle that was terribly embarrassing to us.
You know. Years later, Dennis Hopper used to come to our house. This is well before Easy Writer.
And years later I'm doing a movie with Dennis and it's after work and we're smoking a joint and he kind of looks off and he goes, I'm just thinking about you kids coming down and bowing and curtsying to us all. I think that was the saddest thing I ever.
Saw in my whole life. And it was weird, you know.
But where do you think that came from? Because I was just thinking your mother grew up on a branch and your father had left all that, So I wondered where that. It's not as if they came from European run No.
But my father at this point in his life was very materialistic and very much of a sort of the production designer of his life, with the right material things for the house. And I think he fashioned us on the photographs of the royal family of Cecil Beaton. I mean he would say as much. And he was a
fantastic photographer. He had a hostle blot and every summer we would pose for these deadly serious Christmas card picks, these three glum looking children in suits and with this sort of pastoral background and the art design in our backyard and send them out as Christmas cards to families in New York, London, Los Angeles.
And they were beautiful.
Did you ever go to other kids' houses and see family like fridges and people sitting around?
Yeah, parents and totally different, totally different kind of things in about half, but other parents were equally sort of superficial, you know, and their priority, particularly in that generation, their main focus was themselves, you know. They were not like the kind of parent I became in most every parent I know, where you just encourage every little thing they do, and you notice and you want to know where they go and where you know, And.
Yeah, I think that. Do you have grandchildren yet? No, that's really nice.
I do.
And I always say is that the really great thing about having grandchildren is the children, but also just seeing your kids as parents And I just look at them and I think they are. You know, I thought we were pretty good, but they are amazing.
One of the happiest things I was able to do for my parents was give them a child. They loved being grandparents.
So maybe that skipped generate. They were better grandparents and.
Parents so much better. It was so much easier. You have less responsibility.
And my father would just spoil my daughter, Hannah Rotten, and she goes, listen kid. My dad always had a funny, dark sense of humor. He goes, listen kid, when I cool, I'm going to leave you so much money, which is a terrible thing to tell a little kid, by the way, And my mother was my mother had ms, multiple scrosses, and so she was unable to you know, she was in bed confined and could be moved to a wheelchair.
But the look on her face when I brought my daughter and I put her on the bed and my daughter was, you know, an infant, but she recognized that this lady sitting up in bed was someone important and she which she'd never done with anyone.
She just crawled to her and.
Did your parents they didn't like to cook or have a domestic life of food? Did they love food? Did you was your mother very did. She looks so elegant in these I just think they like to drink, right, they like to drink. Did they like to eat?
I don't think so.
My father was you know, Irish Catholic, and I think they ate the staple of you know whatever. Again more the Irish cook would make they called cook what is cook serving? And it was all like comfort food. I know my dad loved meat loaf, you go on in.
Chicken pot pie.
In fact, when when I was married to Hannah's mom and at our wedding, Dad said, I'm paying for the whole thing. I'm going to take care of this. He was very you know, proud and excited. And he told the wedding planner that he hired he wanted chicken pot pie. And the wedding planner already had a chicken dish prepared, and he shows the menu of what's going to be served,
and he goes, where's my chicken pot pie? He went, well, it just seemed redundant because we have chicken pie art and he went, I said, I want a chicken fucking pot pie.
That's how much you love that?
Why not?
Yeah, that's what do you want?
You want? Yeah? Yeah, but you had did you get boarding school?
I did? Yeah?
So was that a Wrencher going away?
And it was his school very much based on on English boarding schools, you know, have no.
Heat, bad food, and.
Bullying, terrible cruelty. There was corporal punishment.
Sorry for the British people here, but that is kind of the ethos of yeah, I think it's better now maybe.
But that it does not.
But I mean we were literally flogged. There was a it was called where was it? It was in Massachusetts, a little a town called Southborough, mass called Fay, which wasn't a lot of fun to go back to LA and come home from Fay. You know, there were children as young as seven years old. I was eleven, and it was a novelty to be a kid from LA to be going to school in Massachusetts, you know, at such a young age as well. But you know this,
the food at that school was slop. You know, We're all dressed in coats and ties for dinner and we couldn't eat.
There was a ceremony before.
We could eat, of some kind of homily would be said, and then we'd just eat and it just stuff ourselves. Just everybody ate like it was like being at a trough and if you put your elbow on the table, the headmaster at an enormous silver spoon. It must have weighed about five pounds or something. And if you saw a kid, you know, with his elbow on the table, or he'd throw the spoon, throw it. And at one time hit a kid in the mouth and knocked his tooth out.
The River Cafe, cafe, steps away from our restaurant, is now open. In the morning an Italian breakfast with cornetti, chiambella and cristata from our pastry kitchen. In the afternoon, ice creamed coops and River Cafe classic desserts. Come in the evening for cocktails with our resident pianist in the bar. No need to book, see you here, So let's go back. So you left home all domestic sort of domestic life at home and school? Did you did you go to college? Did you go straight into film?
So I was a bit of a discipline problem. I was kicked out, kicked out. I was kicked out of tenth grade.
And then I became an actor both uh and moved to New York. But in tenth grade, No, I spent a year in Los Angeles before going, but and I was held back a year also because I was.
Dyslexic. Poor student.
Yeah, my husband's dyslexic. Yeah, can you do you spell? You can't spell?
Or I have a terrible time with math. But I became a voracious reader once I was out of school. Once I wasn't And.
Also probably when you were in school. I don't know. My husband's much older than you that he was in school, probably in the forties or whatever, and they didn't know what dyslexia was, so he was beaten because he couldn't memorize it. They say, you have to learn this poem, and if you can't, then he was.
Also I know just what he went through.
I was treated as you know, stupid, lazy, Yeah, mostly stupid and and sort of mentally handicapped. And he had to be I had to be held back a grade, and you know, I get pitying looks or just be called stupid. But you know, before then we did. I had one more you mentioned Europe. One of my mothers before she became you know, unable to walk, and she was quite healthy. When I was thirteen, my brother was eleven and my sister was eight, she took us to Italy. It was her dream and she wanted to show us.
We went to Italy and England and France and we took the Michelangelo, the ocean liner, and there began our journey. And there I realized, oh, my mother really does love food. And she would take us to these restaurants and go, oh my god, this is so good, that's so good. You know, I was, you know, a bit of a you know, mischievous kid, and I would always kind of
sneak out. And when we were in Venice, I snuck out and I when everybody was asleep, I assumed, and I met these girls and I told him I was thirteen, yeah, and I told him I was much older. And we kind of walked through the streets and the canals and I rescued them from some harassing Italian guys. And we're walking through and I think I told him I'm traveling on my own. I'm like much older. And all of a sudden, we're in the one of the canals were in.
A boat passes by, it's a police boat and I hear.
Find nay Pein and the girls go, isn't that your name? And went, yeah, your day.
I thought you was some Italian.
No, no, it was my name, and my mother woke up so he wasn't there, and she called the police the Venetian place, and I got totally busted and I had to get on the We all got into the thing and there's my mother at the dock practically with a rolling pin in her hand, and went, oh, so you're traveling with your mother.
I went, yeah. You know.
Another memory I have of that place is she was dying to show us the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel and.
The Michelangelo. And so we're in line.
This is in the sixties, and she's wearing a mini skirt as most women wore, and we're in line to get the tickets and one of the guys, I forget what they're called, but the guards with the hats and the little swords there they one of them came over and shamed my mother about what she was wearing and talked to her. Even though I didn't speak Italian. He talked to her like she was some you know, prostitute or something. I mean, my mother was mortified. So we
went back to the hotel. She changed and her attitude by the time we went to the Vatican her attitude about being a Catholic and being you know, proud of showing us this had totally changed. We would see the displays of all the gold and the crown and she would just say, this was all stolen from poor people gave donations to buy this ridiculous extravagance, and I think a part of her, you know, lost her faith.
So her father and Mexican mother were Catholic. She was raised as a Catholic, so she did have I mean to tell she did wanting to expose her children to Europe and choose the restaurants and give you to the party going. I mean there was the bar that was very different.
Than my father. You think that was oh yeah, she was not.
You know, my father was the the ringleader of gathering of who's coming to the parties and where we're going to go, and the emphasis on celebrity, and my mother wasn't really like that. She went along with it, but when they divorced, that was one of the main reasons. She just didn't want to be the hostess social light,
you know anymore. And you know, when they divorced, my father had to do some real soul searching, and he loved my mother, and he called her his wife right all the way through decades after the divorce, and all of his priorities changed, you know, and he went he lost all of his money, He couldn't get a job anymore in the movie business that he loved, and he'd burned every bridge, you know, from drinking. And he drove up the coast in a little Ford automobile, used to
have a Mercedes that he treasured. His car broke down in a little town in Oregon and he lived in a cabin in Oregon for a year, got sober and wrote these long, single space typed letters to his children. And they were like workshops for him to find his voice. And that's really the you know, the groundwork for how he became a writer and shed all of that superficiality, and you know, his priorities completely changed, and he really
found himself. He found his voice and what his purpose was great and became a great writer.
If you liked listening to Ruthie's Table four, would you please make sure to rate and review the podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Did you ever enjoy food? Was there ever a time when you were eating something and you thought this is delicious.
I want to tell you the.
Exact time I embraced food, because now I'll tell you exactly when in nineteen eighty I did.
I was in a movie that was shooting in Poland.
What was it.
It was called The Wall, based on John Hershey's book about the Warsaw Ghetto, and I played a young ghetto fighter. Rosanna Arquette was in this movie. Tom Conti was in this movie who became a lifelong friend, Diane West.
And we were there during the.
Olympics in Moscow, and that was the year that United States boycott it because of their involvement Russia's involvement in Afghanistan nineteen eighty and so all the food that would have been anything that mood or bleat was sent to Moscow to feed the people at the Olympics. So we were practically starving to death. And I mean literally. Rosanna Arquette and Diane Weist I passed them on my way to the set. When they weren't working. They would wear
babushkas without any irony involved. They looked like peasants and be waiting in line for a black market because we heard bananas were being sold there and the importance of food.
So each we would gather enough food from the black market in order to make a meal in one of our little tinker dressing room cavern that had an oven and stuff, and Tom County would make this incredible meal of all found things that we anybody on their day off, they had to come up with something, so we'd find bread, we'd find this, and these were the best meals I ever had. So when that's when I realized food actually tastes good, I didn't realize it tasted good. I was
twenty three, twenty two something like that. So when we it came time to leave the country, also went into martial law. Like Valensa was the strikes were happening. It was a very intense time to be there, and we were held for over two months because of the conditions.
We couldn't get out.
We could not get out.
Was this an American production?
It was an American production, and so we finally got out. We're on the lot Airlines and it's changed. We're changing planes in Frankfurt and we all have are going to different destinations. We have to walk to wherever our destinations are, But in the along the way to our gate, we're all these different food places, and all of us went, oh my god, they have pizza overy, Oh my god, there's oh we have and we all missed our flights.
You missed it.
Every one of us missed our flights.
We just ate and ate, and ever since then, I understood food, and I understood pasta in particular.
And did so when you went to New York age twenty three, and you know, did you have your own apartment? Did you just eat out?
So I got my first apartment and we went to the neighborhood places. It was on twentieth just West twentieth Street. It was in an area that at that time it's the flatter and district. Now it's terribly trending.
But it was all.
Warehouses and that made you know, a cardboard box, and there was they were.
Always manufacturing things. At night. It was very noisy.
You'd hear these machines and stuff, and it was a desolate street. But for some reason, I made my own clam chowder. Oh that's and I had like a croc pot and I would make clam chowder that would last for I have to say, I'm amazed. As I'm telling you this, I can believe this. You're bringing up all these sensory food memories. But yes, that would be like my dish.
That's ambitious. You were acting. At the time I was acting acting. Money was money in Isshoot.
Money was always an issue.
But you didn't work. And another you never have you ever worked in a restaurant?
I have.
My first job was at a restaurant called Joe Allen's, of course, you know, very famous theater place. And I met Joe and had my interview with Joe.
And he came to the River Cafe in the early days.
I bet he did when he died about two three years ago, but he was well into his nineties then too. And so I had my meeting with Joe, and I think I mentioned something about what I could lie without my pulse raising.
I told her I had all this experience and uh and uh.
He saw me waiting on a table and somebody asked, can I have some oil and vinegar for my dressing? And I took the bowl, I took the salad from their plate and put the oil and vinegar on in the kitchen, and Joe went, You've never.
Waited a day in your life.
You bring out the oil and victory, you don't put it on for them, I thought, so he fired me very quickly, but I stayed.
I did.
In fact, when I became an actor, I would go to Joe Allen's all the time, and I had a charge account there and and we became very very friendly.
That was.
From my lying and faking it. I worked at a place, mostly at a place called Beefsteak Charlie's.
Oh yeah, where's that?
It was a chain.
I worked to the one on the Upper West Side and it had all you could drink sang gria and.
A salad bar.
Salad bars were all the new rage then, and it was pretty easy to wait on people, but they would because there was endless sang gria.
You'd be waiting on total.
Drunks by the end of the night, and they would try to run out without tipping you, and I'd have to chase them down the street run.
You know, that's very Do you think you learned anything from working in a restaurant.
Yeah, I certainly learned people skills, and you know, I kind of learned to fake it till you make it kind of thing.
So living in New York working in the restaurant. Was there a time then you realize you could be full time as an actor and not have to supplant here. Yeah.
That was my ambition where I felt I'd made it was to be able to support myself as an actor and most importantly take cabs after two in the morning, Yeah, instead of being in subways.
And then I could take a cab whenever I wanted. That was a bar.
Did you live a different life of going to good restaurants and drinking good wine and drinking Was that one of your priorities or did you?
No?
No, No, I get the taxi thing. I really do, because I remember, you know, at even actually quite at an early age, I would skip out other things and take a taxi.
Yeah.
I still do. Yeah.
And then and then your your your next you know, bar is a little higher to be able to take a woman out to a nice restaurant and let her order whatever she wants and not have to worry about, you know, if she's going to order it too much. And you know, your stakes just sort of get higher and higher as you as you go. But then I'm fortunate enough to be able to go to you know, my favorite restaurants and eat and stay in lovely hotels.
And you know, there was a restaurant in Los Angeles that the owner just died recently, Dsolvano, that had really great food. And I new Silvano, and he was a bit of a hustler, but I ate there on a regular basis. I love the food and I love the wine. And I always trusted, you know, whenever I said, tell me what kind of wine to get, and they were just a great staff.
I ate there quite a bit.
When you work, when you're doing a movie, when you're acting or you're directing, Directors very often don't like to stop for lunch. What do you feel about food?
And I cannot eat lunch if I'm working, whether I'm acting or directing, I have a food hangover. I get really tired, in lethargic. So I will either skip or graze, you know, lunch, just to keep my energy up. I think it's something to do with my metabolism, you know, even after a big meal of dinners, you know, which will invariably be a big meal of dinner, especially if I skip lunch, I will just I could eat endlessly, endlessly, the hungary er I am the more I eat, the better it tastes.
But working wise you don't. But you have to, don't they do? They do make you stop at lunchtime. Yes, West was saying that he would. He really mess and just doesn't like to stop for lunch. But he tried giving everyone soup, and then the crew said, you know a way, you know, we love to eat.
I learned that lesson the hard way. I had the first movie I re produced, I was twenty three years old. It was called Chili Scenes of Winter. It's based on a novel by and Beaty. It was directed by Joan mckensilver, and I had yet to really work as an actor, but I was able to produce a movie for United Artists a big studio and Joan lick and Silver directed it. And my two partners, all three of us, were struggling actors,
but managed to get a movie made. We optioned this book directly from the author, and we were, you know, had kind of really no idea what we were doing. We knew we had to save money of a certain budget and stay within a budge, so we got the cheapest. We're in Salt Lake City before we came to the sound stages, in Culver City. We got the cheapest catering
company we could find, and the food was terrible. Now at that time I had no relationship to food, you know, And on the third day, the crew threatened to walk off the picture, and I realized I made a terrible mistake, well three of us did, and that how important food is, and that it shows their value, how much you value them, and how much you value their work. And they're each individual talents that they bring to a production by how much, how well you feed them, how good the food is.
And you know, having been on many movies set since, when a great meal is served in the catering company, it affects the entire mood of every single person in production.
The trajectory of food and happiness are lonely or neglect or involvement from your family. Also is to do with grief. And you know, my son died when he was twenty six, and I remember that when we were upstairs. I just come home and my husband we all gathered and I turned to one of my sons and I said, put tomato sauce on, because I need to smell food cooking.
I need to smell something about nurture. And our home and when everything was destroyed, and I know you had the tragedy of your sister, and you know you say in your book that people bought food. Do you have any sense of what that was like? Did your mother stop eating or did you well have food?
You know, at the end, there was that time that it was very common, you know, with people during the periods of grief. She was on life support for five days, and then the weeks after, lovely friends and family would always come up with a dish and all different kinds, and and there was this there's this one woman who brought a meat loaf and and we just love this meat love, We just it was so comforting. And everyone thought that the woman was a friend of the other.
I thought she was a friend of my mother's and dad thought she was a friend of us. And and finally, after like the fourth day of this meat loaf, we.
Just went, who is she? She friend of yours?
And then we realized none of us knew who the hell she was, and she was taking she was answering the phone. She was we still don't know, And my mom just went, doesn't matter.
She makes a hell of a meat loaf, and uh so I don't know, and you never found out. We never really found out.
I'm sure it was a friend of someone that knew something, but she was so kind and it was so comforting, you know. And then you know, a year later, there was a there was a trial for she was murdered, and there was a trial for her killer that we attended.
And the custom then was to eat on TV trays, watching the the events that we had just lived through on that day in the courtroom play out on the evening news, and we would just my mother would be in bed with Trey in her lap, you know, my father would be sitting in her wheelchair with a TV tray and eating, and we would just silently watch television, and then after that, you know, put on a movie. We were raised on movies, and then we'd end up
just watching Oh, What's on. It was a cable, early cable called the Z Channel, and they showed movies without interruption, and oh what's on? Z?
What's on?
And then we'd watch Harold and Maud or you know some they were just cheer us enormously.
I would like to talk about your book. When you're writing, do you eat and what is your writing routine?
My writing routine was compulsive, you know, being a first book, I just could not stop. I couldn't keep away from my office. And if I was on a movie set shooting, I would run back to my dressing room between sentences, you know, finish up where I left off, which is why I didn't eat very much.
I was actually I smoked.
I smoked, and I paste, and I made coffee after coffee after coffee, and you know, I lived in a very unhealthy you know, physically, I didn't take good care of myself in terms of you know, eating nutritionally.
I was sort of wired.
And you know, I felt the presence of my family so much when I was doing it.
It's like having company, you know. And I just saw.
Sort of the less I ate and the more coffee I had, the memories became more and more vivid in place and objects and time and conversation. So so that's how we could like write as if it was a novel, you know, of what people said and how they you know, how they talked, and each voice was completely different, you know, different my mother talked than my father and my childhood friends, and so it was you know, right while I wrote about you know, very sad periods in our family's life.
There were also really hilarious things that also happened, and so you know, our family was always.
The worst things got the harder. We'd laugh, you know, not.
Almost in reaction to it, you know, And that was I think, you know, I attribute that to my mother's sense of humor on her on her Mexican side, and my father's dark sense of humor on his Irish Catholic side.
It really saved us, you know, our humor.
But eating, I think I would, I think I would. When it was time to finally go to bed, I'd always leave something I wanted to look forward to continuing. I then go in the fridge and I'd take out one of those frozen burritos and I'd defrost it and I'd pour salce on it, and I'd eat it and wake up a little fatter in the morning.
Actually, Fishers said to be asking what's in his fridge? He did actually say that to me. But I think that I would ask everyone listening to this to go to wherever you buy your books and read the Friday Afternoon Club. It is something that has been one of the most beautiful experiences for me to read it and to talk to you. And before we stop, I ask everyone one question, which is fecif food is interesting, if it's exciting, if it's something you want to explore or
take an adventure with. It's also comfort. And so your book is a lot about comfort and what we need. And I was wondering that in times of comfort, Griffin done, what food would you go to if you need comfort?
Well, certainly rice and beans.
Okay, let's end on that.
That's I mean, I never get a cigarette.
Everyone, I have to say that it is. Usually the answer is something from the childhood. Have peanut butter and jelly sandwich you had with your mother or beans, rice and beans. Let's go have some. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
That's good.
Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair