In the early days of our friendship. I was amazed by Mala Guancar, then founding partner of Lumpine Capital. How could this high achieving woman be so uniquely calm, thoughtful and serene. We went to dinner in her home in notting Hill. Entering this traditional London house, we were surrounded by the best of brave and beautiful contemporary art and furniture.
When we went down to dinner, there she was. Malla in the kitchen apron on finishing the curries, the rice, the vegetables and the desserts she had cooked for us. All I asked her over dinner what she was doing. She spoke about her work in public health at Harvard and with Atual guan Day, a book of short stories she had just published, the immersive theater piece she was doing with David Byrne, and a high risk skiing adventure
she'd just come back from with her two sons. Today, ten years later, she is founder of Circo Capital, the largest ever fund run by a woman. Okay, so, Mala, do you chose of all the recipes, all our books, pistachia cake And you made it sound as if like, don't you know that I want to do pistasia cake, So here we go with pistachia cake, red piboa.
So yes, pistachio cake, my very favorite. Must have made it abou about one hundred times two hundred and seventy grams of unsalted butter, one lemon, one vanilla pod, one hundred grams of blanched almonds, one hundred and twenty grams of pistachios, two hundred and fifty grams of castor sugar, four eggs organic, forty grams plain flour, one lemon, sixty grams of pistachios, fifty grams of castor sugar. Preheat the
oven to one hundred and fifty degrees centigrade. Line a loaf tin and grease with twenty grams of the butter. Soften the remaining butter, Grate the lemon peel, split the vanilla pod and scrape the seeds. Grind the almonds and pistachios together. Beat the butter and the sugar until light and the eggs one at a time. Add the zest and vanilla seeds, fold in the nuts and sive in the flour. Spoon the mixture into the tin and bake for forty five minutes. The cake is ready when a
spirit comes out clean. Leave to cool in the tin for the topping. Grate the lemon, peel and squeeze the juice. Have the pistachios. Mix the lemon juice with the sugar, Boil until thick. Then add the zest. Stir in the pistachios, and pour over the cake. Delicious for breakfast with a coffee, or as a dessert with crimp fresh or anytime.
That made me want to have it. But I was interested because I always think of you with the incredible chutneese and with the curries and the food that you made, and you chose a cake. Id you like to bake? I just feel like.
To be a really good pastry chef, certainly in the Western tradition, you have to. It's about precision, and I'm terrible with precisions. Oh kind of person, say a little bit of sour, a little bit sweet.
I'm terrible at cakes.
And I felt that this was one of the few recipes I could actually make. And there I was sort of, you know, working mom to young boys with insatia of appetites that seemed for pretty much anything, and this just seemed just wonderful. It was just just a beautiful, lovely cake. I must admit, though, Ruthie, I did. I did shift it around. A great recipe is something that you can build off right like like like any creative, beautiful thing.
And so what I did was, I you know, I did grow up in South India, so I kind of added let's see what did I did all kinds of things that I kept the vanilla. I added loads of clothes, clothes and cinnamon and cardamom.
Crown so you crown them together.
I pounded all of those up and put them in the cake. I put them in the cake. I didn't put the topping. It's a bit of a rush, but that and that just you know, there's a lot of you know this probably but you know, cinnamon can replace and did in medieval times.
Yeah, sure, so that's what I did.
I would say the recipe is half poetry and half science as well. Yes, you know, so we kind of you know, you taste, the precision is really important. But I'm interested that you had the clothes and the climbs, and I'd like to try it. But then did you still at the pistaches at the end?
Oh yeah, yeah, I just put the pistache at the top.
I left out the lemon and the sugar.
You have cake for breakfast.
I have not a cake for breakfast in a.
Long time Italian. You know, Italians have their cakes in the morning, they have their cakes for breakfast, They have their ice creams on the street, and then they have a coffee for dessert. You know, in this presso so there's always a cake, a dry cake to have for breakfast. Yeah.
No, in South India it's really more just a little sombar of sort of lentils or russum of lentils and spices and tomatoes and then some sort of steamed rister lentil cake like an Italy or maybe it does.
So let's talk about that. Your eyes light up when you start talking about clothes and cardonmen and lentils for breakfast in South India. Tell me about this India think.
Yeah, so my story is pretty straightforward in some ways for you know, that period of sort of American Indian immigrants.
So soon as maybe people don't know this, as soon as the Civil Rights Act was passed, there was also change in the immigracial laws of people from being around place of origin and the American and the restrictions in place of origin, and so it was bailed, as you know, and so as soon as that was lifted, my parents were one of the first to come over to the US become graduate students, became academics.
And what do you think that was like for them? Do you think that was?
Oh?
I think if you and I Ruthie were go to Mars, it would probably be less of the leap than it was for them. So they both came on scholarships from sort of rural really semi rural India, both in the sciences, so my father in the mathematical sort of area and my mother in molecular biology. So I think that was a huge leap for them. And I think I'm consistently sort of astonished by their bravery and the sort of almost gallantry with which it sort of went out with
open curiosity to the world. And it's something I wish I think we have a lot of in the world, and I would love to see us all tap into.
That a bit more because it's only good for everyone.
And so yeah, no, I think it was something they did with great gusto and we're very happy, but they're also very happy to go back. And shortly after my sister was born, when I was about six, we moved back to India.
They wanted to go back.
Did they meet and India and come together, actually have an arranged marriage.
They met in India, moved over here together, and then we moved back. As I said, when I was six or so, we moved to Bangalore. And that's where they came from. They came from just south of Goa. So they come from the coast, the Molivard coast, which is a haven up all of his spice.
Growing as as you might know. And so that's very much, yeah, very much.
And it come from a family of sort of academic social workers. I'm really the black sheep of the family, someone went into the vulgar world of commerce and never got a PhD. So that's where I grew up in Bangalore. That's very much part of my life until especially until seventeen when I came back to came to the US and then went off to school.
And what was home life like? Did your mother work and your father worked?
Did you both of my parents worked?
I I'd say neither one of them was really sort of you know, affiliated with a stove in any particularly distinguished way.
But we got along.
My grandmother was maternal grandmother in particularly a great cook, and so she you know, showed me if she always had something pickling. Yeah, it seemed like anything could be pickled. I think at one point she even pickled banana skins, believe it or.
Not, skins.
Interesting wasn't successful, but she she tried. She pickled high biscus flowers, She pickled gooseberries.
Did your grandmother live near you? Was she in the house.
She didn't.
We lived in Bangalore. She lived in the coast, but she would come visit.
Do you remember the meals we had around the table in Bangalore when you were between six and seventeen? Did you go to school? Come home?
Sweet dad? So in India there's this whole did you take your little tiffin carrier as they call it, with these stack little stainless steel boxes, and they all have it's a whole sort of bento box ritual to it, and so all these Arabasic traditions around how many sours
and how many sweets and everything sort of architected. But you know, I took my little tip in mind was a bit less polished, but I take my little lunch box to school, and I remember that the tastes of sort of yogurt and rice and pickles.
And what did you have for breakfast?
Usually just a.
Very simple you know, like a dosa and some lentils or something like that. And then you'd come home to very simple supper. So it was it wasn't anything primarily vegetarian, right, So it was that's but I have it was delicious because the food was very fresh and you know this routie, you know what that's all about.
And so going to the vegetables bizarre.
And the markets with the markets like in India, I've never been to a market.
The markets were overwhelming.
I mean everything is that, but you had big piles of just endless varieties of chili's or endless rides of greens. I was recently in Mexico and the markets they're very much reminded me of of India. And you know, you know what to do, and you know to you learn how to buy things. It's nothing as shrink wrapped. You can choose, right, so you think you snap the m of the gooseber, you know what to look for. And it's that I missed that very much. There was sort of sensuality and shopping that.
Sometimes did you go with your mother or your grandmother, or.
I'd go with my grandmother or you know, our the lady who helped out at the house, And yeah.
Did you love food? Even then, I was thinking of you such a lover of food. And then we talk about food, you'd tell you make food.
Food.
I did you know as a.
Child that you yes, yes, I still remember there was a season for the when the Kashmiri apple juice season would arrive and that would be actually affordable, and so you know, I remember things like that, like I have a very strong Pristian memory for these little flavors and smells.
And Indian street food as well.
And Indian street food is really just a spectacular celebration I think of humanity.
It's just great.
Did your parents take you to restaurants in Bangalore?
Was that something at that time the eighties? I'd say it was rare. I mean, Indian food was very much about home cooking, and I think you'll probably have heard that from others. It's less about a restaurant. I think that fine dining idea is something that's developed more recently, which is the growing prosperity of India and a rising middle class, and I think it's fantastic. I mean, they're Indian cooks and chefs and doing amazing things in India right now. But that was less of the story, at
least of my specific fish and bangled. Did you have very good fish? Yeah, there was really good fish. Less so meat, but more it was more around fresh fish, particularly in the coast, the Mall Park Costhen. I went to visit my grandmother there.
That was did you cook with her grandmother or your mother?
I did. She actually had an open fire stove, so it was a very you know, it was really wonderful. This happened very kind of like what you have. Actually, yeah, it was a smaller and uh yeah. She would cook all kinds of seafood on there and all the pickles and the chutneys I mentioned. So, no, it was wonderful.
So you participate.
Yeah, all was great, but then we had to move back.
The cook of the family.
I didn't really cook in childhood as much.
It's more something I observed, and it's really something that started once I went to university.
When you went back to university, did you all go or was it just you you went by yourself.
I went by myself. I was at Harvard and wasn't much opportunity for cooking there, But you know, that was more just taking whatever it was offered to you in the dying hall. Was that a kind of showing adding hot.
Sauce to it? Yeah?
Was that shocking those I had a big adjustment going from a home it was creating incredible food and markets and smells and memories in your grandmother to Harvard where you lived in a dorm and food was it was.
I mean, I think the arc after that was though, very much about I mean, you're so overwhelmed sort of the intellectual curiosity of that time, right, you don't think about food as much? Are You're absorbing so much new in terms of relationships and friendships and ideas and people. And I was just you know, becoming a young woman with all the sort of uncertainties, and I mean it was it was an interesting time.
It's almost like three failures in a funeral, it was like.
And literally the arc of that until now was very much around you know, failing, failing better learning and then iterating from there in terms of just you know, in life, it's going a little bit away from its food into philosophy. But I do think it's very important to make mistakes and learn and fail a bit in life, because they're
all very intertwined. And I differentiate between failures of hubris and failures of curiosity, and I think failures of curiosity where you're just open mindly trying to try something and maybe you mess it up, I think those are perfectly fine. I think that's how you learn and you move on as long as you're aware of it. And that's what I meant by the three failures in a funeral in the sense that I think my first class at Harvard is one I actually did very poorly on, but it
was also the class that was most impactful. And it was a class that the great philosopher John Rawls taught, and it was on developing the ideal society. So what we all had to do as a class was get together and decide what would the ideal society be if you didn't know anything about your status in that world, if you didn't know what your race would be, your gender, what you'd be endowed with in terms of talents or wealth, what kind of society you create, and ultimately what we
decided is we don't know what we would be. We'd want a society where the worst person off would be not just okay, but actually flourish. We could well be that person. It wasn't just about getting, you know, sort of a pittance, and that really transformed I had a very utilitary and very rational view of the world, and it was my way of sort of coping, I think also growing up in a very poor country. But that
really made sense to me. Finally, so even though the class technically in terms of my transcript was a failure, I'd argue in terms of just what it did to my life and my mindset and what I did eventually later trying to do a bit of good in the world was transformative.
So that was probably failure number one.
I think then that led to I've met the people I met in that class, led them to my first job, actually, which I ended up getting fired from pretty quickly. Failure number two. It's going to be a really exciting podcast.
Let's us go into it.
Yeah, no, I'm just thinking about it in a way. That kind of is how it laid out, and that was working for working in Russia during the privatization program in nineteen ninety one in Moscow. In Moscow and I there briefly and then later in Mongolia, and the World Bank really was I was really working for them through Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at the time at Harvard. And what was really interesting was that we went there with such high hopes. And it's very relevant to the new
headlines we're saying nineteen ninety one. So August of nineteen ninety one is actually when the clup happened in Moscow, the eltson and then December of that year with the Soviet unency ceased to exist. It all happened very quickly and are there, Yeah, we're there, And that was something we went in with high hopes and then just realized this is this is probably not going to work. And ultimately that's right right away. I don't think I got that right away. Actually I might stort of give myself
more credit than I deserve. But that's something I think now looking back, was fairly clear, and that's something we should have we should have addressed as a as a broader policy map, not obviously as it twenty one year old who was there for their first job, but that then I ended up in Mongolia working there as well. But I look back on that period of just such high, bigger, you know, much obviously bigger issue than just me and my journey. Was just this whole issue of how again
failures of hubris. I would argue, where we think we have all the answers, but we're not listening to the local community, and you know we can, we can as a result of that mess up. And my first big philanthropic project was really around sanitation and subsidized toilets for you know, poorer populations across.
South Asia, South Asia.
That was my first step or you know, first worked my first fund that was working really well, and wanted to get back right away. I didn't want to sit around and wait until I was some sort of elderly person. And when I did that, I thought, oh, this is going to be great. We got all the answers. This is going to be about you know, better sanitation for all.
And you know that didn't really work either. It was a complete I think when we visited some of these toilets that we'd subsidize, most of them were being used as chicken coops. Why that one was around, you know, it might be lack of plumbing, and the other was maybe around just cultural habits and what was appropriate what
wasn't appropriate. So longer story for maybe a different podcast, but the bottom line is that was sort of another failure at argue, more of curiosity and hope, but also a bit of hubris there where I just stepped back and realized, Okay, there's it's.
Important now to really listen.
And that leads me, sadly, I think, in some ways to the funeral, which is Paul Farmer, whom I think you know as well, really dear friend and a great innovator in terms of how public health could be delivered, and he and I work together pretty extensively on a variety of projects that he did with many other plan He was a real mentor to me in terms of really listening to the community, understanding grounds up.
And so that's what I do, and that's what I do.
Whether I do it now is someone learning to cook, or someone learning to gather friends, or someone learning to be a better investor or philanthropists, that's very much about listening to what's happening around the ground and observing rather than as you make it.
Yeah, do you remember the food in Moscow?
That you ate going, Oh, yes, food, absolutely, there wasn't much deep but there was a good borsch every now and then there was you know, a couple of solid dumplings, very solid dumplings.
Mongolia was great.
That's where I had my first fermented mare's milk, which it is like sour milk, that's what you would expect. And then there was a lot of sort of lamb, mutt and gristle and that was sort of it.
That was pretty grim.
Was it an urban context? You win?
It was.
There was about we're traveling around a lot, and it's a large at that time certainly it was largely still it's largely sort of rural nomadic society.
And have you been back to Russia since?
I haven't been back to Mongolia, but back to Russia.
And big change.
Yeah, caviar galor you can afford it, lots of fancy stuff.
Now.
Yeah, we wanted I think nineteen which was chairman of the take, and we were trying to get an exchange with the Hermitage for the and the Pushkin for they have great matisas and they were at the Hermitage. We were trying to exchange turners for a show and it was, you know, I went wanting to love it, but it is. It was complex, and certainly for us. I haven't been back since then, so I've missed the whole wealth and the restaurants and everything else. It's a good cuisine, that
wasn't it. Sean and I are here and we're talking about that pistachio cake. I think it's a very delicious cake. It's a cake that you can have any time of day in that Italian way. But there's something about this cake, and of course it's the pistachoes, which I always associate with Lebanon, which feels almost Middle Eastern to me. The green color, the nuts and the almonds. It just always feels like something that you might not have in Italy, but you might have as part of the meal you
were having it from Beirroot, for instance. Where do you think about this cake?
It it's definitely a breakfast cake in my house. It's really yummy, but it's tricky to make in volume. We often have problems with it being oily because the nuts can be mean.
I guess nuts of oily, aren't they. It isn't hard to make that. You have to get it right.
Yeah, it's all in the fineness of the grinding of the almonds and the pistachios, and actually sometimes we put a bit of flour. There's some of their flour through the nuts when it gets folded in to sort of hold the nuts stopping being to sort of mop up some of the kind of oils.
I love this cake and I cannot remember how we came up. I have a very strong recollection of just making it over and over and over again till we get it right. Did you know The River Cafe has a shop. It's full of our favorite foods and designs. We have cookbooks, linen napkins, kitchen were, tote bags with our signatures, glasses from Venice, chocolates from Terin. You can find us right next door to the River Cafe in London or online at Shopthrivercafe dot co dot uk. So
we're sitting here in the River Cafe. It's about seven thirty and we're about to go and have dinner. And of course I chose the quietest place in the whole of Thames Wharf to have a studio, except forgetting that. Some nights we have Sylvia's which is downstairs our private dining room and so the noise in the background is a lot of people, probably fifty having celebrating something in Sylvia's having a drink, So that's the background noise. So
I hope you can all hear us for cooking. You've involved in India with your grandmother and your your mother a bit, with Harvard, really not at all, and then Russia, you know, you were working and eating a bit. When did you then decide how important cooking and food was to you or was it a decision? Did it happen?
I think it came with the birth of my children, you know, I think I really started thinking having spending time and allocating time to not just enjoying food obviously, but to really thinking about cooking again in a way I hadn't in a long long time, and really returned to my children some way brought me back to my own childhood in the sense of joy I got out of food. And so I started very early with them,
you know, giving them all kinds of adventurous things. And I was thirty when I had Lucas, my older son, and thirty two when I had just under thirty too, actually when I had Row and my uncle one. So I was you know, relative young mother. I just we just set up long Pine at the time in ninety eight, so that was, you know, really relatively early on as well in my career. So both a young working woman and a mother.
How did you come to England?
We came to England, Oliver and I early in ninety nine because of his work and also because I was setting up, you know, our little office here in London, so it was sort of a combination of factors, and we stayed. We thought we'd stay here very briefly, but we end up staying here twenty years.
So then, did you before you had children? Did you entertain or entertained?
I definitely loved cooking and both something I did with very much driven by recipes, and so I think what really changed was this idea of thinking, going back to my Childhoo's sense, as sometimes constraints are good.
Constraints force you to be great.
So my big constraint was time and not being able to shop for every single ingredient on some obscure recipe list, which is what I did a bit more up when I entertained very formally for people on a Friday night after work. Now it was got to get delicious things on you want your children to enjoy it, and so I would just say, Okay, the recipe requires a lemon, you know what, Let's just try tamarant that's sour too.
Let's see what that does.
And so this mixing of different ingredients, different flavors and combining them, even though it might be completely different specific things from the recipe I just mentioned with your beautiful pistachio cake, that's something. And actually the pistachio cake was something I started very early with them, which is why I have such great memories of it.
That was in the Easy Book.
I loved it because what was so great about that book and how you constructed that book, Ruthie, was how you thought about the ingredients and really foregrounding the ingredients. And that gave me courage as a cook to really think about the ingredients as something that could be malleable, you know, like people are malleable. Recipes going to be malleable. And I had so much fun with that book.
It's such a such.
A nice way. When we did it, we also thought that what we wanted to do. What's hard about cooking is, you know, shopping and then the preparation and then you know, the presentation if you will, But the shopping, we tried to say, okay, we're going to give you a shop list,
you know. We did the ingredients almost like a shopping list, so you could almost you know, tear it out or write it down a photocopy in those days probably and take it and then you could go to the shop with the with the ingredients, and they were all We tried to do ingredients that were accessible because shopping isn't real pain I mean the restrictions of a working woman to having our men to have to go to something
on the way home from work. It's painful when you want to go home and see your kids and help them with their homework, you know, and then you have to stop and shop.
And also, I think what it brought me that book was really helpful because it also brought me back, not just because of the ease. It took some of the ease out of the ingredients and searching for those. It also started making me think back to what my grandmother had told me, which is thinking in proportions, right, so not rigidly in terms of quantities, but really ratios of flavors.
And that's really why I think what turned me from someone who just followed a recipe into someone who's really a proper cook who really saw you are cooking as a creative activity and outlet and something that it became a passion in a way. That and so I oiled lot to you in that book.
But does the Indian influence do you? Like you used cardonmol and cloves and cinnamon for the cake. Does that does something you inherently sort of go for is to see how you can make this recipe more exotic by doing something from your childhood to it that you yes, I.
Mean my sister gave me. I don't know if you've seen these big spice dubbles that they have in India where you have sort of little trays and a big oh yeah, it's a palette. It's like just like a paint palette. And that's how I think about spices. It's just how to combine them. And you know, my first gift to my partner David was really all was just a big trays of these spices and how you could combine them.
And I think it's just such a just enormously fun.
And you go to India or you eat food from a different culture, it does make you think how boring a lot of our food is. You know, It's just it's delicious and it's interesting and the olive oil is strong. But then that kind of assault on these senses that you have from what's your favorite Indian food? What if you I like southern Indian. But I've only been to India twice. We went once to the Jaipur out of the Delhi part, which I actually really loved just a lot,
which at the children. And then when we went to the south, we went to Goa and down to Kerala, and I was very attracted to that food. It's very perfumely, interesting, light fishy, and yeah, I like that very much.
It's more sort of coconut milk off the base. It's a little lighter.
And when was the last time you were in India?
I was in India in February of this year.
Actually, yes, yeah, I went.
To Bombay Mumbais we're supposed to call it now.
Well, I usually go there into the south to Bangalore, and it was again you go there, and yes, it's about work and meeting people and seeing friends, but yes, it's almost always about food as well.
Well, you asked me what was my food that I love. For Mindiya, what is the food that you love most? Is there a region that you particularly like?
I think, like you, Ruthy, I liked South Indian cuisine. But I think there's some amazing food's obviously from from the north that I sort of think of as you know, just indulgences, the breads and the use of tundor and how that, how that has come about. But in terms of the or the luck now has just amazing cuisine, the d you know, the seal, the pots and clay,
and there's amazing stuff there. But what I really love is that South Indian food in terms of the emphasis on spices and the mix of different kinds of spices.
It's it's it's very it's like.
A burst of flay, different flavors all layered.
And I love that idea of layering.
Whether it's music or literature or cooking, it shouldn't just be a one note wonder of a thing. And so that's that's what I really love about that cuisine, whether it's from Kerala or Tamil now.
And it's different region, isn't that It's it's.
Very different region to region. Yes, even within the South I think people forget, but there are multiple layers and regions to that. But that's that's the food I think about when I think how do I how do you recreate that?
Yeah, that's that sense of feeling.
I really love to think of you is as a cook because of my friends. You know, I have friends with cooked I have friends who give dinner parties and they're great, and they have friends with gardens. I have friends with vegetables. But you you have a farm. So should we talk about the farm where we had the apple juice of the gems and the chutneys and everything. So tell us about that farm.
Yes. So the idea behind that I work with Mark, who's our gardener there really closely to just grow the kinds of things that we wouldn't be able to find normally otherwise. And we ended up also doing a lot of you know, heritage native species that you wouldn't normally find otherwise that are sort of going dying out. Well, one thing we decided to do is start growing the sort of rare type of metal or fruit, and some really interesting odd plums, those parts, all those kinds of things.
And then I realized that they're all of these medlers that are native to Sussex. That apparently they call all kinds of rude names because I think the local name for the metal fruit we group was called like monkeys ass or something like that. I mean, it's all kinds of like bizarre names.
I just loved. And so we had a bunch of those, just a variety of those.
One season and they just spank high heaven really but I pickled them as I did.
That was fine, went in doubt.
So those those were modestly improved by that. And then we had a whole spate of different kinds of flowers, you know, just local flowers, some edible flowers.
It isn't organic and sustainable, as I just oric, did you change the soil or did you had you.
It was very chalky as it's in South Down, so it's very chalky. So yes, it had to be improved us with our local just vegetable waste to be composted and stuff. We brought in a lot of fish blood apparently, which is brought in for the Yeah, all those that we compass soil over whatever twelve fIF years.
And it became which is much better over time, and.
What you have now that you grow what is yours?
Made similar? We try and new new different things. We still have the meddlers, by the way, cause you're interested. And yeah, still the plums, still the apples.
As you know, mesty foot vegetables.
Lots of kale and charred and different kinds of variety.
Verbs krispy krispy kale.
Yeah exactly, yeah, exactly.
Tell us how you make that?
That's a good one.
That's you take.
We make a hoist and sauce with the plums and we grow and then we mix in a little bit of cashew nut butter believe it or not, and then a bit of soy sauce and marrin and a bit of chili and just put in the dehydrator and.
There you go.
How long have you had the fun?
Oh gosh, it's like twenty two thousand and five or something like that. Yeah, it's where really my children grew up in a way, it's very much part of my love of sort of Britain and everything we've we've learned here. So yeah, that's that's what it is. And now what I'm trying to do there is actually encourage more woman gardeners because I think it's such a great profession and
such a great part of England's heritage. So we've been encouraging more sort of interns there under Mark who are sort of from the local horticultural college, so things like that. That's been great and just having that be part of the food. No, we don't have animals except for bees. We do have bees.
Yeah, the honey. Yeah, how's that?
Oh, that's sort of alternous cycles of joy and heartbreak because you know, it's tricky sometimes with the weather and you know, so we've had the one thing I've learned is you to keep the beehives really high up, and it's we were just way too close to the ground. I think that's a big mistake that early beepers make.
Yeah.
Yeah, so they don't like the damp.
They don't like the damp.
Well, if you think about it, naturally they put their eyes way high up. Why why why am i so?
And do you flavor your honey? Do you do different types of honey or.
My son, younger son encouraged me to start putting chili into the honey, which has been a great success.
If you like listening to Ruthie's table for 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. You mentioned David, Yes, and that's David Byrne, and you brought him to meet me in the River Cafe a few years ago, some years ago, because he was just intrigued about how, as many how a restaurant works. I'm intrigued to know how a fund works, and I'm intrigued to know how being somebody from content
and producers work. But it really is interesting to people. I think, how does the motzarell rive at the same time as a pasta? And how do you order? And he was very he seemed to be much more interested, almost as much as how we write the menu. We do write the menu in a kind of unique way, which is that we do it every differently for every meal. What is his interest in food?
He likes just very similar to me. I think it's just a wonderful thing. It's it's food as a form of love. You know, that's what you offer your friends and your family, and it's a creative act as well. And I think one thing, Yes, that was actually a really fantastic day. I was really great to just come here and put the menu together, and and and and sort of see how everything was put together in a sort of magical place.
Hey, we see, Hi, sad here we are. We've spoke with.
Lots of artists and actors and musicians, and you sort of see a logical journey from their creative work they do in the studio to their work in the kitchen. We haven't spoken that many business people who have this passion for cooking, and I wonder if that's us being now reminded, whether that you are quite unique in that in that sense.
I think that, well, I'm sure there are many business people who love cooking, because I firmly believe that business is a creative activity when done well. I think any when I define creative activity as connecting different areas and fresh and new ways, and that if you're good at pretty much anything, you have to think creatively, no matter what it is. And as a result of that, I don't necessarily see the dichotomy maybe as much as might
otherwise seem from the outside. And I also think if you're someone who's a philanthropist and wants to do well, particularly in the public health area, thinking about the business of food and the public health aspects of food and the creative aspects of food are actually quite intertwined in
some really interesting ways. I mean, one thing I think a lot about and I don't know if this is statistic, you all of you knew, but one thing I was sent was a introduction of high fructose corn syrup into the American food industry was nineteen seventy and back then the obesity rate was relatively deminimous. And you progress that ninety and hygrictos corn circus half of all sugar used,
and now forty percent is a pc rate. So that sort of the business of food and how that has made food process food at least much more actually addictive.
And there's some great books on this.
Moss has written a great book called Hooked on This, and you lead that into the public health aspects of what that's led to. I think about that a lot. So I think about food is really just such a core aspect of our society and cultural identities.
It tells you about a culture, It tells you about society, It tells you about a city. I would say, out of the market the first time we get to a city, because it tells.
You that he tells you everything.
The one thing that actually in food that Dave and I learned a lot about was just how the brain processes food, which is interesting for tell you as well, which is we did this project called Theater of the Mind. We wrote this theater piece together that ended up running in Denver and run a few other cities. And as part of that, one thing we learned is how the brain creates these illusions around taste. And have you ever heard of this West African miracle berry? So David told
me about it. I actually haven't heard it. Heard about it first from him. So it's a West African berry. It's a little bush about two meters high. It has these olive shaped little red berries, and you chew on it just tastes quite bulerable and it binds to the sweet receptors in your tongue. And anytime you eat anything sour, it activates the sweet receptors, so you get this burst of sugar in your mouth. So you literally you're chewing
on a lemon. Ever, I mean just like just until it lasts a couple of years, you chew on it. You can chew on a lemon and it literally tastes like it tastes like a you know, like a Sunday ice cream Sunday, and it's amazing.
It's this crazy kind of experiences. So we put that into our theater piece.
It's an immersive theater piece that people went through and people start screaming because you're such an intimate part of your sense, you know, your sensory system to have this like the lemons something sweet. Yeah, And so they were all kinds of littles.
We were tusting things like that, you're immersive. I was talking to Will you were.
Going to ask, Yeah, I just was interested because something that comes up on the podcast, as Ruthie says, food is memory. And obviously there's so much a connection between taste and smell. And do you think that our connection with food and memory is as strong as we think it is or do you think that it's intangible and changes time?
And I think memories are definitely malleable. I mean that's not me speaking, that's just you know, what we've.
Learned over the years.
And I think we should think about our brains not as direct processors and senses out there. We construct the world every time we look at the world, So what we see is not a specific radio frequency. What we see is really something our brain is constructed as an image, and there are all kinds of evidence for that. For example, we don't see the blind spots in our eyes, we just paper them over. So our brain constructs the world,
and I think that's taste as part of that. And I think every time we remember something, since our brain is really about learning, it's not really about being a photocopier, right, what's used is that evolutionarily speaking, since our brain is a learning engine, we revise the memories as come along to suit what is best for us, and to update them based upon what we've learned since that memory was
initially formed. And so I think memories are infinitely valuable as a result, and there's a lot of really interesting research on that, and also how false memories can be ascribed to People's been interesting research on that as well.
So I think one thing we learned about with all of our research when David and I went to Labs to construct the Theater of the Mind immersive theater piece that you talked about, a lot of it was around how memory is really malleable and in a way that's really good so people can go through life and they're not stuck. You know, there's always a possibility of change, which I really fundamentally see is a hopeful thing that we can evolve and move on from memories in the past.
So yes, I do think it's malleable to answer your question.
They certainly talk about people's memories here, and I just say that to as William said, that food is memory and memory is food. Many people's memories come back when they start talking about the food there. I've had just in the interviews we've done, people say, oh my god, I never I don't remember that until I started talking about my father when he divorced my mother and I was eight, that suddenly he started cooking because he wanted
us to know that things. You know that he could do that, or you know, he is an expression of his love and mel Brooks at age ninety eight. Remember, he says, unless it's a malleable memory that he remembers the name of the woman who cooked him his first pasta when he was eight, so ninety years ago, he
can remember her name because the food. He can't remember the person who taught him to tie his shoes, but he can remember somebody who taught him to make a pasta, and then the memories of sad memories, somebody making something for you before they died, or you know, somebody wanted to eat something, you know, but as they were dying, and it is you know, yeah, it's all to do with I mean, I'm sure there are other smells probably
bring back memories, and pain brings back memories. But food do you think it does?
Absolutely right with you? And really it really does. I think a lot about sort of my favorite foods and and what I do when I'm trying to recreate some of them. Some of them are not even ones that were in a recipe. They're just ones I remember having had or maybe it was at a restaurant such as yours, or maybe it was but you're so generous with your recipes.
But you know, maybe it was.
Something that my grandmother and aunt cooked for me or yeah, and and and those are the those are the memory I'm trying to recreate, you know, in my kitchen.
And you were saying, your children and your mother, what is and that connection? Is it a connection for them and.
For them as well? Yes, it's very much. Okay, you're coming over, what would you like to eat? It's a feeling and so going.
To I suppose finding to the end, we would say, if you needed to reach for some food, my friend, beautiful friend, mama, for comfort, you wanted something to eat, is there something you would go for?
Yes, I mean I think of comfort as more a sense of love or maybe even joy.
And we all need that, right, I mean, I certainly do.
And I think of that as this very specific rossum that my grandmother used to make for me when I was ill, and it was this sort of garlic rossum. And to the question earlier about memory, it was something I never could make and I never quite figure out the exact flavors. And this is a really interesting story.
And then someone told me about a woman who lived in Chennai village in south in Tamil Nadu and her mission in life, among other things she was accomplished in many ways, was to do a compilation of all of the pickle recipes and chutney recipes in Roussam's in South India. And so she literally systematically went through and she had the book and had gone out of print. So I actually wrote her and I got this little pdf in the mail. Her name is Usha Prabakara and she literally
now she has it on Amazon. And there's one called four Under Pickles and there's another one called A Thousand Russums. And I could not recommend both of these books more. And you can write her, what would you make it?
This is it?
This is the food. You go for it, but would you.
It's meant to It's very simple.
You just make it with a little bit of tour doll, which is kind of lentil, and you grind that up with coriander and cumin, and you mix it up with essentially what I almost make like a lentil stock, lentil and spice stock, and you add a bit of chili. You know, it's called the third corp where you put you mix and oils and mustard seeds and a bit of chili.
And you can sprinkle it on top. It's delicious.
And you know, any cold you have, I'd be curious guarantee you.
I love you, Thank you, Love you too, Ruthy, thank you.
Ruthie's Table for is produced by Atami Studios for iHeartRadio. It's hosted by Ruthie Rogers and it's produced by William Lensky. This episode was edited by Julia Johnson. And mixed by Nigel Appleton. Our executive users are Fai Stewart and Zad Rogers. Our production manager is Caitlin Paramore and our production coordinator is Bella Selini. This episode had additional contributions by Sean Wynn Owen. Thank you to everyone at The River Cafe for your help in making this episode