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