Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios.
Welcome that the lemons tarp it isn't it it is?
And what's that one?
So that's that alms Tara praes and then it has loads of strawberries on downstairs and dusted with isa chupka.
It is really good. It's actually I really like Bella. Mackie and her family have been close friends for thirty or so years, and when you're close to a family, you're close to their food. We all spent summer's footsteps away from each other's homes in the Baldorcha, swimming, walking and attempting to read novels between long lunches, late dinners Negroni's in the Piazza and Pienza and montepl Channel. Bella was always present, frying zucchini flowers with me, puring the
white peaches for sunset Bellini's. There was one night when our children noticed that we had no urmissue from the night before. When they heard it was in her family fridge, they climbed through the bushes and at midnight broke into their house and took it back. Bella is no longer just the daughter of our friends. She's my friend. When she and her husband Greg come to the River Cafe, they know the food they want to eat, the wine they wish to drink, and they always request a quiet
table where they can just be together. Ask any young person working in the restaurant about Bella's books and they'll tell you that Jogon shaped their life in a crisis, or How to Kill Your Family was one of those books they could just not put down. Today in the River Cafe, Bella and I will talk about running families, Tuscan holidays and facing everything else. Welcome Bella, Hi, It's so.
Nice to be here.
What have you been doing. You've been in the kitchen making Richie Terrelli, the Richarelli. We started doing biscuits. We didn't used to do biscuits. We kind of did them in lockdown when we started the shop because people wanted to buy cookies basically. And then the rich Arelli are so interesting because they you and I both lived so close to Siena, and there's always that trip to Sienna that we would take in the summer. And I think that you know, rich Areli are like their hometown biscuit.
You go to every bar in Siena, and it's so local Italy that if you probably went to a bar twenty miles away, they wouldn't have them. But every single bar in Sienna has Richirelli.
Hi, I'm Polly. I am a chef here at the River Cafe Pastry kitchen, and I'm here with the lovely Bella Mackie teaching her how to make rich relly.
See, they look amazing. I've made them a few times before, so mimonium didn't look like.
That, Okay, So I would say it's probably when an issue of packing it with icing sugar.
Yeah, so it'd be like eight times more icing sugar than you thing.
Yeah, way more. And then you're almost kind of like put a little hat on it. Why don't know, show you had to do that. When I say you give it a little hat, you kind of tuck it under the icing sugar.
Oh I see, give it a little dough. It's like it's like a tree covered in snow.
That is it exactly, And I think classically it is a Christmas biscuit as well, so very good.
That will happened to the icing sugar on the top, like the hat when it goes into the oven, will it fall down?
So as the biscuit kind of spreads out and cracks, as you can see with the ones, So we've we've got dord that icing sugar kind of seeps into it and dries that crust out right, and that's where you're getting the cracking. It's where you're getting the nice like little bit of tan color like under the actual icing sugar.
This is amazing.
Cubits you can go wrong with ritually is not making sure that the meringue has been taken far enough, so it needs to really be like a stiff peak because it can be quite like slack and that makes it extra soggy, or you get.
That thing where you think the top of your meringue is perfect and you look underneath and there's like water still almost so sad.
Yeah, so make sure I'd always take it a couple of extra minutes and you think tomorrow. And then the second bit is making sure it's compacted and covered enough with the iced sugar.
And one of the things that I've learned is that baking is your passion because I think it's very interesting. Why does you know Polly become a pastry chef instead of a cook where she could make feel shins and everything. There's a love of baking and pastry. What is yours?
I think it's pastry and baking because I find it so intricate, and I feel like the intricacy of it, the kind of layers and the steps and the fiddliness of it really takes me out of my brain for a while. So I always if I feel anxious or overwhelmed, I'll always go into the kitchen. I find myself looking through resting books and finding something complicated.
So let's go back to growing up with food. And so I know you know both your parents work, Both your parents were, they love to eat. There was you and your sister. So tell me what was sort of growing up in your household food wise? Would you say, what are your memories?
So what I can remember from early childhood is my grandpa was a farmer on my mom's side, so we were up in Scotland quite a lot on the farm and it was very meaty and it was very traditional, you know, everything kind of meat, like mainly pork and beef. But he didn't think that a meal was a meal without meat, so meat for breakfast, meat for lunch, meat for dinner, breakfast. Yeah, he had a breakfast sausages and sausages, bacon,
you know. I mean that he used to have a buffet tray where there was you know, every type of meat, there were eggs. I mean it was he was a big eater, so it was you know, it was a big tray and.
Had somebody cook that or did he cook it?
And grandmother, my grandma, my mom, like everyone would muck in and cook and then it would be presented to all the cousins. It was a big family, so we would eat. There would be a lot of food, and very big on potatoes Scotland because he was a potato farmer.
So we're still at breakfast.
Yeah, we're still at breakfast. Yeah. Yeah, fried potatoes, yeah yeah, so neaps and tatties and then you know, again, lunch was meat, dinner was meat. So that was kind of the the traditional food that I ate kind of with my enlarged family.
And then did you lived to an old age?
Yeah, ninety seven. Drank a lot of whiskey, ate a lot of meat, and was kind of an enormous horse of a man, and yeah, why not, you know, I mean it's not a coincidence that I would say ninety percent of his descendants are vegetarians. Oh really yeah, oh your cousins, yeah, or my cousins to my aunt's, my mom.
Yeah.
And actually I became a vegetarian because we were staying on a farm for his ninetieth birthday and I looked into the eyes of a cow and I thought, oh, I can't do that anymore. So yeah, and I never told you twenty five, never told him because I thought he would hate that more than yeah real, yeah, exactly. And then at home, Yeah, they both worked, and I think we ate quite a lot of kind of you know,
macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, you know. But again, the only thing I can really remember from when I was really young is just desperately trying to buy sweets all the time. And I was a really fussy kid, and I mainly only liked white food, so I really liked chips, bread, pasta, and I was kind of really fussy right up into my twenties. I was a kind of really limited eater.
And if you'd kind of offered me, I don't know, you know, hummus, I would have said no. Yeah, I had such a bland boring diet of kind of junk food, bread, carby starchy things, and I was incredibly unadventurous and yeah, and that took me really into my twenties, which is kind of pathetic.
I have a great story about your mother which I just remembered, which was that she told me that she once came home and your nanny, you had a young nanny, and you or your sister wanted a biscuit and your nanny said, if you eat this biscuit, it'll make you fat, and she fired her. I really am, And I thought that was so cool because I thought, you know, she's just like, do not ever say that to my.
Children, because I was quite a fat kid though. I was a fat kid. And I remember actually a woman in a hardware shop that we were in, the owner came up to meet and poked me in the stomach and said, you you eat too much.
People are crazy, you think.
I was nine ten, so I was kind of a fat kid, and I did eat, you know, an enormous amount of crap basically, you know, if it was kind of if it had enum was in it or came in a package. My mum would always try and make you know, food from scratch every night, and yeah, I really just wanted kind of chicken drumsticks from a packet,
you know, really, yeah I did. She let you have occasionally, but you know, I think I think she was sort of in despair, really, like how little I wanted to eat and how limited I was, And once I found something I liked, that would kind of be it for six months, you know, that kind of slightly obsessive way of eating. You know, I'd find something I liked and that would be what I would eat for the next six months.
And what about your sister, No, she would eat anything, Yeah, so she What were dinners like? Would you all have dinner together?
Yeah, we would all have dinner together, the four of us, you know, and he'd come back late. So I'm used to eating late, I think from my childhood. You know, I now kind of think I think nine o'clock is the perfect time.
Yeah, very time. I love it when.
Someone says to me at seven, my heart sinks and I think, oh, please don't make me have the kind of early bird special. So I'm used to eating late at night. And yeah, we we would have dinner together, and and the only dinners I really remember from that kind of period were on Friday nights in the nineties we would go to Pizza Express and that felt so glamorous and you know Continental, and you know, it's the first time I had kind of pizza that wasn't from
a package which to Islington. So yeah, so yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't for a long time. And you know, my in my teens and twenties, I just ate. I can't tell you. You'd be so disappointed if you saw my diet back then. It was kind of buckets of ice cream, grab bags of crisps. I used to make myself like bowls of pasta that kind of you know, laden down with pasta.
I just that's what you like.
Yeah, it was comfort food. All of it was comfortable because I was quite unhappy, and so I would eat kind of bland, warm, soft food that could kind of fill me up.
You're going to have a really hard time getting me to judge your any habits. But I think that it is interesting when you talk to people about babies. You know, sometimes they have their first baby and they go, oh, you know, they just try everything and they eat everything.
And this is all to do with parenting and how you expose them to food and then cut to the second baby who doesn't like, you know, maybe like who doesn't want to eat this or doesn't want to eat that, And then they realized maybe you're just born that way that you even as a little baby, the things you don't want to eat or you know, a lot of children don't eat fish, and then they discover it when yeah, they're older. I think sad my steps and didn't eat a pizza fish till he was about.
Forty and then loved it and then loved Yeah, so you're right, like we didn't go out to eat a lot. It was pizza Express often for like birthdays or you know, like a special occasion, and then it was quite often the pub. You know, well that was pre Gastro pub. I guess it was kind of on a costs. I remember the first Gastro pub opening up and people being really excited about it. But but before that, it was kind of you know, bang as a mash fish and chips. Yeah,
those eggs, Scotch eggs. You never had a Scotch I did?
Sometimes you care the pickled eggs A bit of a problem, a bit of step American girl. Yeah, I wanted to take pictures of people eating my mate and and give it too. I wanted to do a photographic essay because I was an arts school of getting Americans and getting them to taste toasts with more mite and seeing the expression on their face.
There not an American equivalent, but back then there was nothing like that.
In my lifetime. And and do you like my mite? You love it?
I didn't try it until I was thirty five and Greg made me try it, and now I love it. But the idea of it back then made me want to hull, you know, but actually, yeah, do you I can see by your face that you still.
Need still abomination the farm ban and toast and like in bed at night, that would be like oh, in bed at night, but you would always have a toasted you know, Richard, he did. He broke all the rules.
You know.
That's really very sweet. But you described living at home and being a firsty eater. But it was the baking interesting too. Then did you want to cook as well as eat?
I always baked from like as a very small child. We had cookbooks that were deliberately for children to learn how to bake. You know, it was always desserts. They never said, you know, you can make past of spaghetti bongle. It was always like, you know, And I remember we had a Roll Dahls Disgusting Cookbook, which was all the recipes that they make in his books, so it was like boot Bruce bog Trotter's Disgusting Chocolate Cake or whatever it was called. So I used to make a lot
of those. So I've always baked throughout my life. I've always loved it, and I didn't have any interest really in cooking, So yeah, I think my twenties were a bit. I was sad. I was a very sad twenty something year old.
So you'd left school? Did you leave her or did you live at her school?
I was just too unhappy, couldn't keep home, having panic attacks all the time, couldn't really do very much.
But she went to art school.
I went to art school in London, which some Martins, but I wasn't very good and I was also very sad, so the two things combined did not do very well for me. So yeah, I lived at home until I was twenty six twenty seven. My mum always says that's like the perfect Jewish mother thing of like have your kids live at home, and I'm like, they're not Jewish. She's like, yes, but Scottish as well, and I'm like, I don't think that's true.
So would you still sit down to meals with your parents most night?
But I think I think there's that funny thing with mental illness, not mental health, but mental illness, where your appetite is completely affected by it one way or another. You know, So quite often people overat if they're feeling sad or anxious source stressed, and the same is true the under each and so food either becomes something that you cling to and rely on. So quite often I would really over et and kind of goreg things, you know.
I remember driving to this new donut shop and having I think I ate twelve donuts in the space of two hours because I felt sad. Why not, you know, I felt sad and then but then there would be other times when I would just food just kind of lost or you just can't stomach it. And that's so common. So I think most of my Tony's food was slightly dictated to me by how I was feeling at the time.
So it wasn't really until I hit my thirties and I sort of started looking outwards towards new cuisines, new experiences, you know, the idea that food didn't have to be stodgy or bland, And now my palette is. I would say, like, if you'd asked seventeen year old me whether thirty nine year old me would be eating the things that I ate, she'd have been horrified. But my food, my diet is completely different.
I'm really interested in what happened to get you out of that cycle. You know, the girl was in her twenties, living home till she's twenty six, and then.
So scared of everything. And I think that partly meant I was unadventurous around things like food, which is, you know, maybe the smallest part of that. But you know, I didn't fly for five years. I didn't get the train the tube for a decade, was uninterested trying new things. And then I realized that I was very anxious and I needed to do something about that. I did lots of things, you know, I started running, I went to
a good therapist. I did all these brilliant things. But I also part of trying to break free from anxiety is always trying to push back against the anxiety and doing new things, doing things that scary you, all of those things. And so, yeah, it's not that food scared me. But I knew that I had to start in every element of my life, in every aspect, trying to break out of patterns that i'd sort of locked myself into. Yeah,
so that just meant I had to try. If I didn't want to try food, I had to try it. So that was my rule too, that was your rule to yourself. Yeah, limited obviously by the fact that my vegetarian. So if someone handed me you know, surlin. Yeah, but everything else, I just said, if I don't want to try it, that means I have to try it. That's kind of the mantrip. I don't want to do something, then you have to do it. So from that, I tried everything under the sun that wasn't full of me,
and surprise, surprise. That's the thing you learn, right, is that you're going to like ninety per center. You know, there's very few things that I tried that I thought. In fact, I can't think of anything that I've tried in the last ten years that I haven't thought, oh, yeah,
this is great. Why didn't I try earlier? I feel so angry with myself sometimes that I wasted so much of my life not eating the most brilliant array of things that now I get to eat, and I think, oh my god, you know my palette was so bored. It was it must have been so bored, you know. And so yeah, so now I eat everything, and like I say, sixteen year old me would just be like, I don't understand.
How much do we love? You're in love?
Or thank you very much?
A great book? I say, how everybody in the River Cafe when I told them we were coming has so weird? Book? Is that weird?
But it is weird to me because you know, I still think in my mind sometimes I still think it hasn't even you know, it's come out and I've read it, but it's still really weird to think about other people reading it. And you're putting something out into the world, and then it's not really yours anymore, because it's it's you know, people that love it or people that hate it, or people that think you're terrible, or so it's everyone
else's reactions to it after a while. So yeah, it's a very strange phenomenon.
Do you have a routine for eating when you're writing a novel. You have that blank sheet of paper which is now on your laptop screen. But how do you how do you start the day when you're writing?
So I get up. I have Dike coke, which is really bad, but that is my favorite YEP for breakfast. That's my It's not a diet thing. It's just that I love Dike. Is it President Trump? Did he say I've never seen a skinny person drink Diark coke? But then apparently he had a diet coke butler at the White House.
So you start your day with the Dike.
I start my day with dark Hoke because Nancy.
Pelos who starts with the chocolate ice cream. So everyone that's living day shares chocolate ice cream for breakfast. Yeah that's your thing.
Oh, I mean I aspire to that level of kind of being a grown up and just deciding that you don't have to live by Yeah, okay, likes so much a lot, so much. I've got to give up because it's going to.
I'm I'm sure it's like burning zero is better for it.
I'm sure it's burning my inside to maybe coke zero, I don't know the difference. Tell me, like just branded, just acid yeah, so I have that. Then I have normally I have yogurt and granola just because it's easy. And then for lunch, I will have salads, like big salads full of like so your whole most That's the worst thing is that I'm right from home, So what I started doing is going out for lunch on my own.
So like, I run, I have lunch somewhere, you know, like nothing fancy, but I love the Italian delis around Clark and weell, there used to be loads more, but but growing up, those were where we would get kind of you know our treats. You know fresh pasta. That was the only place I did fresh pasta, or you know Ammeretti biscuits or you know, all of that stuff. So if I can, I'll run somewhere and go and eat for lunch because otherwise I am literally on my own all day. And then yeah, and then I graze
all day. So it's like you know those Spanish crisps, the kind of olive oil crisps. You know, I'm constantly eating those, and I'm eating salted almonds and chocolate. I'm always eating chocolate, so all day long, or popcorn, like there's always like sort of it's like party food, but it's just for me while I'm writing, because I sort of think, do another five hundred words and then break and have chocolate and then whatever I mean in the evening.
I will always have ice cream afterwards every single night.
So what about alcohol to love wine?
I love wine Again. I'm very controlled about it because I think that's my personality and with anxiety, you know, that's just how you feel like you have to try and control uncertainty. So I'm never drunk, like I'm never drunk drunk, and I don't get hangovers because I know my limits. But I would will always have a glass of wine with dinner, always red wine, really every night. Yeah, I think the most joyful thing in the world is probably a bowl of pasta and a glass of Yeah.
So I'd happened. Then going back is the you know, you figured out that you're going to taste food that you had never tasted before and started cooking and trying and experimenting, and then how did that coincide with getting better?
It was funny because weirdly it coincided with a peer wore. I started running and I was still feeling kind of unhappy because you know, I'd just been dumped, basically, and I was feeling kind of crap about that, and so I started thinking, I remember thinking at the time, but I'm just going to lose weight because then I won't What'll he'll want me still, or he'll realize he made a mistake or something. So it was at the same time when I was I was trying to lose weight
and I so I was on these three parts. One was enjoying food, one was losing weight, and one was running all the time. And I remember there was a point about a year afterwards where I ended up in hospital with tonsilitis and the nurse weighed me and I was quite clearly very underweight for my height, my age, all of those things, and I realized, oh my god,
I've fallen into this pattern of restricting. I was eating different food, but I was restricting food, and I was running kind of you know, eight kilometers day, and somehow I'd fallen into this kind of disordered eat pattern without even realizing it. Which again it's about control, about being anxious, you know, all of those things. But that felt really sad to me at the time because I remember thinking the joy of my twenties and teens. Was I never got sucked into that diet culture.
Who didn't have friends?
Who I did have friends said.
That, yeah, but me never.
I never weighed myself, I never counted calories. I never did any of that stuff. And I thought, oh, in past thirty I I must be past that. You know, I've escaped that one thing that you know, so many women full kind of victim too. And then it sort of hit me at about thirty two, and I thought, oh, it did get me. You know, it's so easy. You know, the moment you start looking at food as calorie containers rather than as kind of delicious or whatever, then the
way you eat changes. So for a long time I was sort of restricting the good stuff, like you know, olive oil or cheese or you know, all those delicious things, and I was viewing them more as kind of a tree, a treat, rather than a you know, just a kind of way of life or just something you might want
to eat. So that was kind of difficult for a couple of years, where I thought I suddenly realized that I was sort of seeing food not as an enemy, but as the sort of something I had to again kind of control, or you manage.
Did you go different kinds of diet?
Just I honestly just kind of no. I was just really cognizant of how calies things, you know. I just and once you know that, it's really hard to get out of your head because if you know, what's a chocolate bar, is you kind of it doesn't? You can't forget that, you know, So it's kind of once it gets into your head, it's quite difficult to get out of your head.
It also affects you socially. I mean the times that I've gone, you know, say I'm not going to eat today to mind. Then you go to a dinner party. You kind of sit a little bit back, don't you You're not leaning in, you know, you're thinking about when you found out was that the turning problem and the nurse told you you were so underweight? Did that make you know?
I think at the time I thought, wooho, you know, look at me, and it's I think I just think at the time, you can't when you're in it. You're in it and you can't sort of see that that's not okay really, But I remember being kind of surprised.
But no, I think it was kind of meeting Greg and being happy again, and not just because I met a guy, but you know, I'd sorted out a lot of stuff kind of mentally, and and yeah, so food became fun again because we were living in East London and there were just so many brilliant restaurants everywhere, and we fell in love over food, you know.
Yeah, so I was like, tell me about falling in love over food.
Just there's something so amazing about sitting with just one other person over dinner, you know, be at the bar in a booth and there's nowhere to go, and it's just it's just the perfect atmosphere, you know. And our first date was a he'd booked dinner after we went to see a comedy show, which I just found extraordinary because I'd never been on a date with someone who'd taken away for dinner before. And I said, I said, are you going to Should we go to the pub?
And he said, no, I've booked dinner, and I thought, wow, you know, this is incredibly grown up of you. So I think it kicked off from that. We just had you know, four hours in a restaurant that night and fell in love and he stayed over and we never left,
so restaurants were kind of our thing. And then obviously he then got this job where he's he's on the breakfast show and he gets up at five thirty in the morning, so he goes to bed at nine, you know, so it kind of like to sit down to Yeah, that's when I want to go out for dinner, and obviously by then he's kind of in bed, so it's a bit of a killer. And so we still try and go out like Thursday's, Fridays, you know, Saturdays if we can, and then obviously for special occasions like we
come here. So we do still try and go to restaurants. But it's the way we bond. If we fall out, we go out down.
You know, restaurant is a public space, but you see quite a lot of people crying, not so much in the River Cafe, but our waiters will tell us that they've experienced people crying over dinner. People get fired in restaurants, people get proposed to in restaurants, and people, as you say, it's very often people go to make up, you know, if you want to just we're being taken care of. We don't have to get up and down. We can just be served and I think that's waiters, you know, are very sensitive.
To that, and that's you to know kind of to be able to ensure it what sort of mood people are in. But I think, yeah, there's something especially after COVID where we were all stuck indoors and everything. You know, if you were with someone, you were sort of lashed to them, you know, and there was sort of no mystique and no no separation. You know, sometimes you have to go away from someone to miss them or you know,
or go out of the house. So you know, in a way, it's now more important that we get to spend time away from our house because we've been in it. We were in it for such a long time, and so it does act like that reset where you kind of go it's like we're dating. Yeah, we're on a day here, and it feels really special. So we still do that. And Greg is a massive foodie, so so
we do. He really is like he and he's one of those guys he'll eat anything and he can kind of be in raptures about, you know, what he ate for dinner the night before and talk about.
It and remember it. I'm amazed at people's food memories. So you're talking about your first date. You know that people can remember what they cook to seduce a girlfriend, you know, or what they cooked when they were they were told somebody had died, or what they had told that they can. It's a bit like music. If I listen to a song, you can sort of remember where you were when you heard that piece of music.
Yeah, remember the mood you were feeling.
And food is like there.
Yeah, there are things that you know sometimes if you were heartbroken and you'd eating a lot of something, you can't eat it and ever again. Yeah, you know you were falling in love and you remember something that's completely true. There are totally there are things that are evocative of a time. I remember this pastor saurs I used to make that I just can't make anymore because it reminds me of being fat, fat at the time in my life.
You know.
And conversely, I think the reason I ate twelve donuts is because my first memory is of my sister being born and my dad buying me a donut in that kind of your sister's here, sha. So I remember going to the hospital and my mom said, here's your baby sister, And I said, look at my donut. You know, like, look at this amazing thing that I've been given, and to me, that was kind of the best day. But nothing to do with her. It was just to do with the fact that I'd got this amazing thing.
So yeah, how old were you then?
Two and a half?
Yeah, so you can remember that.
Yeah, I can remember holding it. Wow, Yeah, because I was so excited about this, you know, sugary bun. So maybe that's my formative memory is, you know, having to be told my life was going to change forever.
Sugar, sugar, sugar.
There's no one else in my life that has a tooth as sweet as mine. And when I was seven, I came back from the dentist with a gold tooth because the dentist said, that is an adult tooth and it's going to rock because she eats so much sugar. So they gave me a gold tooth for a year to protect it, and it's never gone away. My mum wants she said, I'll give you, I think it was one hundred pounds if you don't eat sweets.
Chocolate, to say, if you don't if you pee in the toilet, I'll give you.
Just because even kids understand, you know, money, but it was a hundred I think it was one hundred cred. It was a lot of money for a year for me, not sweet Sugar, and I think I did about eight months and then this doesn't speak well to my character, but I just realized I could cheat. I just realized I could tell sweet and be like, I've not had any sweets.
That's that's the result of parenting.
You could learn exactly if they're teaching. YEA, yeah, you're thinking, well, I'll also do fraud. So it's a slippery slope. But yeah, that for me, it's like I would rather have dessert than mames.
You.
Yeah, it's a there's certain desserts that you always go for. You probably stole.
I probably did, but you know what, really, I think I will just give one addendum to that story, which was that there was a there was a thunderstorm that night. We were all sheltering indoors, and it was my birthday the next day, and you came out with the terms and you said, this is your birthday, and so it was in fact my tiramisso yeah, So when I woke up the next day hoping to have breakfast, it wasn't in the fringe so someone in your family had.
Stolen, isn't it. I didn't know that they had taken it back.
I actually think it's quite a dark I think.
We could get this babe some family therapy here, and they.
Took what was rightfully your Yeah, I mean, Judge is rightfully there. It's a tricky situation.
But I'm really sorry you're we're doing y at the river, which is quite contentious. Well, because you know, the Italians often feel that the food that's been transported out of Italy is not really Italian food anyway. You know, carbonar, they say it didn't exist in Rome, like the mythology tells you that it was the workers, but it was something that you know, so I can put cheese and butter into penny and called it carbonar in America, and I think Jeremy soup really was an invention of a chef,
either in France or in the United States. It was not. But you know, in the end, what we thought is it's actually really delicious. Yeah, you know, if you have one that has too much coffee or fake rama, or you're not enough beaten Mascar ponies, so it's very light. But if you actually think that what you're having is coffee, alcohol and mascarp on, new cheese and sugar and Cocoa's pretty yummy, and so we do it and people like it. You know, we call it River Cafes. You wouldn't cheering me too.
You know.
There's Greg. Does he like sweets? No, not really.
And I've stopped baking as much because because I work on my own and Greg doesn't really love baking, so I make There are a few things I still make. I make French flan.
Quite a lot. I love that creme caramel love so.
Because he loves that, So I make that quite a lot. And I still try and make you know, o casion. I have an Italian cookbook of recipes of dessert, so I make that. But there's not anyone really for me to cook for all. So then I thought I should do a cookbook called Baking for One.
Good one. Baking for one you could make one one a cake then become a cupcake't have to be a small I don't like cupcakes, but that's interesting. I don't know that.
Well, they were very fatty, weren't they. You know, sort of five years ago everyone wanted to cupcakes. But they're just very they're very dry. I always think that cupcakes have I like this stuff on the top. Sometimes that really bad and then you have to kind of eat all that cake.
Quite dry.
Yeah, very dry, very very dense. Very yeah. No, I'm not a fan of cupcakes. But you could do one profeterol one chocolate Claire. You know the measurements, but just kind of one, you know, for lonely.
People, because of lonely people, But there was also just the amount of the size of the cake. As an athlete, would you eat before you ran? Would you eat after you came home? Would you have a sort of know what foods would be good as someone who wanted to run?
I think nutritionally you do as a runner. You get better at realizing what you need the longer you do. And what is that You need protein? You need good carbs and fats. You know you need fats. And actually, if you're trying to run and you're not eating enough, your body is going to tell you about it. You know you can't do it. So if you want to run ten kilometers or fifteen kilometers, you need to be
compensating for that fully. So at the times when I wasn't doing that, I was running probably quite slowly, whereas now my pace is a lot quicker because I you know, because I'm eating actual food again. It's like that sad thing of I think diet culture is being pushed back at a lot by today's I don't know what you see in your granddaughters, whether they sort of talk about it or a lot.
They talk about it. They're pretty depends on the age as well. These little ones are just eating. And as a parent, you know, as you know, it's sort of food is so complicated, you know, it's just how you nurture your child. And then a child knows that if they reject it, you know, they're kind of damaging you. Or you know, we get, you know, the same thing in the restaurant. You get people who want obsessed with food, so they want to cook, but then they also have eating issues.
Over that must be it must be quite high, you know, higher than other industries of kind of people that want because because the love part of cooking is I love you, I want to cook. But that doesn't necessarily mean you love yourself enough that you want to eat what you've made, you know, And I think that's kind of it's it's heartbreaking isn't it. Because people always call those people feeders in a kind of derogatory way, but actually it's not.
It's those people are trying to be as loving to you as possible while not being able to afford themselves the same compassion, which is sort of tragic. So I'm trying to be more compassionate towards myself, and I'm trying to just enjoy, enjoy the pizza, enjoy the kind of the baking more. And I'm still trying to eat everything that I don't want to eat.
How do get your proteins as a vegetarian?
As a vegetarian, yeah, it's difficult, isn't it. I think probably I don't get enough protein actually, just because I never really know what it's like. What's got protein? It like logomes, beans, beans. I'm big on lentsils.
Together, I think, right Spanish country in Mexico, they always have rice.
It's the best combination.
See.
I eat a lot of lentils and Bolotti beans and Candelini beans and all of that kind of stuff. So I sort of hope that that's gonna, you know, that my bones aren't going to sort of suddenly, you know, give up on me. Halfway.
But do you always think about the eyes of the cars. The same thing with fish. I just don't want to go.
I just can't.
What did you eat last night?
Last night I had I made myself Greek food?
What was that?
I made myself to bule halloomi aubergeine meis? I love doing things with abergine?
I love?
Yeah, I love putting it on a naked flame. Okay, I'm burning it on exactly for like fifteen minutes, so that and suddenly it shrinks, you know, the skin just kind of and then you can just the entire inside will just almost already be like puree. So that smokiness is so delicious. So yeah, so and now that's what I mean. I now cooked. My everything is made from scratch. I don't buy anything, So you go to where do you shop? It's an amazing shop called Phoenicia, and it's
a Lebanese supermarket just down the road from us. And there was one day when Yotelengi name checked it in the thing about where he buys all his food, and he said, I buy all my food at Phoenicia. And I tore it out and I took it down to them because I was like, they're going to be so excited, and I gave it to the guy and he, honestly, I rolled at me and pulled out like a stash of them and every person.
In the morning.
That morning, I brought him this thing about Ottelengi and he was like, Lady, we know. And now it's laminated in the window because you can buy, you know, spices that you've never heard of. You can buy brilliant fruit and bread, you can buy Mediterranean mese. I mean, it's amazing.
So yeah, I should change. I mean, we'll go back to politics and how much we need culture, other cultures we need, you know, the idea of brexit or closing our doors to people who are going to teach us her to cook a new food or eat a new food. It's just so crucial to a city. I did a conversation with Automn and though he and I cook very kind of different, My recipes are short and his go on, oh,
ingredients and they're so good and he's so good. And I think that opening the door for people to have ingredients, to try different foods, and to have different cultures is something that's changed a lot. When Rose and I did our first cookbook, people would always say to us, well, it's all very well to put as salted ancher of your on your recipe, but where are we going to
get them? And now, of course also with the internet, if you can order everything, you know you can get if you can't get it from your local place.
Yeah, because I remember, even sort of fifteen years ago, people used to sort of the sort of cliche about OTTLINGI was, where are you going to buy all of this stuff?
Yeah?
Actually, yeah, now you would be easily able to buy that.
When you cook the mess, you have no trouble getting no nothing.
Yeah.
Yeah, And that's because I live like on a kind of bustling, multicultural part of time which has all of
those kind of amenities, which is amazing. But my mum said, going back to your point about sort of you know, restaurants and shops and stuff, my mum said that, you know, they hadn't had proper ice cream until there was a kind of Italian immigration sort of drive in the forties and fifties, and lots of Italians came to the village where she grew up and opened an ice cream parlor called Vazokis, and suddenly they were having gelato in like nineteen fifty five, you know, And she said when we
were going up to said, you have no idea. They were not restaurants like there are now. You know, this idea that you'd go out to a restaurant, just it wasn't a thing that you did, whereas now you.
Know, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess that we've been through, you know, cooking for our own mental health and not eating when we're hungry, or eating when we're not hungry, or food and family and babies and doughnuts, and so I suppose the food is all that, and it definitely is memory. It also is comfort, and so I guess my last question to you is I ask everyone, is is there a food that you turn to specifically when you feel you need comfort?
Yeah, it's a good question, isn't it.
Yeah.
My mother makes mashed potatoes, and because I love her so much, that is kind of That's kind of the thing that I want to say, is just I would make mashed potato in honor of her, but I wouldn't do it as well as her, so I think it would make me sad. So I think I'm going to say that at my saddest moments when I really felt like the world's falling down, or when my family have needed to come together for things, you know, to sort of support each other through grief or sadness or whatever
else is going on. It's always pizza. So I'm going to say, a really good pizza, and when, because it's so common, not everyone's eating the same thing. You're sitting around this boxes. It feels very informal, and that feels to me, that feels so lovely. You know, everyone's sort of scarfing it into your mouth. No one's speaking because you're sort of enjoying it so much and it's gone, you know, like that, So, yeah, you're not. There's no ceremony behind pizza. It's definitely a kind of It's like
the sweatshirts of food. You know, that would be my choice that and then ice cream and then I'd be happy. Yeah.
I hope you don't need to take it off for comfort, because I just like you to be happy. Thank you, Thank you so much for coming my love, Thank you fella.
The River Cafe Lookbook is now available in bookshops and online. It has over one hundred recipes, beautifully illustrated with photographs from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The book has fifty delicious and easy to prepare recipes, including a host of River Cafe classics that have been specially adapted for new cooks. The River Cafe Lookbook Recipes for cooks of all ages. Ruthie's Table four is a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.