Ruthie's Table 4: Emily Maitlis & Jon Sopel

Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios.

Food is key to life and to day. More than ever, journalism is also key to life. Our guests, Emily Maitlis and John Sopel, are too brilliant, inspiring journalists who bring us news, analyze news, present news, helping us determine our lives and the choices we make. They are smart, they are warm, they are funny, and they tell me they are always hungry. Emily was lead anchor for the BBC

So lovely.

My name's Bella Toobs.

I'm the head pater chef at the River Cafe and I'm here with Emily Maitlist and John soapolk.

Okay, so we're going to make a prune and almond tart.

It's a bit of a how to blue Peter.

That's a really useful, usually sad thing to do.

Prune and almond tart, which.

I had last Friday here and it was sensational. I mean, normally pair on the rare occasions I overcome here, but it was incredible.

I think you've already given yourself away.

Well so, so you've just made a prune and almond tart. But before we talk about that experience and what you did, would you like to read the recipe for it.

Prune and almond tart serves fourteen sixteen prunes stoned, three hundred grams almonds, finally ground, one el grade tea bag, one hundred mills of brandy, three hundred grams of unsalted butter, three hundred grams cast a sugar, three large eggs, one preheated sweet pastry start shell. Pre Heat the oven to one hundred and fifty degrees.

Pour enough boiling water over the prunes to cover, then add the tea bag.

Leave for one hour. Remove the prunes from the tea, pour the brandy over them.

Using an electric mixer. Beat the butter and sugar together until pale and light.

Add the ground almonds, Then add the eggs one by one.

Finally, add one hundred mills of the brandy prune juices.

Pour this mixture into the tart shell. Push the prunes into the mixture, Bake in the preheated oven for forty minutes.

Cool and remove from the tin.

Brillier. Hi, how about that's a little do it? So tell me about Meggi and what was it like in the pastry kitchen.

It was spotlessly clean, It was brilliantly well organized. And the smell when you walk in, of the baking of the breads of Christini, of everything else that's going on in there is just fabulous, and of course the almonds, which just smell so rich and sweet.

I was shown a magic trick it actually blew my mind, which was instead of pushing the pastry into the tin, you grate it on a normal sort of greater and you take all the tiny bits and then push them sort of gradually around the back, which apparently makes it finer and shorter and more delicate. And so I'm going to take that away and say this is what I learned.

At the river.

As well as it being spotlessly clean, I have never seen a greater looking so totally knackered. It has been through so much and it looks absolutely oh my god. You wouldn't get a penny for that in a jungle sale. But it's obviously still doing its job.

Much times are harder than we're saving up for a greater But actually you do get a kind of sentimental attachment to certain things that you use in the kitchen.

I don't know if you do, but I'm a spatchelor girl here is so if somebody gives me the wrong kind of spatulor I have favorites in My favorite is the purple spatulate.

Tell us about the Verbel spatu.

It's just it just fits your hand right, It's that's the point. There's nothing special about it. It's it's not unique. It's just that it's it's become part of it's I feel like Edwards's hands, but with spatchul it's the extension of my arm.

Now do you have kitchen equipment when you've inherited from your family?

There was a kitchen knife that has been so sharpened that it bows because there's so little of it left. And that was my mother's favorite kitchen knife, and she had it since she was a girl.

And I mean, unfortunately, it's kind of it met.

Its end because there was just nothing left of it because it had been sharpened so many times over the years that it had been filed down.

Have you got it above the fireplace.

Exactly?

Do you have one that was handed down?

Not? Really, No. I think it's more the practices of my mum was my big is my big inspiration actually in terms of cooking. And it's more the way she does things and the way she talks to herself as she cooks that I do now and I think I pass on to my children.

Did you cook with her always?

Yea?

And did she work or did she come home and cook?

She worked a lot at home, so she did a lot of her work at home. And I remember the rituals actually of her cooking and just how.

I mean, she was very funny. She was always ahead of the curve. I say she was.

She's very much alive and we'll be listening to this, but she was. I think she was quite ahead of the curve and the kind of ingredients that she used and the kind of things that she made, and occasionally she'd go into obsessions. So she had an obsession about an Indian dessert called gullub Jarman, and she decided she had to perfect it, and instead of making it once, she made it like every day for about six weeks

Cooked, You have them in her writing? Did she write them?

She has all her recipes still. And funny you say that, But I've just done a cookbook for my son. He went off to university last year, and I did that really embarrassing mother thing.

Where I took pictures of all the dishes.

That I thought he'd miss, and I wrote all the recipes out and I put it all together for him. And then I saw his room, and of course there's like one burner and a mini fridge, and he just looked at me and is like, I'm never ever going to cook any of that stuff in here.

You know that, don't you know that he will? But one day he.

Will a lot of grand This cook book with grandmother's recipes, a lot of people do people.

It was always a roller decks a little That's what my mum keeps it. And every recipe is like do.

You know what I mean?

Like a little square thing and it's all in her rising.

Yeah, very similar story. My mother worked and she'd had polio as a child and so was left pretty badly disabled by it. And I used to go and meet her from the tube station to carry the shopping home because she would bring the shopping home and then she would cook the dinner and I think, probably like Emily's mum, you know, presentation of it was kind of really important. She loved food to look appetizing as well as to

Yeah, I found that. The other thing it's interesting is how many people talk almost more, maybe not the two of you, but more about their grandmother's cooking than their mothers.

My grandmother was. She had certain key recipes that she would repeat. One was Locktion pudding. I haven't met anyone since then that does Locktion pudding, which is literally it's like noodles. It's a pasta dessert and it's kind of pasta and cream and raisins and more cream. I think it's probably the heaviest thing in the entire world, and it's got a crispy top. I've literally never seen on the menu, but it must just be the most.

So my mother was, I mean, my mother had an extraordinary life story. She was illegitimate child in the Northeast to a Russian Jewish family and had to escape because of the shame that had been brought to the family. And she ends up in a farming community in East Anglia, which you know, which was Protestant, and so she kind of grew up making suet pudding and Yorkshire puddings and all the rest of the kind of English cookbook if

I mean, my mother would not dream of cooking pork, but would have plenty of palmer Ham.

English rose.

Pork wouldn't be anywhere near the table. I don't remember her ever doing that, but if it was palmham or prawn, so that would be fo.

Food and tradition and memories and family and Friday nights. Did you reject having to stay home on a Friday night when you could be out partying.

I think by the time I got to sixteen, it got a bit kind of I'm sorry, I'm going out and going to the pub, you know.

Yeah, so I started to bell at that stage.

But I love the idea of at least one night a week, the family coming together and everyone sitting around the table. Maybe not always getting on brilliantly, but there is a kind of sense that this is what we do as a fact do you do it?

And now your generation, do you deal with your kids? Do you deal with yours?

I mean might have grown up, but when we can, Yes, we do. I mean normally Sunday evenings actually because everyone's got it's either a school day or work day the next and you just kind of, you know, that's the I like.

A Sunday nights. What about you? Yeah, you deal with your kids?

We do Friday night. We like the candles, we say, if the kids are together, you know, And normally it involves me being about to cook and Sudday going, oh it's Friday.

Quick.

So we do that, not in a big demonstrative way, but just in a kind of recognition a few moments at the beginning of the evening.

Yeah, growing up, did you always sit around the table?

Yes, we did. I mean it was that was very much. It was no one had TV.

Dinners, no grazing. It was kind of.

You'd sit down at the table together, the four of you. And yeah, that was kind of pretty much on school nights every night.

Yeah.

Then and to the point where we all everyone had a set place. I mean that's how the pecking order is established. I was the youngest of three sisters.

I had the least.

Comfortable chair sort of squashed into the corner where you had to get between the sort of dresser and the and the and the edge of the table. And I sort of think of it like that. That was how you knew your plate, literally knowing your place right, And did.

You get an easier time than your older sisters. And they were resentful because they thought Emily's come along and we had to do this, but she doesn't.

No, My sisters worked out very early that they could make me run errands for them if they offered to time me doing something like can you post this letter, I'll time you, and I would run all the way down to the bottom of the road, run all the way back. My sister would have gone off and done something completely different that she'd suddenly look at her watch and go, oh, amazing forty five and I'd be like, wow.

Was that better than last time? So that was how.

But the seating was very much And then Sunday. Sunday was a big deal because we had it in the dining room and there is a bottle of Coca Cola in the table and it was the only time of the week we got fizzy drinks, and it was, you know, the real iconic Coca Cola bottle, and that was how you the.

Other times you ate in the kitchen. The dining room is a lost. Do you have a dining room in your house?

We do?

Do you have one?

We have a dining room that comes from the kitchen. So I don't know that I like the idea of a Yeah, I don't want a bright red dining room. That's kind of like right now, have a row about something.

I like the sense of sudden.

You can also be like regulated to the kitchen, you know, so everybody's becomes much more of a performance.

Did you have Yeah, we had it in the kitchen. There was a little table, but Friday nights it was round the dining room table. It was the you know, because that was the posh dinner. And we also I remember as a kid the Corona man and Corona used to come around with bottles of fizzy drinks. It was like a milk delivery, and the Corona man would do deliveries and you could have cherry aid or lemonade or

This huge commune kind of type place in the East Den.

But where my mother grew up was in Essex and we had the house there and we used to go there at weekends and the Corona man would come to this house in East Anglia, near Colchester and deliver kind of off the back of the lorry these different bottles of Corona fizzy drinks.

We had one of my grants that had this great idea when we were in a hotel in France. He said, I'd like to do like the cheese trolley, but ride it around Highbury and it's Lindn and just knock up people and they can say I have a bit of Camembert, I have a bet of every night.

It's sort of six quite entrepreneurially idea.

This is taking meals and wheels, very sophisticated level tally where.

I think there's a huge change. I mean, both my parents have died now, but you know, so there was these silver tea sets which were seen I think in the nineteen fifties must have looked so impressive and proper on the table that who has a solid silver teapot or a solid silver hot for the hot water, and it just there's all of that sort of stuff.

Very formal Cuverry.

I think it's hard. I can't live with and you, if you're not careful, you inherit. It's rather big, heavy sort of service. He ever calls it a dinner service anymore. I just want you, just want plates that make you happy. My plates make me so happy, right, And I don't look good, and you know, I got mine from this amazing potter in France, and it's just bright, beautiful colors and it just makes me happy to look at it.

Terrified if you break on. We did one with Nancy Pelosi, and guess what. She never has had a meal without a tablecloth. No, yes, her father, it was the mayor of Baltimore. They had a huge family, but she said they always had a tablecloth. And I was just thinking about that, about the laundry, the ironing, all that goes into having a tablecloth. It is nice to have a tablecloth.

Well, we had no kind of you know which which nobody you know, we all had an actual napkin and a napkin ring ring with your thing. Mine was a little brown one.

Guess what in Italy they like in hotels we used to go, They used to you had the during napkin. They can't wash them, don't think we every night, right, and then you put them back the door, and then you'd have but.

One of them.

That's the point of the ring, right. It's like a hanky that you don't change every day.

My actual rebelliousness when I was a kid growing up, because I knew it would upset my mother, was to put a milk bottle on the table, because you yeah, from a juck. Goodness.

Even now, when I've got a.

Milk bottle on the table, I think.

So many rules And what about restaurants. So now in the River Cafe, we see kids all the time. We see kids at Friday night dinners or Saturday lunches or Sunday lunches. We see people bring their children. And when I was a kid, we went out for a special occasion, you know, we went out for the birthdays or the anniversaries, and we were told to look at the right hand side of the menu, and I don't know, it's obviously

Yeah, much more, much more seldom. Actually, we grew up in Sheffield and there was amazing restaurant called Fishes, which is on the edge of Bakewell and it's beautiful. Everything about it is exquisite, you know, just the sense of arrival and destination and beautiful herbs in the garden. And I remember that was like very very special occasions. You had to basically be getting engaged, married or giving birth at Fishes, but it did have that sense of absolute occasion.

Yeah. And do you go out now with your kids to restaurants? So is it also that way?

Funny enough, we don't go out that often to restaurants with my kids because we do a lot of sort of cooking and just eating at home when they're home. And I feel like when your kids don't live at home, they're actually really happy. It's almost turned round. I think now that my kids have to fend for themselves. They live, you know, one lives at university ones away. They'll be doing a lot of kind of like cheap and cheerful takeaways or whatever. And so actually the treat now is

I think we used to go out for special occasions and there would be about three or four restaurants in London that you know my parents love.

Do you remember them?

Well? One of them actually I now live around the corner too. I mean it became my mother's favorite restaurant, which was a Greek restaurant in Primrose Hill and Liamonia. So you know, we used to go there and meet my mother there, but they were kind of they weren't terribly grand, you know, there was nothing overly flash about them. They were just good places where good food was served. And somebody was saying, you know, the kind of food that we ate at home that was, you know, was

So this is exactly what My dad would come down to London for work and we lived in Sheffield and he would visit Berwick Street. Next street was the first fresh.

Ravioli and amazing.

Yeah, it was a delicatessant and he would bring them back to Sheffield and it was like this, Oh my god, what's dad got from London?

Now, yeah, a big deal.

As both of you have talked a lot about your mother's, did either of your father to cook?

Fun enough?

My dad? So, my dad was a lot older. My dad was born in nineteen ten, so my dad was a lot lot older than my mum. Had grown up in the East End of London and had never really left the East End of London. And there were two favorite dishes that he cooked and I both found both of them absolutely inedible. He would have he would make porridge for breakfast, but he would he would put salt in it. He didn't sweeten it. It was just kind of salt. And I just thought, this is really hard work.

Did your dad cook?

He was a real foodie. He didn't cook a lot but actually, looking back, he was a chemist, right, so he was very obsessed with the science of getting food right, getting cooking right, and so he'd be the one who'd say, never put meat onto a grill unless it's hotter than you dare you know, useful. He'd be the one who'd say, never put the spaghetti in until it's massively salted, massively boiling,

So it stays with you.

Yeah, yeah, you know, you like you've did for Milo. I mean for my mother when I was sixteen and I was going off. You know, I went off camping, right, you're going to learn to cook on one part, and you know, I learned how to make rattetuia, learned how to make speable and NAIs and then how to do stews and you know.

Stuff like that she told you before you ran.

Yeah, she taught me.

And when lockdown came and the ghastlings of COVID, my wife had moved back from America because she's got a very elderly mother. I was in DC by myself, and suddenly the restaurants are shut.

I am cooking every night.

It was great because I found that I could still do it.

Yeah, and did you Yeah, of course, I mean I cooked right through lockdown. I didn't really mind it. I was still working at these night. My week was very much divided because I was out on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday's not coming back till midnight, you know, one o'clock in the morning.

And so actually the rest of.

The week felt like I sort of earned my lockdown yea, and earned my you know, time to cook.

Living home, you know this this home with the food in the dining room and your mother's and gathering around the table. What happened? Did you go to university straight from home?

I took a gap year, and so I sort of traveled. I went to the great picking harvest in the Bougelot region, and then I travel around Europe, and I spent some time on your books in Israel.

What was food like in that yeard?

You discover?

I loved French food, I absolutely grew to love for and I thought France then was the most sophisticated kind of Wow, this food is just amazing. Actually, I spent four years in Paris as the Paris correspondent for the BBC, and I kind of thought, actually, it's very conservative. A lot of the cooking and some of it is really quite pedestrian. Whatever restaurant you went to, you got a version of the same menu every time. I just thought, you know, and everyone was like, oh my god, I

And that was just there was a chauvinism I.

Think that I found in France then that they wouldn't acknowledge that there was other ways of doing completely.

You agree, did you likee You've ever lived in Paris or France.

I've lived in France and I love it as a sort of this is what we do and this is the way you do it, but God forbidding if you break any rules.

Actually, and I think it's at least the same.

You know, a friend of mine who is the Roman correspondent, was saying, you know, if you if you try and open a sort of Thai restaurant or a sort of different culture, there's actually quite a lot of pushback because it's not how you know, sis, how we do things, you know. And so I think maybe because we were behind on our own cuisine, I do think Britain has been much more accepting and really good at accepting other cultures and other fusions, and just a bit more adventurous.

Actually, I don't know.

I don't know anyone who says I will not try you know that nationalities food, I will.

Not eat that.

Did you go to university?

I went to university and then I went off to Hong Kong and that just completely opened my mind to Southeast Asian food in a very different way. And I would say, now, you know, anything that's got sort of prawns and lime and chili, lemon, grass, lemon, all this, I just love. I love Vietnamese flavors, I love coriander, I love mint. I love handfuls of herbs as almost salad. I am absolutely obsessed with herbs. I'm obsessed with you grow them. I grow so many, I've got a jungle.

I said that when you go to a city and you go straight to the market, it tells you a lot about the city you're in, the culture you're in, whether there's you know, a lot of greens, whether people are shouting it's full. You know what's in season, don't you say?

You know the journalistic lives that we've been lucky to leave.

You have taken us all over the world, and so you suddenly immersed in Afghanistan.

Or somewhere like that tells you a lot.

Oh yeah, and you have no option but to eat what the kind of international food happens to be.

And that's just been joyous.

We were in Bulgaria last year, funny enough, and I always just took my son there for you know, three days, little break. A little kind of rented place was right next to the market, and I was I sound sort of like shocking, but I was so surprised by just how magnificent the sort of produce was, and the fruit and the vege. And I think I still have this very Soviet sort of thought in my head of everything being a bit sort of pale and gray and gristly, and you suddenly realize the richness.

Of what they've actually, Yeah, probably very seasonal as well fantastic these places. They do fly raspberries and from New Zealand in the winter, or grapes some Souf Africa in the role season.

And look, we live in a country in the UK where there is plenty and we are blessed that we live in it. But then you go to America and you go into one of the big supermarkets and you see this kind of rows of brightly colored vegetables. It all looks fabulous and just doesn't taste.

It's when you learn that big strawberries are normally tasted of strawberries.

Water, And that's sort of that realization that you've got everything, but it doesn't taste as good as in many places where if you went to the small local market you're going to get fabulous fresh fruit and vegetables.

I also think they over chill everything like American restaurants serve everything too cold and so you can't taste it, and I think I must serve everything more or less like Ted.

I say that in Italy the only thing that really they care about being hard is pasta because you can even have a blito misto and it's kind of room temperature, and a lot of soups are not hotright, And I agree with you. As Americans, I would say that things are really really.

Do you think it's true that?

I mean, the thing that struck me really when I was living there was that sweet things were over sweet, so that you would have bread and you could almost literally taste the taste it.

Yeah, you can really taste it.

And the savory things are over salted, so there's far too much, you know, like buying a packet of crisps or chips as they would call them in the US, and the salt levels in them would be on a different scale to what would be served here.

No, I agree. I think as an American, I don't even want to leap to the defense because I think you're absolutely right. But if you go down to Union Square, you know there's a Union Square market and there's rocket from some County in Upstate New York, and there's broccoli that's been grown on Long Island, and I think certainly in California there's a whole movement of farm to table, and as a chef, I just know that there's a

And you've been in England too long. When you call it rocket and not a regular I mean I just oh yeah, yeah.

Well that was the other thing that was interesting is how when we Rose and I opened the River Cafe in nineteen eighty seven, we'd put a Papa pomodor or a Rugela salad, and you know, people would say, I'm not paying those days, shockingly three pounds fifty for this soup.

But I do remember my mum in the nineteen seventies making a lasagnya for the neighbors that had just moved in, and nobody had heard of it. Yeah, it was just computing. She was ahead of a time, and she took them out and they were like, what do I do with him?

Yeah?

Now, you know, nobody would believe you'd made it yourself and just assume it of a packet. Ye, She's brought it around, and you know, she just thought that's a warming dish for a family that are moving in. But in the nineteen seventies, people hadn't even had past they haven't even heard a pastor.

But you know, as you were saying, you did have Indian restaurants, you had Chinese takeaway. So it's just I was amazed, again coming from upstate New York, that there were all these people who know how to make a curry. I mean, you know, everybody could make a curry. They might not be able to make a lasagna, or they might not be able to, you know, make a risotta, but there they were making some sort of amazing curry,

You were I'm going to Venice in June. We've already booked restaurants.

Oh good, where you go?

I actually the friend that we're going with his booked restaurants, so I know that we're going to one absolutely sensational place on Saturday night.

I could find out the name VI if.

You were going or is this okay? That's all right? You'reing together very often in the office.

In the office, I know that he likes you know, yeah, the press.

Now you have to write it down.

But this is not his favorite. I think that would be kind of slightly undermining.

And it's not my favorite. It's convenient. She has it's too chicken soup noodles.

I like that. Yeah, it's convenience, it's quick, it's not too unhealthy.

Do you feel about eating at your desk? We were talking about it here.

About the problem with the newsagents. I mean, there are very few problems, but I would say structurally, the big problem is that we tend to record between twelve and two. So you either have to have a very Spanish lunch. You have to have a brunch yeh, a sort of eleven eleven thirty brunch. And we're still working out with it's best to be sort of spilling soup on your nose at.

Eleven thirty and laptop.

Yeah, on your laptop.

We have an office, an office editors who's managed to spill coffee on four people.

Very smart.

But if you wait till three, there's a chance you get quite tetchy when you're recording.

And well that's me.

And if you and if you get wait till three to have lunch, but then you've got a dinner in the evening at seven. I don't feel like dinner, but I need something between.

Yeah, so I suggest you reschedule the podcast or do you have to do it during people.

We want to get it so that people receive it when they're on their journey home. And if the podcast goes up online, say an hour later, listening figures go down because we're doing a daily news.

But if we were properly Italian about this, we would just basically lay out the table and all eat and record, you.

Know, and just sort of make.

Put the meal in the center of it and record the podcast around the edges, which you know, I always ask actors.

You know, if you're doing a matinee or even you know, do you eat before or do you eat after? I mean most of the actors that I know play, they say, come meet me, you know, after the show, and we'll go out and have something to eat. But then do they snack before?

You know?

Do they wait that.

Long if you've just had a meal.

Problems? Probably they are, they're our podcast timing, But it is would you talk about that?

Yeah, it's importantly, it is important. What do you think chances favorite dishes?

I'm going to do? I think I've got mine really wrong.

Okay, I feel like we asked I'm sure we ask you what is your favorite dish? Well, we're going to say what what did you guess is his favorite?

So first, because I'm I'm going to say what you tell me what I think it would be something sea bassie prawns with a spicy kind of sauce.

That would be yeah, kind of have a flavor of the Far East too.

Very good.

Yeah, I'd go with that.

Yeah. Yeah, And what have you got for me?

Well, I think it's a bit too sort of matcho for you, because I don't think you're really matching your food. But I have gone for Philips, state mushrooms, fat chips, truffle butter or bonnets and green beans.

Yeah there are.

Okay, should we just talk for one minute about these agents? When I said it's my favorite, I do think it's a great program. Do you want to tell the world.

What you do?

We started, you know, as every podcast starts, with zero subscribers and zero listeners, and we were trying to create something that was not a million miles away from our BBC backgrounds, but was maybe just a tiny bit bolder, and you know, we would really call stories as we

That's what we're trying to do.

Our editor would at this point kill us if we didn't say we are now the biggest daily podcast in the UK get so that he doesn't sort of, but that's a kind of a big a surprise to us, I think, as it would be to our listeners in the sense that it was a very tiny acorn, you know. It was sort of three of us just wanting to work with our mates and create something that we wanted

You know, we're recording this and it is the day before the coronation, and there is a certain tone and timbre to the coverage at the moment on a lot of the mainstream outlets, and I think we are asking different questions, not being anti monarchists, but just asking you know, more interesting questions maybe about some of this, which maybe the main broadcasters would be fearful.

Of going to.

The Other thing is that, you know, when I was in Washington and I'm doing the ten o'clock news, the audience on average would be over six years old. We're getting a lot of young people, and so this whole idea that young people aren't interested in news, I.

Think is both.

I think that we're getting a lot of people who but they just want it done differently, and that's what we're trying to do.

Yeah, my favorite line came yesterday from a friend who said, I'm a much much better kind of dog owner as a result, because he used to be really grumpy with his sweet whippet Wolf, and you know, if Wilf want to go out, it's kind of, oh, come on, then let's do it.

And he said, now it's my time.

You know, I get in with the newsagents and Wolf is happier, and I'm happier, and we get back.

Exhausted and it goes really quickly.

So if we've made dogs happier as a result of this podcast, that our work is done with, I think.

It's you know, as I said, you know, it's about informing. It's about telling us. If we know about news, if we know about what is happening, it helps us make choices. It helps us plan our lives. Our day is what's happening. You know, That's why at some point, and that's what you do. And I don't want to compare food to information and you know what we're all doing, but it is. It gives us knowledge, gives us nourishment. It gets to

Well, I guess I'd say put aside your you know, the SeaBASS, prawns and the chili. My favorite food is fresh bread and butter and strawberry jam.

And I don't.

Indulge in that very often because it feels like, you know, if I started with bread, I would never stop.

But I just love it.

A couple of years ago, I was flying back from Australia. My son lives in Australia and I caught COVID being very on trend. I got back to London, tested positive, felt absolutely dreadful, and I realized the food I wanted I hadn't had since I was a child. And it's so such a cliche to say it. I wanted chicken soup and moncibles and it's the kind of almost it's the punchline of so many Jewish jokes. Give him some chicken soup. Yeah, And that's what I felt I wanted.

Well, thank you very much. It was great to have you here. Let's go have munch. Thank you very much. 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,