Welcome to River Cafe, Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios.
I've done so many things that had very tight corsets. You can't have lunch, you'd.
Make you sick.
When I was doing one hundred and one hundred two Dalmatians, I had a corset that made my waist twenty one inches, and if it was off by a quarter of an inch, you'd literally could faint.
I'm here with my wonderful friend Glenn Close. Sadly we're far apart. She's in Montana, I'm in London, but we're both going to go together to Genema in Liguria, where this recipe for tagliaatelly with walnuts sauce comes.
From three hundred grams tagliatelly, two kilos fresh wet walnuts, shelled, bitter skins removed, one hundred GM's bread crumbs soaked in milk, two garlic cloves peeled, one hundred and fifty milligrams olive oil, one hundred grams parmesan grated, four tablespoons fresh basil, seventy five grams unsalted butter. This is best made in a pestle and mortar pound. The walnuts and garlic until combined
and season well. Squeeze most of the milk from the bread crumbs, then add to the mortar and mix together. Pour in the olive oil gradually. Finally add half the parmesan and basil. If it is too thick, add more milk. Cook the tagliatelly, drain and return to the saucepan. Add the softened butter and toss gently. Stir in the sauce and serve with the raining parmesan. And my mouth is water and.
It's too so beautiful. Let you read it. It makes me want to eat it and cook it right away. I love this recipe because it's so regional, comes from Geneva. It is totally seasonal, and when you only eat it when the walnuts are fresh, which is in the early months of autumn, and there's something very delicate and very subtle about the taste. Why did you choose this recipe, Glenn Well?
I chose it because I asked my wonderful daughter Annie what recipes she would choose from the River Cafe, and without hesitation, she said, tagli Itelli with walnut sauce. So I chose it because I love my daughter and she is a foodie of the first order.
She is. And did you always cook with her? Did you cook together? Was she somebody who loved food from the beginning?
Yes, I have a picture of annual. She barely could reach the kitchen counter, and she was. She used to come in and say I'm going to cook something, and she would just get a bowl and start putting things in a bowl, and you'd say, do you want to add a little milk or yeah. So she's always had a pension for cooking, and I can't say that I have. So I am really really overjoyed when she comes and visits because I know I'm going to have a spate
of fabulous meals. And she's very adventurous. She likes to try new things.
When you're growing up, who cooked for you? Wow? What was it cooking like in your childhood?
It was hilarious my early childhood. My mom she would open a can of suck atash, which had those mealy lima beans. Hated it hated suck attash and corn beef hash. I remember she did some wonderful ribs though, but I think she just put ketchup and mustard together other and put them over. But they were really good. I remember that from my childhood, but she would I think she was a basic, you know, just a good steak or chicken.
We had a rooster called Pretzel and he would crow during the night, and my brother cut a oil drum in half and cleaned it out, and at night, Pretzel would be put under the oil drum, but you still could hear the worm. Finally, finally, everybody thought it was time for Pretzel to be butchered, and he was, and he was putt in the freezer. And then I happened to be there when they brought Pretzel out and said, let's roast Pretzel. He was inedible. You couldn't even get
a knife into it. My mother was pretzels revenge.
And what about that part from being in the kitchen and big home? What about restaurants? Do you like restaurants pre covid, Yeah, pre covid.
I love going to restaurants. I love sitting down knowing that you're going to get a wonderful meal. But I think for me, the most important thing about a restaurant is its atmosphere and who you actually are there with. The last time I was in the River Cafe was with Jonathan Price and Kate his wife, and you were there and you came and sat and you were busy around, but we were celebrating the end of filming the Wife. But it was such a spectacular time because you feel
so embraced by the whole atmosphere. And also then, of course, there's nothing more wonderful and brings people together than when a gorgeous plate of food is put in front of you.
It's always interested in me the way that you can see that people come sometimes to a restaurant and they are a bit damaged, or they're a bit tender, they're a bit tired, or they're a bit sad, or they're very happy, or they're celebrating. There's a lot going on. And I also think that's why perhaps actors really do like restaurants, because there is a theatrical atmosphere. Do you think of a restaurant.
Very much so? And I think as an actor, there's something wonderful about knowing the people in a place and coming in and you literally feel like you're going into another version of home. And I think that's also important. But it's interesting that you say that because I was recently in California and I was staying in Pasadena at a very lovely hotel one evening when I went with
my book and get a little bit of dinner. Across from me at a two table was a couple and the guy was sobbing, Oh, I mean sobbing out loud, and I almost I wanted to go and say, I'm so sorry, you bet you know. A woman was holding his hand and it went on for quite a while, and then he would pull himself together and start laughing. And I thought, of course, my actors imagina thought, what has happened?
What is that situation?
But I found it fascinating that that much emotion was being, you know, let out in a very public place. As far as observing how people eat, I one of my my ex partners, I remember, I remember the day when I actually noticed how he chewed, and he chewed like buzz bunny, like really fast, and it was like it would be a scene out of a comedy that I just stared and I thought, I can't believe that I'm
with somebody who eats like that. And it was so funny and so distinctive that when I was in Mars Attacks and playing the first lady to Nicholson's President, and we're eating TV dinners in front of the TV. I chew like a total I totally took how my ex chewed because it was it was astonishing.
I get it, I really. I have a friend that left her husband because the way he buttered bread. She just couldn't believe that he was so many of these. She said, they were making garlic bread and he was, oh, he was so he was so stingy about everything in life. And then she just saw him put no, you know, the smallest amount of butter on a piece of bread, and she thought, that's it. You know, it's a bit like you and the chewing. I cannot this is it. I just can't do this.
This is it. It kind of was a this is it moment for me.
Back to Annie and you do you eat out together? You know, now that she's older and she's married, and you're not maybe cooking together making pancakes for her? Do you share a lot of food together? Do you eat out or does she cook for you?
She does, And the thing that amazes me is how much she loves it, how much she takes time in getting the right ingredients. And I think the help she likes the most is the cleanup. You know, she doesn't like people hovering. It's really a process for her that I think is psychological as well as practical. I think she finds real solace and she has told me that it's a place that helps her with anxiety. You just get in the kitchen.
Yeah, it's comforting, and it's a connection, isn't it It is? It is comforting and our connection was we met in Mexico and I was saying, how we how many meals we shared in Mexico and going to Contramard and sitting there for hours with our friends, Yes, and going to that breakfast place and having breakfast and having margerite. Oh, isn't that that beautiful.
Conchiman That was God, what a great place. I just I think a fine Mexican cuisine is, besides Italian, my favorite food ever. You know, if you if you have a beautifully cooked chicken with one of those dark molet sauces, it's just exquisite. The ingredients that they put in is so beautifully subtle and deep. You know, it's you know, I put salt and pepper and lowery sauce and oi
roast chicken. You know, it's like but it's again, it informs you because probably you're getting stimulated in your taste buds in different places, and it actually becomes almost, you know what kind of a physical experience. It's it's it's profound when you're when you sit down to a beautifully cooked meal with complex ingredients. And the breakfasts, certainly in Zikatella is the avocado, the wonderful fresh fruit, and also
the eggs are just to me. My favorite was that moment of breakfast and you could hear the ocean pounding, and it's just that it's I really miss it.
I really want to go back. Oh we will, we have to go. We were in Mexico. I think the most recent time we were in Mexico together. It was your birthday and I remember we were in this incredibly beautiful, rather remote place and Chris Terrio, your friend, and I thought we had to catch you a birthday cake, and we walked down the beach. We came to this little village.
We thought, we're going to find this really wonderful Mexican birthday cake for you, and in fact we went into this kind of pastry shop and they had those kind of terrible looking slightly plastic birthday cakes that were kind of full of sugar and kind of probably fake icing, but we was all we could get, and so we bought it, and we came back and we brought it out to you for your birthday, and it turned out to be like the most delicious thing that we'd ever had.
Do you remember it was so shocked that here we were in Mexico being this kind of who knows what cake, and it was so good. I think the three of us finished up the whole birthday.
Yeah.
In France, when I did Dangerous Liaisons, they have French hours, which you don't have a break and you go and get something when they're doing a setup or something. But then they had a dining room trailer with tables with white table claws and wine on the tables, like what. And then of course you have caterers and you have the craft service table where everybody goes and snacks. And that really depends on how much money the production has,
is what the quality of that is. But I just I did a film up in Canada on January and they had a lot of really healthy food that was really nice to have because you can just gain weight.
I was thinking about big chill and the memories. There's so many memories from The Big Chill, but a lot of The Big Chill, it seems to me in my memory because I haven't watched it for a while. Takes place in the kitchen, doesn't it, sitting on the table. There's a lot of food in that movie. What was it like making that movie? And the food and the topping? I can't remember what we ate.
I do remember because it was my second movie and I was shown what the pattern of my china would be.
You must say, oh, I would never have that.
I would never have that, And I got all upset, and then Larry Casten was very you know, said yeah that, thank you, you know, blah blah blah. Then of course when you see the movie, there's no way that any would ever notice the pattern on the china. So I realized how gracious Larry Casten was. I think in The Big Chill, wasn't there a bit about throwing spaghetti against
the refrigerator? So if it was, but yeah, I think there's something that promotes conversation when you're sitting around a table, and that movie is all about conversation, and you know, in life, we all end up in the kitchen. So I think it was very true to life that a lot of the scenes take place in the kitchen.
But what is it like being as a political you know, my most socially conscious, political involved activist friend. Do you feel that way about food? I mean and farming? Are you you know you're in that? I mean?
Doesn't it all come down to soil? This valley, the Gallatin Valley, it's just vast and spectacular and it has some of the best soil in North America, But it also has sprawl. And all I can think of is we're building over some of the best soil that could be feeding people. The least there should be is a tax for developers who are taking away the ability for
protos to be grown on this invaluable soil. Annie wants to develop a garden out on our property, and we have a wonderful, wonderful place for that, and she wants to eventually find students with the Agricultural Department, you know, to use whatever in whatever way we can to develop things. She loves the Stone Barn thing, the things that they're doing in Stone Barn, where they're they're developing vegetables that have very a wonderful flavor, but they take less water.
Things like that I think are going to be crucial as you know, our population keeps expanding and our water supply keeps diminishing. I think, especially in a place like this, we're always afraid of fire. Now in the summers, it's just a way of life. Now you have to think of of water, and you have to think what's the best way to produce food. And I can't say I'm deep into that. I think there are people here that
are and I can learn from them. But yeah, it's definitely an issue that's not, you know, obviously not here, it's worldwide. Populations are shifting because of food supply and depleted soils.
I mean, that's well, we hope we have no history happen as an American in London, but as an American in America, we do have a government now since the Department of Agriculture and our President and the internalfess are all really thinking much more than that. I think that way everyone has to know and wants to sustainability.
Oh god, it's it's a profound relief because the heads of all those departments were formerly people who had worked to dismantle them at terrible cost for future generations, terrible cost. You know, I have no words for what I feel about people who don't think of their children and grandchildren as they're raping. Yeah, yeah, our natural resources. It's yeah, shameful.
So we think about our as you say, our children and our grandchildren, and you think about your daughter, and you talk about you know, you're in Montana and London and so food is food is a connection, but it also is a comfort. So I try to end each conversation with the question, the food is a comfort? Do have one comfort food? Do you have a comfort food that you would go to when you need that?
My unhealthy comfort food would be coffee, ice cream and oreos. I've had a passion for oreos ever since I was.
Tin Do you separate them? To take the top?
You have to, I everybody has there there way of eating oreos. I very carefully try to take off the top with my bottom teeth. You know, you feel like you've accomplished it if the top comes off in one piece, and then I scrape the lard out with my back and I placed the chocolate wafers on my tongue as if I was, you know, taking communion.
Yeah, we have I have to say we have many things in common, but I eat an oreo and exactly the same way. That's exactly so there you are exactly Thank you. We'll see each other very soon this holiday season.
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