Ruthie's Table 4: Jamie Oliver (Part 02)

Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adam Ii'ze Studios.

Yeah, nice see you, Nice to see you. Are you working tonight?

No, I'm really sad about cooking and milk apparently.

If that's okay, I've got a table before. I can't wait. Where are you sitting us? I haven't done the table plan yet, Jamie, but you.

Know, tell me where you want to out of the famous Table four. I think I'm going to be quite well behaved today, so you can put me next to Delicate. Delicate is Yeah, I'm back on the rotor, but as James, not Jamie.

Welcome back to Ruthie's Table four. In the last episode, we spoke to Jamie Oliver about childhood, moving to London, and getting started in television. In this episode, we'll be talking about his school Meals campaign, but not before we sent him back into the River Cafe kitchen after a twenty year absence to prepare a River Cafe classic. When we said to you, as we say to every guest,

Well, I was lucky enough to be taught it by you and Rose, and the idea of cooking meat in milk it was something that I had never been taught anywhere or at college, and I hadn't at that point read anywhere. And really it was very simple ingredients. It was pork shoulder, which is obviously the cheaper cut of meat, and it needs slow cooking and that's the fac yeah, and the connective tissues and these incredible leafy lemons, but just the zest sage, garlic and some butter, and that

That's it was the most genius meal.

And I remember trying it for the first time, and I'm sure things slowed down and went in slow motion, and it was like this, like the milk that you pour in you brown you. Yeah, I mean I just start explaining the recipe, which I'm going to do now, But the meat was so unctuous and like lipstickingly delicious, and like the milk split into essentially way and ricotta sort of, and it was just the most bonkersly beautiful thing I think I'd ever eaten.

There's actually a recipe that I was taught by Richard's mother, Dada, really, and.

She actually cooked. She cooked, and she said quite a lot with milk.

So she would always finish off some meat dish by taking the gravy and then you know, the juices and the pan and then adding milk to it and making this sauce.

So Danny, pork and milk. That's that kind of old school ritual of the River Cafe.

I think it's one of the first things.

Yeah, Rose and Ruby told me as well.

It looks like the recipe hasn't changed, right, New season's garlic, lovely sicilian lemons, zest saved in the garden, salt, pepper, and pork and milk.

You know, would you like to read the recipes? Go ahead.

Pork cooked in milk serves eight people. Three kilos of pork shoulder, two tablespoons of extravergin olive oil, a liter and a half of full fat milk, fifty grams of butter, five garlic cloves, peeled and halfed, a small handful of fresh stage two lemons, rind paired and pith removed. Remove the rind and most of the fat from the pork and season the meat. Heat the olive oil in a thick bottom pan, brown the meat, remove it from the pan, and pour away the fat.

So we take the shoulder off the bone first round it in a little bit of butter, a lot of oil. The a nice golden brown color of it. Yeah, and then once it's this color, we then chucked in the garlet.

Yeah.

So the the pork is obviously a lovely beautiful three range pig, free range and middle white port. If people wanted to do this at home, you just get a whole or a half shoulder d.

Bone skin off. You've left some of the batom.

You have a mastndering because that's the flavor and it helps the crispiness, allows it to go golden brown. It's probably what like three or three kilos port there.

Walk shoulder pork shoulders obviously sweet and delicious and needs longer to cook.

That is so, and it takes hours and it's just people that three three bowlder garlet, three three or four volted fresh garlet, or it's gyre garlic.

Then probably less and This has probably brown for what half an hour?

Half an hour and a medium to low heat.

It's really dark. The smell as soon as that garlic goes in.

It's it's gorgeous. Put the stage in because we want to put the sage out. It's about a handful of pips, a handful of its age lovely.

Heat the milk to below boiling point and set aside. Melt the butter in the original pan, Add the garlic with the sage, and when brown, return the pork to the pan, add hot milk, bring to the boil, add the lemon and reduce the heat.

Beautiful, the beautiful.

But you've used a speed peeler to take just a lovely yellow skin off the Sicilian lemons.

Yeah, that's yeah, five lemons.

And we just use that obviously the flavor the actual meat and also helps split the milks it goes in, because what happens he is as it reduces the milk slips and you end up with these lovely furs like ricotto. Yeah exactly, and it just has that amazing flavor and taking the flavor of the pig.

Yeah, absolutely beautiful.

I always think this this moment's quite because you've got the fat from the port, yeah, the fat from the butter, and then you've got the oils from the lemon skin.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's like this little fridity.

Yeah yeah.

To get the milk in now, yeah, go for it. Right, We've got some hot milk just before boiling.

Right, And of course that milk is just cleaning the buttom.

Of the pan, blazing it, and it's getting all those lovely caramel life.

Juice in the pig. What do you reckon? Four hours at least?

Sometimes that's exciting.

Damn right, damn right.

Place the lid on the pan and simmer slowly for at least three hours. When the pork is cooked, the milk will have curdled into brown nuggets. Carefully remove the meat and serve on a plate and spoon.

Over the sauce. Delicious.

I remember you teaching me that. And there's a simplicity but also a bravery. I think about the cooking that you've always created here. And you've got this piece of pork, and you keep turning it and you want it dark, not just because the pork's dark, but so you get the sticky bits. And I remember what I was going about to add the milk, maybe when it was lightly golden and no, no, no, keep going, And I remember.

I remember being nervous, no no, no, trust me, trust me.

But that magic when the milk interacts with the zest of the lemon, which curdles the milk on purpose.

Of course, the chemistry of cooking is so interesting, isn't it.

The lemon with the juices and then the milk.

And it's very it's quite a difficult call thing to get right, isn't it, because if you put too much milk and it never gets that brown kind of crusty if you don't put enough milk, and then it kind of becomes stuck on the bottom. And then also once you pour the milk into about three quarters of the pork, you know you don't want to touch it. We say, don't touch it, don't move it, you know, because let it just be patiently. And I think it cooks a

You chose that.

I tell you what I'd done once and it was such a kind of powerful dish, I think, like in a delicious sense, and unexpected I took the liberty of doing it with chicken in a book years later, and then it went mad in the New York Times and they started like redoing it. I'm like, and I think I even did like a story about it. I said, No, that's that's learn how the River Cafe with pork. But of course it is delicious with chicken. It's not the

But if you do a spatchco chicken and you kind of get it quite brown, and then just be brave and halfway through just pour a lot of milk almost up to the chicken. Then in a big pan, then it reduces. Then you scrape up the really nice with a lemon.

Yeah, delicious, And you.

Would serve it with beautiful polenta, some simple greens and these chunks of pork and this weird but wonderful kind.

Of how would you describe it? Like, it's not a gravy, it's kind.

Of a it's almost like it's gone wrong.

Yeah, what you.

Don't want to happen when you make ice cream, when you add the eggs to the milk and then it can curry.

But the story was so clear, wasn't it. It's just saved and lemon and garlic. And the only thing I was nervous about coming in the cab over was reading this recipe out because I'm like.

I've worked out ways to blag it, so it looks like but so.

Is that just like yeah, yeah, And did they not realize what there was?

You had to be literally blind to have any extra help in my school, and I was pulled out of class into a class which was a very kindly named special needs. So imagine eight hundred and eighty boys and then can I have Jamie please? And mister love it and and we'd be pulled out and we'd end up in literally in the attic of the school, learning how to spell the most basic things. But I think it was And of course in a boys school you would never learn to cook because that's for the girls.

Then I mean like we.

Never cooking lessons for the girls.

Well in the girls schools, yeah, but they certainly you know, it was just very chovens Is. And it's funny because I left school with this chip on my shoulder about like this is not for me, and they're not serving every child. And I think I've only literally just brushed the last chip off my shoulder, you know.

I keep talking about that ad for the Felix Project which tonight four hundred thousand children in Britain will have the same meal nothing, you know, and that we're living this time right now where I find it shocking that we still can't feed our children. We've been looking at country's approaches to food and I grew up at a time when Lyndon Johnson in the late sixties started the head Start program, and it was that you would give every child in poverty at breakfast.

It was breakfast.

You know, there's a great phrase, no child should be disadvantaged by his birth. In fact, a lot of children were disadvantaged by the fact that they went to school hungry, and so they fed children. They fed children breakfast. You'd come to school in any child who needed breakfast would have.

It was a head Start And.

Studies are years later that the children who were on head Start were not taking welfare, so.

They flourished out, flourished out of it.

And that in fact, investment by society to invest in children. Actually, if you want to be crass about it, save the money later on.

Yeah, I mean there's some sensible countries that invest in it. And it's funny, like I mean, I know it's a name drop. But I saw Tony Blayer last week, just a week before, just because it was a moment of reflection since because he was the one, he was the first prime minister that found new money invested in equipment and training and the money on the plate, and I said, like, Tony, like,

I don't know how you feel, but I don't understand why we can't feed every single child, whether a parent makes a million dollars or one dollar, you know that every child And also the idea that Sam Taylor Johnson was on and she can remember being put in a separate line because she was a child that needed school lunches to be paid for. And I'm sure I don't know how they do it. Now, what is a society that does that?

You kid?

I mean it was often a lady of a clipboard and a name and a token. But you know now with technology like the card system, which can be incredibly intelligent if the government just allowed it to get organized, and that's what happens is little islands of hope. But the government never really consolidates genius and spreads genius and

Do you know what I mean? There's just loads of really clever things that can happen.

And how do you qualify for a free lunch? Do you know that the salary that you.

Have a household, you have to earn less than seven four hundred pounds a year. That's not as a person that's as a household.

There are households that live on seven thousand pounds a year.

One point two million of them.

Yeah, and then there's a gap between the free school lunch kids who are parents that are on universal credit. So universal credit is complex in the sense that it bends and it was invented to be bendy. So you could have people on twenty grand per household, which is still not loads of money, but the average is about

You can't have.

Enough people on the line, you can't fix the equipment, so there is a kind of business.

You know.

So free school lunches definitely would make the food better, more consistent, and then you know so, but more importantly, give those young people from poor postcodes, which is essentially what it is, give them much more hope and the ability to thrive.

Now, because they don't get a free school lunch and the parents can't afford, they'll get nothing, they'll have nothing.

To do, and at the moment there is more lunch cooks than ever saying I'm having to illegally give them lunches not on the system, and they're teachers paying for ten or twelve kids a day from some there or that some budget they can find, so obviously they can't visually watch kids not have a meal, and like you say, it could be the only hot medal of the day

But one of the things we're doing this.

Year, which I would love you to get involved in any way you could, is where actually it's funny when you're like overwhelmed by a problem, you keep telling the story of the problem. And then then this genius idea about how about we do an annual school food awards that's amazing with real and real incentives, and how about we celebrate the best up and coming lunch cook and the best team and the best primary school, secondary school,

I've really only focused on the darkness. So that's a change attack.

These institutions are incredible, These teachers are amazing, and they haven't that you know that. I think I've worked through five or six Prime ministers. I've worked through thirteen education secretaries in fifteen years, sixteen years since school dinners, So imagine changing the head chef at the River Cafe that many times in that time. I mean, it's I do think the institution of school can be something so much more powerful than it already is.

People forget it's the biggest restaurant group.

Thirty thousand odd schools, over three thousand secondary schools. It's nearly five million meals a day, eighty five thousand lunch cooks, which are largely women, which are largely parents most of the time. So there's an incredible workforce bigger than the you know, the military, you know the navy, you know, like out there cooking for kids every day.

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.

Well, as a child that dyslexia and working as a nine year old in the kitchen and knowing that your passion for food that was what was did you ever waiver from wanting to be a chef to everything?

At one point? Maybe I'd like to be a recent card drive now, I mean, it wasn't like helicopter pilot.

It's an interesting one because I think there's so much noise around what are you doing when you leave school? What you're doing, what you're doing. I knew I could cook, so I knew I'd never have to be hungry. There's always a job, for sure. But like I play with a lot of Lego, and I know it's random thing to say, but like that was the building blocks of

We've talked about, you know, food as politics and society and fairness. We've talked about food in your father's kitchen doing something I still can't remember with the bottles bottling up. And we've talked about food and the River Cafe and the friends you made and rose and memories and food is memory. You know today we've talked about our memories, and I think that food is also comfort. Is there a food or some foods that you would think I need a bit of comfort right now?

What shall I eat? Would you cook? Would you buy something would you open?

Now? I cook something?

What would you cook?

Jamie Oliver?

This is, unsurprisingly it's a dish inspired by my time here at the River Cafe. But it's a bit of a millunge between two things, right, So it's spaghetti arabiata, And certainly one of the ways I was taught it, and I know there's many ways, was to gently heat oil and put whole fresh chilies in and just let them kind of just cook beautifully, and you put a little hole in the chili so it doesn't give over the aggressive heat.

Well, you can make it.

As hot as you like, because obviously arabiato.

Means angry, and that means hot. But it's a really rounded fruit chili flavor.

And then the tomato, beautiful tomatoes go in, and a little garlic of course in the oil before the tomatoes. The little hijack on that was. I remember seeing you and Rose not very often using vodka as a base to to rosotto. I don't know if it's because there was no wine close to hand or vermouve, but it wasn't like you to You hadn't always had an intention. I'm sure you used vodka when you make rosotto, and you fry the safri too off. You would add often wine,

I do.

Oh you need comfort, you can have your rabbi out, but you can also pick up the phone and call me.

Thank you, Okay, thank thank you, Jamie, thank you for having me. I love you, Love you too. Everyone. That's it. I love that nice conversation.

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 Look Book Recipes for cooks of all ages. Ruthie's Table four is a production of iHeartRadio and Adami Studios.