Ruthie's Table 4: Mariella Frostrup

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

I'm often asked if it's intimidating cooking for celebrities who come to the River Cafe. My response is that the guests who really worry me are other chefs. It's a bit like that today, as I'm about to interview the interviewer mary Ella Frostrop, especially since I was watched the subject for the Guardian's Lunch with mary Ella, Mariella wrote, despite such eloquence that Ruthie is a disaster of an interview. My questions get longer as her answers get shorter and

Oh, Ruthie, that's the best introduction I've ever had, ever, ever in my entire life. Don't you think? How would you like to be described? Ruth I'm sorry I said that, but it is true.

That's true, said, it is really sweeter, he said, you just kept turning the questions back coming. So today I'm just going to listen to you and not tell you, don't you think? But before we do, first of all, I'm so happy you're here. I love having Molly here. She's just fantastic.

I think she feels like she's at a West End show every night of her life because.

She's a bar back. So she's behind the candy.

Who did the cooking? When you were in your house, well.

In our house, it's very it was very fifty to fifty.

Do you have Sunday lunches? Was the one meal that you would have.

That would be we would have Sunday lunches, and I'd say the most important thing of our Sunday lunch was probably the Yorchhire puddings. My dad was obsessed with them. He'd have like fifty.

At least your mom grew up in Norway. Do you have a connection food connection to Norway?

So we go to Norway sometimes on holiday because I mean, it's so beautiful and obviously, like mum likes the fact that we all get to see we sort of web.

We're from and stuff.

But I wouldn't really say that that was a sort of dish. But that's this sort of cheese that Mum's obsessed with, but none of us.

Like so much.

Yeah, it's something it's like and it's a very brown color, and it's very smelly and sweet and weird.

It's not for me.

I can't understand none of my family of conversion to all with them. I think it's probably heavily processed and not necessarily good for you. But it is a taste of childhood. It's called ya toast and it's a goats cheese. But it's I'm going to make it sound disgusting. It looks sort of caramel color.

It's a caramel.

Broone cheese. Because the thing about Norwegian is that it's very literal. You know, if you pass a lake and it's got brown water, it'll be called Brune Lake. You know, if you pass a house and it's the first one in the road, it'll be called Who's one, And so Brune cheese cheese called okay.

This gives us a chance to start at the beginning, at the very beginning, Norway. You were born now.

Where born in Oslo in nineteen sixty two, where my dad had moved back. He and my mother met at Edinburgh. She was a very young art student. She was sixteen when they first met. She started Dark College two years early. She was an incredible talent, but this was the end of the nineteen fifties. He was studying English at Edinburgh University, as a lot of Scandinavians so they still do. But

Do you remember the food that you ate when you were in Norway. What age did you live?

Six?

Oh, so you might not remember.

Yeah, but you know, there's a really weird thing I think that happens. I mean, firstly, my main food memory of Norway is actually because at that time, in the nineteen sixties, they really didn't have many ingredients at all. You know, there wasn't this sort of globalization of food, and you know, you'd get strawberries, but only in midsummer. There was a lot of pickling fish and vegetables, salt cord, which I didn't like at all, but I do remember,

And I remember things like that.

But the thing I remember most was I think it was difficult times, and I think it was difficult with my parents, and they weren't very happy in Norway, very young, and my mom had sort of given up all of her artistic expression to go there, and suddenly she had three children. And it was the nineteen fifties and Norway was very very conservative then, and my father used to travel a lot because heat of his work. He was

That many memories.

But what I was going to say about sense memory to do with food is I don't remember much about the food there, but when I go back, I'm like the you know, the woman in the tin drum in the film, I'm like her, the one who can't stop eating fish. I'm sat there with jars of herrings. I can't get enough sourcial. You know, I can't pickle everything, pickled gerkins, everything.

And did your father miss it? Do you think did you have any of it in Ireland?

Or oh, we used to get suits, We would get pickled fish and jars because you couldn't get that in Ireland. Then I'm not sure that he missed it. He was never much of a food man, my father. He was more of a drink man, okay, so his interest in food was sort of minimal.

Can you remember sitting down at nels with them? And as a child, and was for dinners and lunches.

It was the nineteen seventies, really, and I don't think we did a lot of sitting down for meals, And also because it was always complicated, they split up when I was eight, so I think those sort of family moments were very few and far between, which is probably why Jason and I have been so kind of committed to creating them to appoint where my children are like.

Oh no, not Sunday lunch please.

But as you grew up in Ireland, so what was it like growing up? You were quite poor? You said that you had very little money.

Yeah, and so food.

You know, in terms of, you know, defining childhood food memories, they tend to be not very.

Not very warm and cozy ones.

I mean the awful, awful memory ones when we really had run out of food. And my brother, who was always the one who tried to beat emmolient, he is still the kindest man you'll meet, and he was trying to make light of the fact that there literally was nothing in the cupboard, and he was like, look, look I've got spaghetti and I've got golden syrup.

It'll be delicious.

So you wouldn't have he wasn't going to have the golden syrup. After the spaghetti he made it for us with the golden syrup.

Was one of the most disgusting combinations I've ever come across. Did you say that at the time, No, No, we grained him and yeah, this is good lovely sugar, sugar and starch I can have.

It's like rice pudding. I suppose how long did you live in Ireland.

For till I was sixteen?

So your father died?

He died when I was fifteen, he was forty six. He had a heart attack for years seventy eight, and then I moved to London in seventy nine.

So when you came to after the tragedy of your father's death, is that when you moved from Ireland right after that? The whole all three of you and your mom?

No, no me?

What by yourself? Yeah? How old were you?

Well, I'd already left home. I left home when I was fifteen. I lived with my mom for quite a while, but my stepfather and I didn't get on and he was not nice, okay, And so then I went to live with my father, but that was very difficult because he was by then a sort of fully fledged alcoholic, and when my stepmother left him with the two children that they'd had, and I ended up living with him on my own and trying to go to school and kind of manage what was really a fast deteriorating situation.

And there as.

A waitress, yeah, and or a waiter as we say now, And that was for too, A lovely gay couple called Peter and Melvin, who really looked after me very well, because I mean, what kind of a state I must have been in? No idea, but apparently I was a very good waitress, I can imagine.

I loved it. It was my favorite jodea.

What did you love about it?

I loved the interaction, and I loved that it made me feel quite efficient, and I loved the whole I think the theater Robert actually really drama. Yeah, And I just used to love get But I think maybe I also just loved getting to work because it was it was.

Spike, you were still going to school but working.

When I first started working there, and then I worked there full time for about four months, and then a friend of mine gave me a job in his recording studio and so I did that until I left for London. In Dublin, yeah, that's when I met, you know, all of the people that we have in common. I recorded U two's first demo tapes when I was, yeah, fifteen and he was seventeen.

He hates it when I remind him that he's older.

But yeah, that was all when I was working at Keystone Studios. But after my father died, Dublin started feeling I don't know. I think my father got off at a job at the Sunday Times, probably about four years before he died, and I think in my head that lodged as that would have been the moment that he could have changed his life. That was the pivotal moment where things could have changed for the better, and he

Oh you had another friend.

She didn't know. She just had an address for us.

There was a she had some Irish friends who were living in a squat or friends of friends who were living in a squat in Stoneleigh Street in West London, actually not very far from here, off Latimer Road. And we arrived there on a bright summer sunny morning and were greeted at the door by just this crowd of Irish men mostly, And I was like, married, what was the point in coming all the way here if we're just going to live with the whole house full of

I mean, there were.

Amazing days, you know, I think it was It was a really great time to be young. You know, there was huge adversity, but at the same time life just felt full of possibility and you could afford to rent places for cheap. You know. We were only in the squad for about three months, and then I got a job at Blushes on the King's Road. I don't know if it's still There was a wine bar and it

Do you remember what you ate at the time? Would you would you go to restaurants or would you cook at home? Or would you I'd cook at home.

I'd cook at home.

Food wasn't great in London then, you know, it wasn't and I didn't really care so much. I mean, I was so obsessed with just survival and getting on, survival and getting on. I mean, it was the nineteen seventies, it was quite a bit of sort of beef Burgignon and you know, black Forest ghetto, nothing to write home about. Everyone was eating spaghetti bolonnaise because that was very exotic and Italian, but not.

Baudelais Nouver. That was always quite exciting.

Yeah, I remember that through the eighties, but not so much the food really.

Yeah, so you're you're a sixteen year old in London, You're working in blushes, you're living in the Irish house, You're father has just died, and and you have a vision. Did you know what you did? You know you wanted to be the writer or the journalist or did you did you go back to school? So you left school at fifteen?

Yeah, wow, I did my you know, the equivalent of GCSEs And then yeah, it just wasn't possible. And for a while I thought I'll go back to school, and then I just realized that that wasn't going to happen. And then I didn't really have a dream, you know, because it was very much about survival really, and it was day to day and I think I was just very lucky, you know, I had lots.

I think you probably must have been fantastic kid. Just to have that courage and to you know that.

They had courage when you're that age, don't you. I think maybe because you don't know you know, now I think I'm much less brave than I was when I was sixteen years old or eighteen years old, because now you have the benefit of or not of having, mean what the world can do risk for risk and the risk and the jeopardy, whereas then it's just about you know, possibility,

Kind of Olympian height.

And so I spent an awful lot of my late teens in early twenties, you know, finding really broken men and trying to fix them because I felt guilty that I hadn't fixed my dad. And I really think it took me till my thirties really to escape from the kind of tyranny of his perfection, which you know and realize who he was, you know, which doesn't make me love him any less, but it certainly helped to create a more functional life for myself.

And did you drink? It was the fact that he died of sort of alcohol?

No, I think I drank, but I don't think.

I mean, I've never I'm not a very addictive apart from cigarettes, which I was hopelessly addicted to for sort of all of my twenties and early thirties, which is mad because my father died of a heart attack and was chainsmoker. But drink, I mean, you know, it was the nineteen eighties. I was in the music business. I had a lot of fun then, Yes, because the next thing I did was get a job at a record company because of the studio that I'd worked in in Ireland.

I was appalling.

I mean, someone sent me like a YouTube clip the other day, you know how everything lives on.

YouTube of me presenting.

Yeah, it was called Big World and I spoke in a monotone like that, and I was clear, just shit scared, really self to do that. But but so I did that recovery years and then it.

Just did you have a domestic life as well? Did you live with anybody and have to think about a kitchen or food or bringing shopping home or did you just basically food was smoked and.

Smoked and drag.

But I did get married when I was eighteen to another lost soul who's a wonderful and old friend of mine now called Richard Jobson, who was the lead singer in this punk band called the Skids.

Yeah Skids, great.

Yeah, into the valley working for the Yankee dollar, come on.

Anywhere.

But Richard was a really interesting and unusual character. He was another lost kid. He's left home at sixteen. He had, you know, huge intellectual aspirations, many of which he went on to realize a huge determination. And I think we sort of fell together out of loneliness and we tried, you know, we gave it our best shot for two kids, and we stayed together till I was twenty one.

Wow, so young.

So we had a domestic life then and very rudimentary. I used to make things like grilled pork chops with mustard on them, and a lot of potatoes, spaghetti, bolinnaise.

Cookbooks do you remember using.

I had the Constant Spry cookbook that my mum had given me because that was sort of her bible. So she did yeah, she used to bake more than cook. I mean, when I think about food that my mum made, she used to make incredible gingerbread. She did make a mean spaghetti. Bolonnaise she used to make. She made really good normal food. You know, she'd make a great shepherds.

Part did she come from. She came from an English family.

She's half Scottish, half English Scottish. She was Scottish really, but she learned, you know, we used to.

She used to.

She taught me how to make love scass, which is a it's a very rudimentary Norwegian stew, which is beef and potatoes but cubed very small and cooked in their own broth for quite a long period of time. And she used to make these things called milkering, which are that's sort of yogurts basically that Norwegians used to make. And it was very weird because both she and my stepmother used to make these yogurts. Once I left her house and went went to live with my dad, every

Breeding was your father's second wife.

She wasn't.

They weren't married, but I mean, no, she was Irish, but I think had an influence.

No, they all wanted to impress them.

He had this thing, you know, which clearly worked for every woman in his life. And I don't think my mum and my stepmother were the only ones either.

So yeah, he has a thing of.

Cooking for you know, seduction as well, something that people can remember. She can you remember meal where you wanted to impress somebody and you cooked.

I've never cooked when I wanted to impress.

Well, you're joined by Judy Dad, she said the same thing. He might be came down and he said something to her like you know. She said, this agent is coming, so I'm going to make him the best omelet. She tried to figure out how to make the best omelet and he ate it and she was looking and he said, I think you should stick to acting or something like that. Right now, I'm going to ask you your shares of all the recipes that we have in all our books.

I will read the recipe for you. Four tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, four clothes of garlic finally chopped, three dried red chilies crumbled, three kilos of small clams, a bunch of flat leaf parsley finally chopped, and then brackets divided. Talk about organization, sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Four hundred grams of spaghetti, one lemon quartered fairly precise. I think only listeners will realize that serves four.

That's where I go wrong. Often did you just.

Have bigger pieces of garlic and then you can take them out or just cook it slowly? Yeah?

Maybe add the crumbled chilies, clams, and two tablespoons of water. Cover and fry over a high heat for about five minutes until all the clams open, discarding any that don't. Add half the parsley to the clams. Season with salt and pepper. Drain the spaghetti and add to the clams. Serve with the remaining parsley and the lemon quarters.

And invade it with Carlota. Hi, I'm carloying with shap at the River Cafe.

So I'm going to start sweating off the garlic with Passley sports, so it's sweating rather than frying. I think that's the important thing exactly.

Yeah. Now a bit of chili, now, flick of chili.

Dried chili, dry chili, yes, always dried chili. So that's starting to cry off.

And at this stage I'm going to add the clams.

You so you've scrubbed that, you've done all the hard work with them, because that is the boring thing, isn't it? And these clams are from where because the tastiest clams I think comes from the Bay of Naples, and I think it's far.

It's a bit rubby, are they sorry?

So this.

This point we just want to get a little bit more heaty to the plan and then I'm going to so usually here we use.

Savee to put the bongola in.

Nice to sort of drink it and deleting the dish as well. It's multi purpose. You can overcook the clams as well, can't you. So what's too long?

You want to catch them just as they're opening up?

And will they if you stop the heat when they're opening up? Will they keep opening up the way you want them to?

So they say they're starting to oisten up.

So I'm going to finish and the start you wore to the wine and the oils are going to come together and sticking the saws.

So listening, I bet you can. She's got a brilliant hand tipping technique.

You need to finish it with parsley freshness.

So there we have it. Oh my god, the most spectacular thing. And now I feel confident my love it. Thank you very much.

Related well, first of all, why did you choose us?

It's entirely my favorite dish, mussels and clams. And there was a period in my childhood when we lived on the west coast of Ireland in Connemara, and it was on one of my mother's kind of escapes from realities, which used to happen quite often, and we went to live there for six months and we were very poor, and for about a three month period we just ate potatoes that we could dig up and mussels which we

There's no hiding.

It is there, there's no hiding, and I really loved that. I love food like that. I don't really like very complicated food, you know, sort of very French high end.

Never really enjoyed it much much.

Prefer you know, really great fresh ingredients and a simple recipe, which is probably why I've been found here for the last you know, I used to see. I first came to the River Cafe when you first opened virtually in the nineteen eighties.

Yeah, nineteen eighty seven reopened and when we were only opened for lunch. Do you remember we.

Were only opened for lunch.

I think when I first started coming and used to have a wine from Antsi of Venice called I obviously wasn't paying the bills then that was the beginning of my career. But I used to come with a friend and we used to have this wine called Where Dreams.

Yeah, that label wasn't it.

It was amazing And even then this felt like the most glamorous place on earth because it felt decadent in all the best ways. And actually here was one of the first places, and I know it's on a different level from the pub on Grafton Street or whatever, it was one of the first places where I really felt that sort of bubble of excitement and conversation that you get on a Friday night in a pub in Dublin to be passionate about something, and food is something you

They're still my friends and we used to cook together.

Yeah, and they were some of the happiest years of my life, you know, cooking together every weekend. And I actually learned a lot that Nikola was a particularly good cold cook, and they were very precise, even things like a I remember teaching me to make a basil omelet. But it's a bit like the wonga lay. It's only about the ingredients because it's so yeah yeah, and you have to you know, and that I think I just loved the sort of satisfaction that comes from that.

But then when you have kids, Yeah, so what was that like? Well, I loved cooking.

Going back to marrying Jason. Did he grow up on a domestic house where meal and like yours or was it the same?

No, very unlike mine.

His mum did everything and she was in she's a really good cook. She still is, you know, I mean, very English, quite sort of nineteen seventies. She had one of those trolleys that's hot that keeps things hot, and she would wheel it in, sit by the table and you know, the plate to be in they're warming and the food lots of sort of castle roles and pop ghosts and things like that. But she's a really good cook and it always looks perfect. She's a good baker

But do you eat really healthy? It's not consciously, it's like the food that you like.

It's the food that I like. I love fresh things, I love, you know. One of the things that gives me huge satisfaction is we've got a garden which during the spring period of the year is just absolutely wall to all wild garlic. It can almost be noxious the smell, and I just love to gather it. And I make pesto in industrial quantities.

Good. Oh, I have to. And when you go when you go to Greece, do you cook there?

Yeah, we go to Greece a lot.

I get like a craving for I used to go to Greece from the age of sixteen, and so you know, Greek islands, you get there, the smell, the pine, the Greek salad.

Again, it's everything simple. I just love it. I just love it.

And so actually, you know there, we tend to eat out quite a lot, but we'll make, you know, a big lunch with Greek saladin. We'll make some dips and things, and you know, we might get some.

Fish and grill it. You know, we keep it very simple, but.

You have a lot of friends over it. You do, like, do you prefer going to people's houses or having them come to you or do you like them?

I prefer going to people's houses because then I don't have to clear up. Jason prefers having people over because I clear up after him and he loves cooking. But no, we do have people over a lot, and there's nothing there. I don't think there's anything nicer than a table full of people and they're all eating and talking. And you know, I tend to make big stews and things that I don't have to do a lot of cook Our kitchen

And yeah, so how do you combine working with cooking? You know, the chad or how did you bring up children? And for through your career and you know, I have a home life. Did you brush from one thing to another? Did you have was it hard? Did you just do it? Do you think?

I think same as every woman just you know, I mean, it's so much every woman's experience these days, isn't it. And it's kind of the bit that wasn't factored into our great desire for you know, equality and independence. So I think it's really hard. You know, it was less hard for me because I had, you know, enough money to have help. But I think it's a really difficult thing.

You feel a kind of choice, you know, it is really terry. I think also, as you say, it's economic, you know, so when people say, oh, you know, there are all these kids who are growing up on Peter McDonald's. But the fact is that if you have a night job and you have a choice, I often think I like to think that maybe the mother has a choice of doing homework with her kids or cooking a fresh meal for them, maybe cut you know, And I think that's.

I think if you've done a pretty hard graph job that isn't based on your passion or any of the luxuries that that you know, some of us have. If you've done a hard graph job all day and then you get home and you've got hungry, grumpy kids, I don't think you want to sit down and start creating a meal. I mean, for all the sense of you know, holistic happiness it might offer, I don't think you're in a place to actually think about or do that.

You know. Yeah, you know we saw in lockdown when kids didn't go for you know, the school, they didn't have their one meal the day. And I was, you know, talking to Jamie the other day about you know, the goal now is to make lunches so nutritious, because you know, that's the only meal the kid's going to have.

But we should have free school meals, I mean universally across the nation, you know, And one of the first things we need to do is recognize that there's real hunger in this country and address it. And the idea that you know, we can sit around and have our amazing meals and somewhere else, just down the road, there's a kid who isn't getting separate. It makes me feel physically sick, and I just don't understand why we can't

When you're working your column, when you're writing on your campaigns, on your books.

Do you eat well?

You Since I started my radio show at the times, I've lost a lot of weight. I mean not a lot, but I've definitely got thinner, not intentionally, but because it's a lunchtime show, and lunch is my favorite meal. Like I can eat like a horse at lunchtime.

I love it.

I can still sleep at night, you know, because once your menopausal and postmenopause, sleep can become a bit of a challenge. And so lunch is my favorite meal. And four days a week I can't have lunch, and I just don't eat until after I finished my show, so I end up having maybe one and a half meals a day. You know, I have supper, but I have a breakfast tea to you know, kids high tea suffer. I always eat about six thirty or seven. I don't really like breakfast very At weekends, I have breakfast. I

Mum? Yeah, but that will never stop.

I hope it doesn't because it makes me feel useful.

I think going home and being fed, and I think, you know, we all grew up with kind of role models. I certainly, you know, did, and I see myself sort of acting. My mother was incredibly child oriented. You know, she never blamed a child, never told off a child. The child was always right, oh my. You know, we had a lot of way that we kind of grew up.

You know, I had love, you know what.

And I always think about this because you know, they say that basically we shape our children by the time they're five or six. And I think I was really lucky because the one thing that they were really good at was they made me feel very loved. And once you have that, it gives you a confidence to step out into the world and you know, stick your toe in the water and see what's out there, and I think, you know, without that, that's when the real damage sets in.

But I'm very injured.

I have to ask you one question, which is were you interested in food even when you were a teenager and in your twenties or was it your mother in law that inspired you really with food?

I would say that my mother was here, we go, see what was it? Don't you think? Don't you find there? We go? Yeah, the stories that my father was a doctor and my mother was a librarian, and I think they both came they were immigrants, their families were. They were born in the Lower East Side and then you know Jewish immigrants who came Ellis Island all that, and I think that for them the whole thing was education, whereas there my grandparents were very focused on food. I

But we ate well.

We never had dilvered or package. No, no, we didn't have to get syrup for me. It all opened up when I did come to Europe, going to Italy and then living in Paris as we did. That was the kind of food, you know, inspiration.

But I think there's something about Italian food though as well, because most of it, maybe you know, some of it's complicated, but most of it is about fresh ingredients and simplicity, and it's very seductive. You know. I became interested in food, as I said to you, when when I used to go and stay with with my friend Natalie, you know, because this was amazing food, Natalie from Naples. It was

So we've talked about the work, we've talked about the children, we've talked about you know, the husband who cooks. Maybe we should wind up on the comfort food and ask you if food is is sharing and love and memories. Certainly memories. Your memories are about food.

It's about food and memory.

And I also think that our emotional lives are often channeled through food. So when food isn't good, I mean it is a bit like like water for chocolate or whatever. You know, when when food isn't good, it's because other things aren't good. And that's why, you know, the bad meals are as almost defining memories as the good meals,

Yeah, and we are. And do you have a comfort food that you go to when you that's what you needed?

Well, all the way through my twenties, I used to go and stay with my best friend Natalie in Maples.

I'm getting I'm getting friend jealous in here.

I've got two best friends. Okay, that's best friends, but that's really you know. I've known them since I was eighteen years and we used to cook and we used to cook it at four o'clock in the morning when we came back from the nightclub.

In Carpery where we used to go.

We used to cook it in the middle of the afternoon if we got peckish. We used to cook it if one of us was sobbing, you know. And so in many ways that still is my sort of go to comfort food. But the other thing I've learned to cook quite recently is this delicious I call it porridge bread. It is an Irish recipe and it is very much porridge bread because it's just made with oats and seeds, and live yogurt and a spoon of baking powder, and it's incredibly easy to make, foolproof, no yeast, no flour,

Okay, I love butter, Yeah, I love butter. I love butter. Richard Richard's mother used to say that butter was the best cheese, and she was a Northern Italian. But if you think about butter like a cheese, then you can have that thick piece with a little thin bit of bread, you know.

Yeah, yeah, you just want the car for the butter, isn't it I think that's and that's very irish as well.

Yeah. True. And we're going to go right now into the River Cafe and you're going to meet a friend and have dinner, aren't you. I am.

I'm so excited.

So's nice. Who are you having dinner with tonight? Then go on, I can allow to ask that question, you can.

It's not my husband, for change, I have a gentleman guest. No, I'm having dinner with your friend and mine. Danny his timeh fabulous and he's about to do my podcast Books to Live By, And I'm so excited to talk to him because you know he's going to pick his the five books that have shaped his life in many ways.

Books, it's the literary companion to this one.

And food and reading. Yes see, Danny, And.

Thank you Mary, thank you, pleasure, thank you so much for having me.

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 Adami Studios.