Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios.
I can honestly say that I've had breakfast, I've had lunch, and I've had dinner with Mary McCartney. The last time was breakfast. Mary brought her own porridge, Ruthie, You're gonna love it. It has vanilla, it has almonds, it has pecans, and it has poached maple syrup plums. How could I possibly disagree? She also brought her camera to take a picture of us for her newest book, Feeding Creativity. My friend Mary is a filmmaker, she's a photographer, she's a writer,
and she's a chef. She comes from a family of creatives who are passionate eaters, and she has continued the beautiful legacy of her mother, Linda, who taught her the importance, meaning and beauty of food and.
Cooking for people you love.
I can't think of anything nicer than being with this incredible woman on a sunny Friday afternoon in June talking together. Wow, I'm just never leaving. I know I'm going to stay for breakfast, undry dinner. We've done lunch, but now we're going to have dinner. But that was the only time I've fed you is when I brought you breakfast. Okay, well the tables are turned. Now I'm coming over for dinner, lunch, and breakfast. I'll bring what would I bring you for breakfast?
I have to think that everyone needs to know. Whenever we have any big celebration, I always phone you and I'm like, Ruthie, can you send me some of your tomatoes?
And I do so.
Mary, you know the drill. So what we're going to do is we're going to start with the recipe that you chose and you had for lunch, and it is risotto with zucchini flowers. And may I say it was absolutely delicious. Good risotto with zucchini flowers. Eighteen male zucchini flowers, six small zucchini, four tablespoons of olive oil, one medium red onion, finely chopped, three hundred grams of risotto rice, seventy five milli liters of Pino bianco, and a handful
of fresh basil leaves. Remove the stamens of spiky sepals and tear each flour vertically into four strands. Slice the zucchini into very fine discs as thin as the flour strands. Heat the olive oil in a large pan and fry the onion until soft. Add the rice and stir until the grains are coated with the oil. Add the white wine and stir. Add two ladles of vegetable stock and simmer, stirring until the rice has absorbed nearly all of the liquid.
Continue to add more liquid in the same way. After about twenty minutes of cooking, add the zucchini and then the flower strands. When the resorto was ready, the zucchini should still have a little bite, the flowers will have disappeared, and the rice will have a creamy coating. Add the basil leaves. Serve immediately.
My name is Chelmnowen and I'm the executive chef at the River Cabot and I think she's brilliant. Thank you.
So shall we talk about resort So I just had in this beautiful summer's day of the Ribber Cafe sitting outside, I just had the most beautiful corgett zucchini resorta, which was actually a part based one. Yes, and for lunch it was super fresh.
Yeah.
Really, what I loved is here you're not shy of extra virginal oil, and I literally it was so like the olive oil in it made it really glossy and really delicious and moorish.
What we're doing that more is finding that some of the rosotto's that we would have made for previously in the last twenty years of my career or twenty three years, we always made resulta with only chicken.
Stock or fish stock. We never ever made fatiable stock. But now it's like this. You know, vegans, vegetarians want to eat risotto.
It's a previous food.
It was just no, no, you can't have it. It seems strange, doesn't it. We used to fold suphiny flower even though like the stamen.
Just give you more get it, which guy had a little bit of a different flavor, which was good and surprising. Yeah, it was a little bit more bitter in a really interesting way. It's probably a bit sweeter, yeah, and I fully approved.
And also when you have this time of year now or some people not everyone might have the odd zucchini flower growing in their garden because we're coming into corjette season now, are we. It's really you know, July August, September, because it's exactly peak peak season.
But as I say, I didn't realize that had white wine. That elevates it as well.
And also that olive oil.
Yeah, the oil is good, but it all makes everything taste good. Secret ingredient and it's really good for you.
If I had to pick one ingredient, it would be a extra virgin olive oil.
Yeah, I mean the average chef in the River Catholic Kitchen's probably.
Actually it was delicious. I want to eat it all over again. And vegan, not only vegetarian, but vegan. Are you thinking more vegan? I am. I'm not fully vegan, but the book that I'm doing is, for instance, there's a bur less blanc sauce in the recipe book.
Can tell me that well exactly.
I was watching Rick Stein's Cornwall series and he made this amazing bur blanc sauce and I thought, I wonder if I use olive oil instead of butter, and I used plant based cream instead of cream, and I used a little bit of cornstarch to just make it glossy, and then the mustard and the white wine and it was incredible.
That's it.
So it's sort of this thing of experimenting, and the more and more I'm doing it, the more surprised I am with how simple and delicious it can be. So that's why I'm exploring more and more plant based. It's interesting also, and we will come back to this because I want to really talk about growing up. But what you're talking about is replacement, isn't it. It's saying, can I do this instead of that? Can I this instead of that? Can I think about where did this come from?
And can I find another place? And I think it's a way of cooking with the kind of rigor which it says, you know, I'm going to really think about what I'm doing. But my big challenge and also excitement of what I've grown into doing is this thing of I'm not doing it for other vegetarians or vegans. I'm doing it for people that are wanting to eat more. You reduce their intake of meat, So it's more like trying to win people over. What I like to devise recipe wise is that you would almost eat it if
you're a meat eater. If I get it right, you would eat it and then be like, wow, I had no idea. We had such a great time with your dad when we did the podcast with him, and it was one of the earlier ones, and he told us a story about making a turkey out of macaroni and cheese, and I just thought that was hilarious and so touching. And tell me what it was like growing up in a house that cared so much about where food came from, about the ethics, about the lambs that they saw on
the hill. Was it always vegetarian? Mum and dad came I remember them saying, let's sit down and want to talk to you. And they said, look, we've decided we don't want to eat meat anymore. So they were like, we're not going to We're not going to cook it anymore. But they were always like, it's your choice. But at home,
this isn't going to happen. And we were so young, we were like, you know, I don't know, like young, like five or six, but I remember it and it wasn't a problem because it was more of a problem eating out. But at home, my mum was a great cook, and you talking about the macaroni turkey she did. The big thing is we always would talk about it. So we'd sit down and we would talk about food. So my dad was very clever. He was like, well, look if we're not going to eat a turkey, what are
we going to eat? Because we want to slice something and we want something at the center of the plate. So Mom and Dad would big debate. They'd be like, what are we going to have? And Mom was like, well, I could do this this macaroni thing, and then we could slice it, and then we could still So it all sounds a bit crazy, but that was the beginning of how it carries on even to this day, like I'll do it with my husband or my family. I'm like, well,
I still want to eat that. I don't want to ever feel like I'm missing out on Like I don't want to be apologetic for you know, I don't want to go to a restaurant and be like, oh, someone to look at me and go, oh, I'm sorry you have to eat that. I want it to be like if we get it right, If we get it right, somebody stuns, like, oh I wish I'd ordered that, and I have to eat this steak, and I'm like, but also,
I'm not very judgy about it. I understand I have tasted meat, and I understand the like of I would like the taste of it. I just think because I've grown up this certain way. I've never considered it a food. I don't consider it a food, but I know that's unusual, although I didn't realize it was unusual till we kind of started promoting meat free Monday. And that's the only reason I got into to share recipes and then doing the cookbooks and the cooking show.
Because about meat fruit Monday.
Meat free Monday is a movement, and it's great because all it is is word of mouth.
It's like, do you.
Want to for any reason you want reduce you know, we often think we can't do anything for the planet, and it's like quite overwhelming.
And so what I love about the idea.
For meat meat free Monday is like you can have one day where you don't eat meat or fish and then you're not giving into that industry. So you can be like, I'm reducing you know, the amount of water it takes to grow beef and all of those kind of things. So it's sort of like a really easy way of reducing your carbon footprint or you know, being kinder to animals if you want to. And I think when people start doing it, what I found is people
suddenly it sort of grows into your lifestyle. And also it makes us consider what we're eating a bit more because sometimes we just eat without thinking about it. So basically that's what happened. We launched meat Free Monday, and I kind of like, la, la la, We've just done this, and you know if people want to do it or not.
And then I did at work, had people come up to me if I'm in a photo shoot and be like, I love meat Free Monday and we're trying to do it with our family, but I really don't know what to cook. And that really surprised me because I've grown up talking about food and like, what are we going to have on that gap on the plate if you're not having meat and fish? So then I was like, oh, okay, I can share these recipes. And that's what mom did.
That's why she did the cookbooks, because when people would come to our house, they'd be like, I would eat this way, of course, and she was like, here's a book. Yeah.
Of course.
First of all, the influence that you've had and that your family has had on not eating meat has been enormous, and I think now there are so many reasons why we don't and why people don't to do with witness a hurricane in Florida, witness the climate, witness animals who are fed hormone. There's so many witnesses. But I think what you did, what your family did, was to say that actually, it could be delicious, it can be fun, it can be ethical, and it can be quite sexy.
Yeah. Yeah, starting out at the very beginning.
So you grew up with a mother who was a passionate cook, and there were four of you were children, And what were meals like in the McCartney household when you were growing up, Well, they were homemade. Mum would really do the cooking. Like growing up, Mom would do the cooking. Dad would help, like he's a good sort of if you give him a job, like can you chop this? You know, he'd do it meticulously. But Mum was kind of very much. She would describe herself as
a peasant cook. It's like, go to the cupboard, find what's in there, and make something delicious with it. Did she grew She grew up in America, like East Coast, New York and Scarsdale, and she grew up watching people cooking. They like had a cook in the house and she would gravitate towards the kitchen, but it was very much meat loafs and you know, very fifties and Barrican cooking, so in a way that kind of went into her vegetarian cooking. It was she often would say it's like
meat as often like how you flavor it? So it sort of stemmed from that, and so I would cook with Mum a lot. Then it sort of grew into us kids sort of helping her, and then in a weird way, in the end, we sort of took over a lot of the cooking and would say like, what do you want to request? And you know, she'd love a fresh pesto or we had a lot of pasta and stuff. So then it's sort of like we would we carried on the cooking. Was it all of you or were you the kid that cooked? No, it was
all It felt like it was a group effort. And then when I left home, I kind of had this choice to sort of you know, suddenly I'd grown up in this family where I had great food. We talked about vegetarian cooking all the time and this sort of joy, joy of celebration of cooking. And then I went to work in London. I was like oh, I wonder as a photographer, and I was like, I need to pick my own food. So I sort of had like a tuna salad sandwich in my lunch hour, and I loved
the taste of it. But then all I could think about was like, I know how to cook differently, I don't need to eat this, and I was just thinking about that lovely tuna swimming in the ocean being plucked out. So it's like, unfortunately my brain doesn't work, or fortunately, what about your grandpa? I love it. My grandparents, well, we had I always considered myself half Liver Pudley and half American growing up, so my accent was this sort
of odd mixture. So in Liverpool it was all like going to the chip shop and chip butties, real comfort food, very simple food. And then you know, the more New York deli sandwiches, pizza. The minute we would get to New York to visit our grandparents, it would be like straight to get pizza.
Did they cook? To do grandparents cook?
My grandparents were like when we grew up, we didn't. My step grandmother cooked a lot. So my mom's mom died in a plane crash in the early sixties like the first big sort of Pan American. So then my grandfather remarried I quite we thought of her as quite strict French American woman. But what she did was my mom taught me all my more peasant instinctive cooking. And then Monique. Growing up, she was a little bit it
felt like children should be seen or not heard. But then when I became a teenager, we kind of bonded a bit more over her teaching me how. She taught me how to make pastry. She taught me how to make a soufle. She taught me how to make a partisserie apple tart, and so all of those things in my cooking now I kind of use. So like in the new cookbook, I take Dame Judy Dench my apple tart, but it's four ingredients, so I'm not making the it's a ready roll pastry. Then they slice apples brushed with
olive oil and then glazed with apricot jam. Back to the growing up, So your mother would cook, would you have common to cook?
No, we didn't.
We sit down at a table because we go to school every day to come home and then you would sit down all together or would people eat at different times we would kind of have the home cooked meal. Maybe during school time. We'd eat slightly different times, but generally holidays and like summer holidays, we would be in Scotland and this kind of beautiful but remote farm. Or we'd go to Arizona in where mum sort of went
to UFA and then became a photographer there. So we would go to these places where it was just us, so it was sort of all of us cooking and we would sit down and eat. We didn't have like housekeepers and chefs and chauffas and all that kind of stuff, which I really value now because I know how to cook and I was sitting literally with my family under table talking endlessly about food and flavors.
Have you carried that on with your own children?
Yeah? And what I like to do is because kids can be a little bit unsatisfying to cook from, don't you think They can be a bit like how many bites do I have to have? And then when you cook for friends the same they're like, oh, this is so thank you. But I found once I started getting the kids involved, then they're really much more excited to eat it because they'll chop things the size they like it,
or they'll kind of put in ingredients. So I think it's important because when I left home to become a photographer, I remember making a stew thinking it was exactly how my mum had cooked it, and it was really didn't have like the flavor. And I phoned her and I was like, Mum, this is just not working. And she was like, you need to have you put celery and cabbage, two ingredients I would never buy. And celery like is always the base of anything like arosoto a stew, so
just those tiny little bits. She would make this amazing kiche, but it was like a souflekiche. And when I made it, I was like, Mum, this is not this showstopper that you pull out, and she was like, it's the oven temperature. It needs to be higher. And I was like, does these tiny little I think that it's of advice.
Yeah.
People who I've talked to, so many of them have little books from either their grandmother or their mother, and I think, you know, they could get some of the recipes in a cookbook, but having that those handwritten recipe cards or being able, as you say, to phone up and get the hint or it's a connection. It's a connection you have when you're eating it. It's a connection you have when you're cooking it and talking to somebody about how they made it.
Is so revealing.
I'm always trying to mythbust this that plant based off vegetaran. Cooking is more ingredients, takes longer, So all of the recipes I develop, I try to sort of use the fewest ingredients and make it the quickest and the most easy, but also pleasurable, so it's not too many, you know, It's quite simple and enjoyable to make. Sometimes I question some of the recipes are too simple, but I love
a shortcut and I love make ahead, like prepper head. Yeah, yeah, because you want to enjoy the people that you're with, especially if you're having a dinner party, you can sort of make all of it, have it ready, or even make it the night before and then put it in to cook.
Is your kitchen connected to your dining room? Is there a dining room in your hand I.
Have a dining table which I also work at, and in your kitchen. It's quite important to me because growing up at home, my mum was clever that we would always gravitate towards a kitchen, because if you're cooking nice things and you smell them, where you're going to go. And we would have we had a nice like I have a table in the kitchen that people can sit around so they can be doing homework or chatting, or friends come over. Friends come over. We don't often move
to another room. We always just stay in the kitchen.
Nice to be in the kitchen.
Also, when you're cooking by yourself, it's quite isolating. Comes much more of a performance, you know. I'm saying to one of our kids that the that one of my sons made it really took a long time to make a zucchini pasta, and his brothers were there with their wives and he brought it out and they just ate it. You know.
He said, wait a minute, guys, you.
Know, what did you think of my pasta? And one of the girls said, what is it with you? Rogers and praise? But the thing is that, you know, it is a response. Whatever we do, it's a performance. It's something we care about and we do want to know how people feel. You know, I actually think it's more I think you're doing yourself a disservice. It's not wanting a response. It's like when you cook for someone, it's a real you're really putting yourself on the line.
Like doing this, it's very exposing.
It's very I feel every day when we cook in the River Cafe, you know, I has to say to Richard, you do a building and it's there for like hundreds of years and people drive past it and like it. I put a piece of fish on the table, and because we have an open kitchet, I can see the way people are looking and they go no, or they go yes, or they take a photograph or they don't, and you can see the response and you're as good as your last meal. I have photographed my rosotto today.
Oh and I had like a beautiful What I like to do here as well is get all of those beautiful I had the roasted red pepper and the bloody gens. Yeah, the vegetables, which is nice because my husband always jokes I'm the vegetarian who doesn't really love vegetables because I will never be found eating like a piece of steam broccoli. It's like I like a dressing like it and a soup. I'm like, it's all about a little favor.
To cook, you know, to put.
I say, if you're thinking about it dinner, because the way that I do most of the meals in our house now, I'm done with sort of second courses. So we have a pasta, a risotto or a Papa pomodoro, and then I just bring out the vegetables. You know, we have a lot of beans, We have spinach, we have peppers. We do have mozzarella, and sometimes I put you know, put a plate of pisciutto.
But it's a lot of work vegetables.
You know. I do think if you take a piece of fish, and you take a piece of meat, you put it on the grill or you put in the oven, you're kind of done with maybe some vegetables. If you decide to have a meal with vegetables, it is time consuming, you know, I love the time that it is much more time consuming. I understand what you're saying, but I would actually it's interesting this book that I've done the recipes.
I've been really in drawing making the recipes because they're really quite simple, and I really think I'm always surprised, like I've done this caesar salad dressing, and I've these torn sour dough creutons, and when I put them the creuton into the caesar salad dressing, I was like, oh my god, I can't believe I've made such delicious dressing. And my mouth died watering and I was like, this took me like thirty seconds to make. That's what I think about all the time, and how can I make
something really easy? Like I'll pick an ingredient. I often start with the name of a recipe and then I'm like, now, how would I make that? Yeah, anyway, you can tell that I'm obsessed with food. We are when you left home, so you left your mom cooking for you, sitting around the table, and then you left home.
What was it like? Did you have your own apartment, in your own kitchen? Did you eat out in restaurants? Did you tell me about leaving me the comfort of you?
Yeah, move to London. I got a job around photography, and it was about I had an apartment and I would cook, so I would cook. But it was all much more like pasta and you know, just sort of not very simple kind of early twenties. It's more about going out and having fun than having people over for dinner parties. And then I think when I really really got into food and cooking, as I said, was around meat Free Monday, because then I was like, wow, I
need to share recipes with people. And before I did it in my mom style, I would just have my like things in my cupboard and I would make it into something, whereas this was like, I'm actually going to write down this recipe and consider it. And that's when, And going back to what was saying about this, it's sort of you really put your heart on the line because you're sort of cooking for somebody and you kind
of want to please them. So when you know you want something, as you say you want to, like you can see when some takes that first bite, if they light up, it's just like an electric shock of joy. But that's why The Great British Bake Off is one
of my favorite because it's the drama. It's like, if you the cake can look beautiful, but if you bake it over bake it for like two minutes, it can be dry and like a chore to eat, and it's just like the pleasure of feeding people, I think is my main motivation.
Are you a pastry ship? Do you cook cloths? I do?
Yeah, yeah, I can I do, although, as I say, it was my step grandmother that sort of got me into that, and I like it because it's something I didn't grow up with at all. We would have, like my mum would make brownies, which was very exotic growing up in London eating brownies because that was before brownies were everywhere. But other than that, there wasn't a lot
of baking. So one of the best ever bits of advice I was given was to get an oven thermometer, and then baking became a joy because otherwise before that would be like not cooking at the right temperature. And it's like the oven tells you the truth. The oven thermometer tells you the truth. I think that those you know, the recipes are both poetry and science, and the uncertainty of when something's done, the uncertainty of how long to
cook it for. As you say, if you have a thermometer, you learn sometimes you know, you see, especially in these restaurant kitchens with the chefs that you know, we touch it, we can tell. But Rose had this great thing of taking a skewer and putting it into the middle of the fish and then seeing how hot it was. And we all work out our times. I have a skewer special one for like cakes that I love, but I have to keep it hidden away because I have four boys.
I can't let them play with those things. I'm like somebody's gonna stab something. They cook, They do cook, and they love me baking like they love it. I don't bake a lot because I feel like I'm always cooking for people, like you need to cook a dinner or a lunch for a breakfast. But baking is like an extra treat, and also I love it. I've got these little glass sort of jars where it's like I put cookies in, or I'll make a loaf cake. But then I find that I'm the one going constantly like I'm
a real picker. I love snacking something like I break a little bit of this cookie off and suddenly I've eaten the whole the whole thing. So baking is more, you know, a special treat. What do you have breakfast? Apart from I love peanut butter jelly, that's my American side. I like making pancakes, but usually it's toad toast porridge. I love porridge, and I love I've been making I mean,
I love it. The consistency. I like, I've got this new chai pudding chai seeds with coconut milk and then a bit of vanilla and a bit of maple syrup, and then I chuck some pumpkin seeds in because it's sort of extra texture and so it's super healthy. But you put it into a little container and then in the morning it's turned into a beautiful coconut pudding and you can put all chopped mango or berries and nuts and so sort of My thing is I like to eat. Back when I left home, I am surprised by how
I used to eat. It wasn't that nutritious. But now I'm about trying to eat. Everything I do is I want it to be, whether it's vegetabing or plant based. I want somebody else to eat it and go, oh my god, I can't believe how healthy that is, and it's really satisfying. Do you have feedback from the media industry. No, I don't believe you on that. Well they do, I'm not,
you know, I think it's interesting. I hadn't realized. I realized it because I work on my mum's the Linda McCartney food brand, and I was there, launched it with her, and I didn't realize that the meat industry has millions and millions and pounds promoting it and like that obviously
vegetarian has zero. So you know what, I don't, I really do, honestly want to not judge things because I don't think honestly that from the research I've done into it, I don't think people forcibly made the industry, the food industry, the mess that it is now. And I really believe that it is a broken food system at the moment. And so what I like to do and what I'm actually pleased about is it feels like growing up, people like you're vegetarian.
Do those shoes leather? Did you do that?
Like trying to beat me up? I'm like, I know I'm not perfect, and I'm not saying that I am. But now what's good is like we it seems like we can have more of a conversation. It's like, well, I don't necessarily agree with you, you don't necessarily agree with me, but let's have a conversation and try and openly discuss how we can sort of maybe all help this broken food system. When you say broken food system,
the industry. What is broken about it? Well, like, the cattle industry in America is not even farming, it's sort of they have like a central unit somewhere in Middle America that has cameras just all different places, and the cows are up to their knees in waste, and they're not fed what they normally would be fed, and the meat's becoming contaminated. And when it's contaminated, instead of going, oh, let's feed them grass and give them more space, let's
bleach the meat. You know, there's all these pretty horrifying But what I do is I don't delve too much into that. I feel like my purpose is to be like, you know what, I'm going to make your mouth water, I'm going to cook you something interesting. I'm going to be like, let's have something yeah, because other people are
doing that. There's a really great documentary I love called Kiss the Ground, which I found really interesting because it's so positive and I like things that give me a bit of a solution and don't make me too freaked out about the future. And it was just very much about soil health and what we grow actually on. You know, it's very sort of simple message, so I'm like, let's simplify, try to create recipes with as guilt free as possible.
I don't like guilt. We don't like guilt. Guilt as a useless emotions.
It doesn't get.
And so in terms of restaurants, when you were growing up, would you go to restaurants? Would your parents take you to eat, you know, Indian food or Greek food? And would you go to cities where perhaps your father was performing, and you know, suddenly be in a place and think, where are we going to eat tonight?
Where was what? Did you discover? The Median restaurants?
We would eat out Because we were growing up. Mum and Dad kept us all together as a family, so when they went on tour, we would go with them, which is why we all grow up so close together. We wouldn't sort of be left at home with other people, so we would explore. And what I love is this, I think it makes you more open minded, like you know,
trying Japanese food at quite a young age. I remember in Japan in Japan, well, actually one of my earliest memories of Japanese was in England in London, and we went from my sister Heather's birthday and we were used to.
We had a lot of sort of Chinese or Italian when we would go out usually, and this was like a Japanese restaurant, and we ordered the seaweed salad thinking it was going to be like the crispy Chinese, which is actually even seaweed, I feel, and it was literally like you that seaweed from We were like, eh, this is literally but it was. You know, it's great. It really opens your mind. It wasn't the most delicious meal, but I was like, wow, did I really.
In a restaurant? Did you ever work?
I didn't. I would have loved to because we were always traveling, all were away in the holidays, so I wasn't answer. But my friends would be like working in a pub or a restaurant, and I always kind of, I think you're someone who loves people. Yeah, and also you're like feeding people, and so well, maybe you'll have to come and have a job here for a bit.
Well.
I had that beautiful morning where you I write you and I say can I come and watch the you know, the prep before service and inviting me in. I felt so honored to be here, and I got to see why I think that's why you and I connect because I could see that it makes sense because when I come here, it's like as a family atmosphere. And when I sort of say to my kids when to have a special occasion, like for my mum, what would be my mum's birthday? I'm like, where do you want to go?
Let's go celebrate her on her birthday? They will always say River Cafe and they behave when September twenty fourth, and they always behave impeccably when they're here. They don't do otherwise.
So too.
But it's this the way that you have everybody that in the restaurant, whether they're front of house, in the kitchen. Yeah, they all kind of help prep the ingredients, talk about the menu. So there's this real and it actually, as we talk about it reminds me of my childhood. It's you talk about food, you're around food, and do.
That with your children. Yeah, do you remember what it was?
I think during lockdown you said that your son was with your dad for his twenty bus and they were in Sussex, and you said, can we send them some tomato sauce and some fasta And then they sent me a photograph. It's one of my favorite pictures of the two of them, so proud. Well you made his birthday because it was lockdown and he and dabbed together, and I was like, Ruthie, literally, yeah, they need some of your cooking.
Well, food as we talk about it.
We talk about food being as you've recollected memories of your beautiful mother and experiences with your father, and experiences with your children, and you know, cooking when you feel that you want to celebrate or you want to give or share, but it also is comfort. So I suppose I'm as beautiful Friday afternoon, and having talked about the resoto you had, I was wondering, if you have the food that you kind of reach for when you do need some comfort, what would that be. I am big
into comfort eating, I really am. And there's one that hands down comfort food for me, and it's my mom's cream of tomato soup.
Let us tell me about that.
I actually asked her to teach me how to make it, and it was all sort of like it was actually inspired by a lobster beask. It's sort of this tomatoes and onions and celery and she would cook it all down and then she'd put it through one of those what is it? And then she would put cream and herbs in it. So I've kind of adapted and grown that recipe over the years, and I actually made it last night. When I have that, if I'm a little flat or down and I have that soup, it just
brings me joy and it makes me happy. And I had this moment years ago where I was like, Wow, food really does do that. I remember being in a bit of a bad mood and having like tomato soup and fries and then ice cream, and then I was happy and I was like, isn't that weird? But it's really jibbio. That soup is miss my sunshine.
Well, you're my sunshine.
I would have loved to have met your mother, because she comes through as a person who who just gave so much and created you. And I want to thank you for coming and you were my sunshine.
Thank you.
The River Cafe Look Book 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
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