Ruthie's Table 4: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

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

There is nothing better than a friend you love, falling in love with someone you love. When my friend Salmon Rushdie brought Eliza Griffiths into our lives, we were happy for them and happy for us too. Eliza's smart, she's funny, and she's kind. She's a beautiful poet. A photographer whose black and white images evoked for me. Drothia Lang promises her work of fiction just published, the Story of a Family, the story of the Civil Rights movement, a story of

Good to see you, So.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, that's great.

And you've just been in the River Cafe kitchen and what were you making?

I was making this wonderful dish with broad beans and pasto and garlic bread and it was heaven.

It was so delicious.

I just want to go back to the kitchen and eat.

It looks so yummy right now. That's the color is so.

Pretty, really bright.

I love the green. It's good.

That should be enough.

Would you like to taste some at this point?

Absolutely, I'm not shy about tasting anything.

It's a dish that we make when the broadbeans are in season.

You can't really do it when they're kind of older and more floury.

I like cooking by season.

There's something very special about what's available and what you get to look forward to.

When the time comes.

And I'm used to cooking for like six people or more in my family, so I love making, you know, large pots of things and a lot of food. And even now sometimes my husband is like, don't make so much. We're going to eat this for five or six days.

Just cook for two.

Is that true? Someone?

Yeah, When when Eliza cooks dinner, when everybody's finished eating a lot, it looks it looks like it hasn't been touched, and then we have it for the next week.

Do you ever do you ever cook together?

I'm the eater.

Yeah, the eater. Yeah, he's a good eater.

God yeah, yeah, yeah, you need a good eater.

Yeah, but yeah, she When when Eliza decides to cook, which isn't always, but when she decides to do it, it's always a treaty.

I imagine, do you go to market?

I used to go to markets more frequently. I used to walk down to Union Square and go to the market, and you know, walk to different places to get specific things. And growing up with my mother, she had you know, the butcher we went to, and then she went to a different place for her flowers. And sometimes we go as far as Philadelphia just for a certain spice sharp to get spices. I have a lot of very vivid memories of you know, you just don't go into one place.

So where was this?

Where did you grow up?

I I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, between Wilmington, Delaware and Washington, d C.

So in Washington, d C.

Of course, there's just so much culture and so many kinds of food. You know, Ethiopian food, and you know French and Italian. It's I mean, all of these different things. And you know my mother's kitchen, she would really experiment with cooking different types of food.

So tell me about her. Was she born in the United States?

She was born in Washington, d C.

And she when she married my father, they moved to Wilmington, and my mother I think, you know, one of her her gifts as an artist was cooking.

I mean she.

You know, it was a classroom to be in her you know kitchen, that would be the place.

Where so many things would happen.

But she would experiment with food, she would find recipes. She actually did classes for cooking. She had a whole chef's uniform she would put on, and she had some really wonderful her bread pudding recipes.

She won prizes for.

You know what it was. What did she put in the bread pudding?

She put a special ingredient that only myself and my three siblings can ever tell. So it was kind of lockdown. Although I can't bear to eat bread pudding now because in makes me think of her too much.

I've been spoiled by her bread.

Pudding, and so whenever I see it on the menu, I just immediately see her face the saying no one's bread pudding is as good as mine, and her pretty much being right about that.

That's just so interesting that she had. I love the idea that she had a chef's outfitted home. She did because you know, when you put on a chef's out, when you change.

We all change for work every day.

We come in here in our clothes and before we write the menu, because we write the menu every day.

Even just sitting down and writing the menu.

You need to be wearing the clothes of cooking, you know, and puts you into that world.

And she did that.

She was very meticulous about it and her her equipment and materials and things that she began to acquire. Cooking was very serious business for her. And yet it was the place where, you know, you learned a lot of lessons, but your hands are always And I loved that. I mean, I felt like she was a real artist with color and how the dishes would look in the flowers, and it was just a whole kind of event, even if you were making like a grilled cheese, like how is

And did she entertain?

Did you have?

She?

Did?

She did?

Growing up?

I mean, our home was a place where people in our community, you know, if they knew that my mother was cooking, they were not declining that invitation. And it would just be a whole thing. And I remember I'd have to like iron and starch the tablecloths and help with the flowers and you know, polish the silver. And it was just this whole kind of stage that she set, even down to the music that might be on, and

And I think I think some of that.

Is probably involved in my process as a writer, Like you can fail at your sentences, but you keep pushing language until it gives and you think I hear it, now I can see it. But my mother food is one of the greatest gifts that she gave our family, and certainly to me being the eldest daughter. You know, I would I would be sous chef quite a bit and it's made me a better person. And I love cooking for my friends and my husband and my family.

Did you think that she was Did you have a career, Did you have a job.

No, she mostly was at home. She had four children. I'm the eldest, and we were young, and so she was more of a homemaker. When she was older, she went back to school and got a degree. She did a lot of kind of things where I would kind of call her like a kind of business woman of her own, where she sometimes did real estate or she would you know, literally be selling things that she cooked to people in the community. Sometimes she actually would cater things.

Like she would kind of dance around.

She put on like Smokey Robinson and Diana Ross and the Supremes, and she suddenly wasn't a sick mother. She was making things and being a creator, and you know, having to kind of balance the day being in bed on medications.

But then she would she.

Would rally and want to be in the kitchen and make things for her children and her family and for her friends.

It's interesting that you draw the parallel of the artists, because there was a great film about Christo building a fence in California, and the whole objection by the ranchers was that it wasn't art because it was temporary. And a woman who actually was in favor of the fence got up and said, you know, I make a cake every night for my family, and I really think that that cake is a work of art.

And then it gets heated.

You know, you think about that it is temper and that your mother doing or you know, what she did, and creating, as you said, like an artist, and then feeding people she loved, is a part of the whole circle, isn't it.

I think it feels so special because you know you have in that moment, whoever is there, whoever is present, they have this kind of feast and then you can't be.

Precious about it. It's to be devoured.

It's to be savored, it's memorized, and you know, then you go and boast and brag to other people. You need to taste this, but then it will never be the same, so you get a whole new experience. You know.

It's also so if it's art, it's also a performance because absolutely, you know, we have an open kitchen in the River Cafe, and I have an open kitchen at home, and so you put the food down, and then you want to see people's response, you know, and you see I often look at the table and see if they're sharing, if they're tasting, if.

They're shaking their head no, or shaking their.

Head yes, because it's an immediate response to what you've just made, and you know they may be they may be right if it isn't.

It isn't always of the open kitchen here, it's kind of like that's where the excitement is kind.

Of look drama, and.

Everyone's excited, everyone's pleased, because you know, there's just something about cooking. It's beyond the food. It's the whole kind of sensation and experience of it. You're there with the people you're with and whatever you might be talking about and sharing stories or just how you feel your moods, and then you're looking at the kitchen, you're watching the waiters,

When you left home, when you left this incredible home of food and your mother expressing her love through food and feeding her children and teaching her children and handing over, handing over the reins to her children. And then you left, you know what, eighteen years of every day having your mother do this.

Where did you go?

What was your next step?

Well?

After going to college, I moved in.

Where did you go to college?

I went to the University of Delaware, And for graduate school, I went to Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

You did you cook when you were in college?

What did you do?

Did you go in college?

I was the person doing the parties, big pots of pasta and garlic bread, and I would drape scarves over like the awful fluorescent academic you know, dorm dormitory lights. And I would have candles everywhere and people will kind of feel like, well, this is like home away from home. I do not like doing the dishes so people would volunteer that part.

But where did you find this kitchen in college that you could cook and ever your own apartment or did you know?

I was in the dormitory, but I would just take the kitchen.

You cooked for everyone. And then when you graduated, did you live a domestic life where.

You can you know?

When I'm in two thousand and three, when I moved to New York, I kind of it was that moment. I think many writers have them and have many moments where I just thought, I need to live in New York.

I'm a writer.

I want to see what I'm made of. Can I make it? And you know, reading so many books about you know, the writers and the poets, and you know they're in the village and they're all over Manhattan, and I thought, well that that should be a good place for me to go and see if I'm like cut out for this life. And you know, I worked every kind of job and then I finally thought, you know, I'm going to go back to grad school and just so I'll be able to feed myself if the writing

I was a nanny.

At one point I was a waitress for about an hour.

Did you have to cook for the children?

No, it was a very small baby, so you know, we spent a lot of time with me reading bad poetry to the baby in Central Park.

But I got to.

Kind of get into the rhythm of the city.

Because you read out, you discover restaurants.

Yes, I loved finding little places, and you know, New York is such a feast of little places and well known places, and it was just wonderful to kind of have these discoveries of things and also to go to restaurants that you'd read about. You know, as you're wanting to become a writer, suddenly you're going to.

A restaurants where they do.

You remember I loved Cafe Dante in the West Village and you know little places or the Romanian pastry shop up in Columbia that's just divine. And then you know, going to you know, No host Star or I feel like the diner situation was really great for me to just sit in a diner and write and write and write.

So do you write?

How do you combine working and writing and doing your work with food? Do you I often ask actors if they eat before the play or after the play, or artists who feel that, you know, they live such a solitary life that they only want to go out to parties, and film directors who basically don't want to stop for lunch because it ruins the rhythm.

What is your writing and food day?

Like, I won't really have that much food in the morning. I'm someone who with wellness things I'll have like my green Mucky drink, which is delicious, or I'll have just some poached eggs or something like that, which I like with a little spinach. And it depends what I'm doing. If I'm out in the field working on photographs, then I probably don't eat. I'll just have like some fresh squeeze juice and then I'm out because I need to.

Follow the light very carefully.

If I'm writing, I can write for long periods of time and a lot of tea. In New York, you know, going to friends homes to eat is a thing that we enjoy, and going out to really lovely restaurants. We both my husband and I both have an appreciation for wonderful cooking and food and kind of the imagination. So we'll kind of work all day and then perhaps we'll go out to a restaurant to meet a friend, or

Have you thought, Eliza more about Indian food, because I know that you are passionate and grew up with it, and we talked about Indian food.

Well, New York used to be not good at.

Indian food, unlike Britain.

Yeah, yeah, it's getting much better. You know. They now are like half a dozen really good Indian places in New York. So that that feels great because it felt like a real you know, in this city which has every kind of cuisine. Indian food was a kind of absence.

But now why do you think that is not many?

I think Americans hadn't discovered India, yeah somehow, but now they have. And you know, my view about eating and working is that I've always thought work hungry.

You work hungry, you do eat later.

Yeah.

Interesting?

Are you as a writer, are you attempted to get to get up and down? You get up and go look in the fridge and then close the door.

Will you go into the kitchen? I think one of the important things about writing is to stay. Sitting down.

Helps New York. I always think that it is interesting.

This is a diversion that Britain British food, which is so I could say, quite bland and you know, unadventurous, and.

People cook the traditional food they grew up with.

But except for when I came to London, I couldn't believe it how Indian culture had. You know, everybody can make a curry, you know, or you know whether it's a good curry or not. But then you'd go to a small town outside of Britain will be an Indian restaurant. You know, there would be people selling all sorts of chilis in the market.

Now it's it's so interesting, but we.

Know why to do with an empire?

Just to do with an.

Not a very hard question to answer, but it was to do with an empire. Then coming back I guess and saying this is I had this fabulous food and we have to learn.

Things I love to do when we come to London is to sit at Salmon's sisters table Samine. Her cookbook is amazing, but it's such a treat that she usually cooks when we come to visit, and so everything she makes is so delicious, and she'll have the chutney, and she'll have the sauce and the somosas, or she's oh, I just put something together and it's like the best

Yeah, I feel the same way.

Yeah.

And then can we talk about the food in your book and how you integrated and brought food in to tell a story, a complex story?

Sure?

So, you know, one of the things I've always loved when reading novels is food and how it's kind of you know, how it's introduced to the reader and the presence of it, Or novels where no one's eating you kind of noticed, well, what were they eating? What exactly

And so there's something in the.

Girls that they have their kind of authority and imagination and respect for their mother's stature in the kitchen and in the home.

You know, their mother cooks them a kind of special the day, you know, before the first day of school meal, and that's almost as important as Christmas dinner for them, and that there are these different moments through the food that certain things about each character is revealed, and how they feel about the kitchen or what they're eating, and the kind of comfort that food offers them in a place that is really starting to shift as different things

Families can be victims of racism, or victims of poverty, or people who've just immigrated from another country. It's so interesting to me that many people who've emigrated from one country to another bring the food with them, or the grandmothers bring the food with them. They talk more about their grandmother's food than their mother's because the grandmothers actually

Yeah, I mean, I've read many accounts were enslaved people, you know, will come over and have stitched into the hems of their clothes seeds from their country of origin, and that they would try to literally bring kind of pieces from the homeland or the motherland with them to try and grow it, you know, wherever they were being taken against their will.

And so there's such a power in that.

But also I love stories about, you know, one I'm thinking in African American families, you know, taking something that was the scrap and then making it into something that then finds itself in the mainstream of American culture, you know, and how things can you know, transform and become these other things even though they were supposed to be the food of the poor or this is all that was available, and then it becomes this thing that everyone's like, what

It all is.

So do you see those sized photographs of Gordon Parks. I love He's one of those favorite too, and those ones that particularly take place in the drinking fountains or the outside and a diner outside of a place of food, and you see the separation. It's they're they're painfully beautiful.

Photography is just sounding. It's heartbreaking, but then it's also like beautiful the way that he shows the distance. And yet there's a beauty and a dignity. Dignity absolutely agree.

Hi.

My name is Sophia and I'm a cheh at the River Cafe. Today we're making brusquetta with smash broad beans and ball of Montsorella.

So for the smash broad beans. Here we have some potted broad beans.

You want to choose the smaller ones if you can get them, because they're not so starchy, so a bit sweeter. Put them in a food processor.

Give that big clip.

You don't want it, you know, to be blitzed too much. You want it the texture. And into that a little little bit of crush garlic, bit of roughly chopped.

Basil and mint.

It's fantastic. Give that another list.

In with the herbs this point, a bit of salt, bit of pepper because people will be adding cheese.

You don't want too much.

And now it's a fun pot.

We get to put quite a lot of the.

Oil in it.

We were talking about creating food and making food and your mother making food, and just before we came into this room, you were in the kitchen with a chef from the River Cafe. You made smash broad beans to serve with mozzarella.

Yes, with mozzarella and warm tasty garlic bread.

Yeah. Yeah, So would you like to read the recipe.

Smashed broad beans with mozzarella. We only make this when the first broad beans are in season and when they are small and sweet. Three hundred grams potted broad beans, extra virgin olive oil, and when we say extra, we mean extra one hundred and fifty grams of freshly grated parmesan, ten basil leaves, very very green, ten mint leaves, half a clove of garlic, the stinkiest garlic you can find,

Then roughly pure.

Because you want to keep some of the texture. Don't over pure.

Trust me. Season with salt and pepper.

Lightly tear the mozzarella with your hands, which is fun, and place onto a plate. Place a spoonful of the pure next to the mozzarella. Grill the bread until browned. Rub the bruschetta generously with the remains garlic.

Finish with a.

Drizzle of extra extra extra virgin olive oil, and serve with delight.

An extra extra extra happiness. What was it like seeing this? Smell?

Sophia is wonderful.

I mean when she was making this, the bright green and the smell of the garlic and the mint and the basil, it was like better nearly as good as having a really strong cup of coffee, because the smell suddenly brought you kind of into the world. And then of course the warm bread and the cheese. It's like everything you love. So I was very happy to be in the kitchen and to have a little taste.

Maybe you'll make it, oh for sure.

Yeah, what did you think?

I couldn't believe how much olive oil. That's a serious amount of olive oil.

Really really go for it.

It's a good thing. Yeah, it's good.

Final blitz. And then you want to add the cheese at the end. You don't want it to become gummy in the mixture. Same with the broad beans. If you ever pure it. It's the texture isn't as nice.

Texture is very important.

M that is good.

I think more oil still, it's quite a lot, you know.

It's more herbs.

Okay, I think.

That that would be perfect.

And then you put this mix on a brusqutter.

Let's have garlic and salt on it, rubbed on onto the bread. A bit more oil, and then we've got a ball of mozzarella. You can either cut it in half or rip it on the plate with your brusqutter. A bit more oil.

Oh my gosh, fantastic. That's beautiful. Thank you so much. Fun. Yeah, I'm very welcome. Thank you.

We always ask one question of everyone, which is that if food is alleviates hunger, and if food expresses sharing, and the food expresses of course love, and it can be something that you turn to whenever you need to be fed because you're hungry, or you need to be loved. It's also comfort and so one of the questions that I'd like to ask you before we end this interview is if you have a food that you turn to for comfort, do you know what that would be?

I think when I think of comfort and food, I'd probably make something my mother made for me. She had some wonderful soups that I met. I can make them, but there was nothing like coming into the house and having one of those days or things are you're blue, you're a little bit blue, and you could immediately smell that she was making a soup.

And I love to read and have soup.

So is there a soup that you particularly like or does it depend on the season.

I think it depends on the season for me because I love chilled soups too, So you know, a soup that has meant, or a soup that is gospato, or you know a New England clum child, or they're all different seasons. And in the autumn, I love a squash soup. It's so nice and comforting carrot soups. So I think when I need comfort, I will I look at the kind of traditional, kind of really nice soup or stew.

Yeah.

Well, speaking of stew, would you like to read a section from your book?

Sure?

Because I'd love that.

And there's a reference to the stew, and I thought you could perhaps tell us what that is.

This is from promise.

Miss Irene ask us to set the table with her special wooden dishes and spoons. She'd made a healing stew, she said, filled with nutrients to replenish and restore our self esteem. I'd been so afraid of what miss Irene was going to say to us. I hadn't noticed the rich scent of the stock simmering on the stove. This has potatoes and peaches in it, she said, having no idea really what she was talking about. We only nodded and went around the table, quickly arranging bowls and spoons and cups.

Before our father would arrive. To take us home beautiful.

I love many things about this paragraph. I love the idea that nutrients can give you self esteem. Yes, I like that would be saying that we hear, especially with this generation, that self esteem, self esteem and self esteem.

But who knew that peaches and a healing stew could do that? So we have to.

And I was also very intrigued by the idea of having a stew with peaches in it. That's almost Moroccan, isn't it, the way they do Tajeans with fruit.

Did you have a stew with peaches or did?

I think sometime in the past I probably had a stew that had fruit in it, but I don't know if it would necessarily have been peaches. I think, you know, thinking about in August and it's kind of end of summer and peaches and last chance peaches and all the different types of peaches and loving to have them grilled or loving to have them like cobbler or something like that. Like, I'm sure there must be a stew somewhere that has pea.

Yeah, I'm saying, you know that's I don't know if you've been to Morocco, but they do these Tajeans if you're somm would have maize and apricots and lamb and prunes and chicken and lemons, and it's really using everything in there.

Yeah, I think miss Irene who is the mother and the family that they are very close to her people kind of come in my mind from like Caribbean or diaspora, and so they might have a different bit of a different palette than Cynthia and her sister. And so these kind of hardy stews where they're wondering where she gets these ingredients and things and puts them together, and that this is something their own mother can't make, but they

You know.

I mean, I think this has been I have to say, one must be full. Interviews we've done, the talks, we've done in conversations because you know, we know that.

Food is memory and is food is family.

Food is an expression of comfort, time together and just having this time together for two of us with someone to talk about that is.

Something that I'd love to do more of. And I feel so grateful to you for coming.

I'm grateful for you too.

It's lovely, it was lovely for all of us to talk about food.

I can't stop smiling right now. I just want to go eat it. Thank you so much.

And as I said, you know, there's nothing better than someone.

You love being with someone you love. Thank you good.

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