Welcome to River Cafe, Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adami Studios.
In his most recent book, A Beautiful, Clear Collection of Essays, Language of Truth, Salmon Rushti, my friend writes in his first line that before books, there were stories, and that children ask for stories as they ask for food, stories and food, food and stories, food and family. Salmon has been a member of our family for over thirty years.
When we were planning dinners when salmon was coming, I would be thinking about what to eat, and my husband, Richard, and my son Rue would be planning to make sure that the ping pong balls and the bats were in top condition. For Salmon was one of the few people who could beat Richard at the game. When I was once falsely quoted as saying to Rue, why did you let Salmon win? Salmon almost didn't speak to me for over a year. But speaking is what we're going to do today. That's what we're here for.
Hi, someone, Hello, Ruthie.
So it's nice we're here in the River Cafe and a rainy day for change. But would you like to read the recipe?
Yes, this is a recipe for marinated grilled lamb serve six. The ingredients. Five garlic cloves, peeled and crushed, two tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary leaves, a good pinch of coarsely ground black pepper, one leg of spring lamb, boned and butterflied, two tablespoons of fresh lemon juice, three tablespoons of olive oil, and one tablespoon of sea salt. Mix together the garlic, rosemary, and black pepper. Rub into the cutside of the meat. Place the lamb in a shallow dish and pour over
the lemon juice and olive oil. Turn over a couple of times, then cover and leave to marinate at room temperature overnight or for at least four hours, turning occasionally. Remove from the marinade and pat dry. Season and carefully place on a hot grill. Brown on one side until very dark, then turn over, lower the heat and continue to cook for at least eight minutes on each side. Serve with salsa verde or fresh horseradish sauce.
Thank you, so when I asked you to choose a recipe, you didn't even take a breath, You didn't pause, You just said immediately grilled marinated lamb.
I was wondering, why.
Well you know, in my family, we've always been big carnivores. We eat a lot of meat, so I know, you know, meat is unfashionable in some quarters these days. But it was always going to be a meat recipe. And I'm just thinking, which was the thing that I always chose what I came to each other?
And it was always that the menu today, you know, and I think, interestingly enough, it was actually on the very first menu of the very first day, which had like four things on the menu about average price of five pounds, and one of them is grilled marinated lamb.
Well there you are, you see, go right back to the beginning here.
Yeah, and I think that's probably when we met, was just before the River Cafe opened, maybe early eighties, middies and so. But I'd really like to start with with Mumbai. We were born there, and what are your memories of food and memories.
Born and raised there? And my memory of food is home cooking, yeah, and my mother's kitchen and the kind of flavors that came out of that. My mother didn't like very highly spiced food. She didn't like chilis, so the food was always quite mild. In fact, my sister Samine and I grew up on this food.
So your mother was the cook shed.
Well, she cooked, but she also I mean we had, you know, a cook, and she would always train the cook in the food of the household. And one of the things I've always thought about India is that in middle class kitchens, kitchens which employ cooks, there's always a copy book is it's called hanging on a hook And in that book are the recipes of the family. And I've always thought if somebody could just go and gather the recipes in those copy books, that would be the greatest Indian cookbook of all.
Do you remember your grandmother? Was your mother's mother a cook?
Yeah, my mother's mother was not a cook. My mother's mother sort of shouted at.
Cooks, ah, okay, yeah in that way.
Do you think she knew what she wanted?
Well, yeah, she was a grubby old lady. I don't know. I wouldn't have liked to be cooking at her kitchen.
Oh really? And what about your mother and her?
But my mother was very a gentle person, you know. And I also had an Ayah nanny from South India, came from Mangalore, which has its own very distinctive cooking her kind of pickles and chutney's got into midnight'staurant because I grew up on those. There was a particular green chutney which is famously in the book. It was just a lot of green things chopped up with a lot of chilies. It was very particular South Indian recipe that arrived in our house through her go and South Indian
Aya mary mayonnaises. She was called lived to one hundred and two did she spoke seven languages and was illiterate. There's a line somewhere in Midnight's Children where where the character the narrator talks about stirring feelings into food. And I always believe that that if you're in a good mood, the food tastes one way, and if you're in a bad mood, the food tastes another way. You know, that sense of emotion, your own emotion getting into the cooking.
You know, it's something I always thought.
Did your mother put an emotion into her cooking?
Yeah? I mean she actually she wasn't like a great chef, but she enjoyed it. Yeah, she enjoyed it, So the food was enjoyable.
What about your father?
My father.
A Friday day never. Never.
I don't think so, yeah, because I do talk to a lot of men who were discouraged from going into the kitchen, you know.
Yeah, Well, I mean I wasn't discouraged, but I was only thirteen when I left home to go to boarding school. So and then food was a whole other thing.
Yeah, well that country? Did you go before we leave Mumbai? Did you when you were growing up in Mumbai?
Was food?
Would you go to the markets? Because it must have been a very rich culture of food.
Well there's, first of all, there's this wonderful covered market in what is now called South Bombay but was then just called Bombay, a place called Crawford Market where you can buy everything from like hair dryers to live chickens. And Crawford Market was an incredibly exciting place to go, thronging with life, very noisy and as I say, with everything you can imagine buying, including lots and lots of food and fruit and vegetables and chickens.
And you were allowed to go there, there.
Was no I went very often there.
Did you travel throughout India? Did your parents take care.
Making See my father's family was originally from Delhi. Although my parents have moved to Bombay before I was born, but he had still had a lot of connections and he had business in Delhi and sometimes I would go with him and stay in a hotel in Deli and sort of mess around while he did his work.
But did you go to restaurants there?
Yeah? And I mean and Delhi of course is the heart of North Indian cuisine. So that what's Moclai cooking is it's called the cooking that is left behind by the Mongol.
Empire, right, And how does that differ from southern It's.
Richer, you know, it uses a lot of yogurt and ghi and stuff like that. And it's also I mean, the further south in India you go, the more vegetarian the cuisine becomes. From the further north you go, the more meat orients it goes. And that's just the difference between Muslim culture in the north, where the Muslim conquerors were there for hundreds of years, and the Hindu culture of the south, which is largely vegetarian.
And when you came, you said, you said you were thirteen, when you did your whole family.
Come to London?
No, I just got sent to boarding.
Sent you to boarding school. Wow.
Wow, I'm sure there's a lot we could explore in the difference between as a thirteen year old going to England.
But food wise, no subject.
Well where would you go on that subject?
I mean, the food was kind of inedible, you know, it was a dreadful school food. But it, like this said, when we got overcooked beef burger patties, that was the highlight of the week.
Yeah, did you mind or did you just get used to it?
No? I just I mean I didn't like much about school, and the food was certainly part of what I didn't like. I was quite isolated, but I really didn't like boarding school. And actually when I left, I mean, I had got my place at Cambridge, but I didn't want to go. You know, I said to my parents, I said, just let me go to the university here. Finally there's good universities here. I go. My father had been to King's College, Cambridge and I had got in, and so he was
very keen that I should follow him. And in the end I went, And actually I'm very glad I went because it was a very different experience than school. You know, I had a much better.
Time going from Cambridge to London you have your own apartment.
Well, no, I mean my college friends and I there were five of us who rented a place just off the New King's Road, on the sort of corner of the Wandsworth Ridge Road in the New King's Road, five bedroom house, five pounds each, nineteen sixty.
Eight, nineteen sixty eight.
Yeah, those were the days.
And what did you eat there?
Do There was a kitchen, soho we would all pile in and make spaghetti. You know.
So London in the sixties, working in an advertising agency, you weren't part of the Martini lunch of no.
No, no, no no. I mean I worked in two or three different agencies for a long time at Ogilvy and made that. But in those days, Ogilvy's was kind of more or less on Waterloo Bridge. I mean, if you were to go all the way down the strand and turn right to walk over Waterloo Bridge, it was just there. There wasn't much I mean there you would you would walk into Covent Garden if you wanted to get something to eat. So, I mean, I've always remembered the day when the fruit and vegetable market closed in
Covent Guard. Yeah, because what happened is.
Can I ask you that it was?
It must have been in the early seventies, you know. But what happened was that the entire neighborhood, the streets were full of rats because the rats all had nothing to eat, you know, and they swarmed. I mean it was amazing. You would walk on the strand, which with that had its usual crowds the rat and the rats headed over the bridge and I think they found their way to nine Elms.
That's where the new that's where the new cover of garden.
Yeah, but it was an extraordinary day. The rats took over London.
And did they did? Ogilvy and meither. Did you ever meet David Ogilvy?
I was just in his presence on one occasion, I know. But I was working full time to begin with. But then I managed to get a job which was either two or three days a week, and and that gave me either four or five days a week to stay home.
And right, do you have a discipline?
Yeah? I mean my idea, which is probably very bad in terms of how one should eat, is that you should work hungry.
Ah okay, tell me about that.
In other words, you know, if I've had a nice meal, I can't write just I get slow and sleepy, you know. And so my view is work first.
Tell me about you're working day and food.
Well, I mean I just in the morning, I have virtually nothing other than a cup of coffee. I mean sometimes I have some fruit juice with it, but that's not much more than that really, And then then I.
Go to work, you know, for how long.
How long depends where I am in the writing process, because in the early stages of writing a book, when it's making something out of nothing, then you know, two or three hours a day, and really you're burned out and you start writing things that you know you're not going to use. But in the later part of a book, when you're writing a final version, I work all the time. I work like twelve hours, thirteen, fourteen hours a.
Day, and you don't start to eat.
Then I do sometimes, because I mean the hardest thing is the blank page. Once you've got a version there, no matter how approximate it is, working on that is less difficult than the first active invention. And then sometimes I do it. Yeah, I do sometimes have a bit of lunch.
Do you like to go out, Yes, I like to go out.
I mean, you know, living in New York. That's what everybody does. I do it before the pandemic. It's what everybody did, and now again it's beginning to be what everybody can do.
Restaurants.
When you walk in a room in a restaurant, what do you like to see? Do you have a feeling about, well, the kind of restaurant you want to be in.
Well, you know, the grand old restaurants, so once we just have a great feeling in them. You know, if you walk into Indosine or Balthazar or the Waverley in you think this is a place you want to be. This is not another one of those places. But also I think what's interesting about places like that, Like Industan's been there since the mid nineteen eighties, and the food has never dropped in quality. You know, it's it's obviously not anymore what it used to be, which is like
the hottest ticket in town. But they've never allowed the food to become ordinary, you know.
Yeah, when I talked to Michael Kine, he said that he'd never done a movie deal that didn't take place in a restaurant, and it was always over at lunch. In Hollywood, you go out to lunch and you discuss the deal for the movie and then I don't know if that still goes on, but did you do it with your publishers?
An you agent?
I remember when I was looking for an American agent being taken out for a very swanky lunch at the Russian tea room by a very powerful agent whose name I won't mention, and she was so kind of grand at me that it was actually off putting you. And meanwhile there was this other agent that was wooing me who had an office which was one and a half rooms. It was like him and a secretary and a xerox machine. But he was so dynamic and energetic. I thought, I
want that one, not the fact that you know. And that's how I came to a point Andrew Willy, and it's the best decision I ever made.
Yeah, you learn a lot about somebody in a restaurant.
Yeah, it teaches you. Do they thank the waiter? Do they share their food? Do they eat quickly? And I think that's why people go for dates in a restaurant, don't you?
Or why tells you what?
It tells you? If people have good manners, you know? And that used to be something when we were kids that we were taught, you know, how to behave. I'm not sure people are quite taught that in the same way now, but some people have it naturally, you know. And I think it's incredibly appealing when somebody has good manners, as you say, when they're polite to the white.
Stuff, or conversely, if they're rude to the white stuff, you never want to see them again.
If they're rude, forget about it. Yeah, it's over. And I'm always shocked when I see that happening. So I think good manners and you know, you are what you eat, don't you. So it's it's very interesting decide.
About food is seduction? Would you ever want to seduce a woman through food or watch it?
I do think that works.
It does.
I've found out from interviewing other people that they can remember the first meal they cooked a woo a woman, you know, or what they how they tried to or go to a restaurant to see, you know what about.
It happened the other way round one or two people who've cooked meals for me in order to that work.
Did that work out?
Yeah?
And dates at restaurants?
Do you think that I'm not sure that I'm not sure that a restaurant is a great place for a first date. Yeah, it's I think it's more interesting to to do something else. I go for a walk, something, something with less pressure on it, you know, and maybe go out to dinner. When you worked out that you might enjoy spending the time together. Yeah, because one of the worst things in the world is to sit in a restaurant knowing after ten minutes that you that you
really want to leave. Yeah, so I think it's a good second date.
And what about right now? Who's cooking in your how are you cooking? Are you cooking or I'm going.
You know, I mean I have a partner and she's And also, you know, New York is New York. You can order in Yeah, And especially in this pandemic, a lot of restaurants as a surviving method, you know, restaurants which never delivered are now delivering, and you want to do that because you want to help these places survive.
I've read every one of your novels, and I got to know you through your novels. And a really pivotal book in my life was The Jaguar Smile because as an American, nicaragen is so close it was so intensely political and resonated. Tell me about going to Nicaragua.
Well, what happened was that in the mid eighties, when the Contra War began, I became kind of involved with thing here called the Nicaraguan Solidarity Campaign and was involved in protesting against the way in which the then American administration was siding with the Contra in order to try and crush this tiny country, you know. And then I was at a literary festival in New York in fact, and I met various Nicaraguan writers. It's one who had
been invited there and they said they invited me. So I went as a guest of the writers' union, I guess, you know, And and I went. I thought I would probably write something, but I thought it would probably be a newspaper article or something. And instead what happened is I got I kind of fell in love with the place, and I got obsessed with its tragedy and came back and ended ended up writing something. It's a short book,
it's but it's a book leg thing. And one of the things that talking of food that was heartbreaking was how great the shortages were. I mean, I remember staying in this guesthouse is a government guesthouse that was made available to me. And in the morning, going down to breakfast, and there were you know, two boil eggs, and I said, I had this interpreter who was always there with me because my Spanish is not very good. And I said to her, look, you know, I don't really eat a
big breakfast. And she said to me, you know, you should eat these eggs because they were the only eggs in the market today. They've been provided for you eat the damn eggs. And I just was one indication, you know, of how impoverished. I mean, we went to I remember meeting a farmer who said that it was so hard for him to make any money that when he wanted to service his tractor he had to sell a cow. That's not the thing you can do very long, you know,
because you run out of cows. So it was horrifying how badly off people were. And then how kind of in a way pro American they were, you know, so they want the things that everybody loved. Everybody loved major League baseball. You know, Ni Karagan's crazy about baseball. But the thing is that the dictatorship which preceded the Sandinistas.
The Somosa dictatorship had been entirely in the thrall of the United States, and the tragedy of Nicaragua is that the Sandinista revolution spawned another dictatorship, you know, so that now we have the Ortega brothers, Daniel Ortego, who is
as bad as any Somosa. I mean, I did on one occasion actually had dinner at the house of Daniel Ortega with the whole Sandinista leadership, and there there was kind of a being explained to me that the banquet food, you know, but the banquet food felt a little revolting given what I'd experienced in the rest of the country.
What was it, do you remember?
Well? It was great, heaping dishes of beef, things that nobody in the country could dream of. And the funny thing was that I thought, Okay, they know that I'm here to write, so they know that they're on the record. But I thought, if I put a tape recorder on the table, it'll completely change the conversation and everybody will speak to the tape recorder. So but I thought, I need to make a record of this is you know, six of the nine man Standani said directorate is around
the table. So what I did was I invented a stomach upset.
Oh back to food.
Yeah, I said, I'm sorry my stomach, and I would go to the bathroom scribble crazy in my pocket, and then I'd come back and sit down and listen for by that's I'm so, I really have to go again, rush back to the bathroom. And that's how I managed to keep some kind of a record of the dinner. But yeah, it was a very intense experience Nicaragua. You know, it's the first It's such a beautiful country and in such terrible shape.
When you travel to well Nicaragua, to write to Italy, to Spain, to India to wherever you go, do you think about the food that you're going to eat in that culture.
Yeah, I mean I remember, you know, like just before the pandemic the a few months before, I was able to go to a literary event in Wahaka in Mexico, and they eat amazing stuff. They eat grasshoppers. Did you this whole plate full of fried grasshoppers? And I did eat them. China, I've never been to trying to be into Hong Kong. I've been to Hong Kong, but so long ago that it was still British at the time. That's my big hole is the far East of Asia, the Japan, Vietnam, China very high on my list of
places I'd like to go. Food does a lot to tell you where you are. I mean, one of the things that is sensational about Italy is that it's impossible to have a bad meal, you know, just impossible. And I think the same is true of places like Paris, that you don't have to go to fancy restaurants. You know, you could sit at a corner brasserie and have something delicious. You know, that kind of culture of food is exciting.
I have ever written about food? Did you write? Over a few?
Not exactly. I once had to do a thing for British Vogue a couple of years ago. It's exactly what you were saying about traveling. So they asked me for like favorite places in different countries and so on. So yeah, I wrote about half a dozen restaurants in different places. No more. I was lucky.
Oh did you go to Noma in Copenhagen? Y?
Yes, I did. Out that he's a bit of a fan of mine, so I got a reservation, which is not easy, and then I had to eat this thirty nine course meal in two hours.
Yeah, it's a temple of food. Do people come up to you in restaurants.
Sometimes find that?
Okay?
Sometimes, yeah, but I mean it's not very often.
Yeah, growing up in a house where your mother had her book and your grandmother had the cook and growing up with food and you have a sister has not only a cook, but she's written books and she's very respected in the food world.
So tell me what that feels like.
Yeah, I think it was sort of a it happened by accident, because you know, she's all sorts of things. I mean, she's a very good lawyer. You know, she's she's worked in community relations a lot of her life, et cetera. And then I think really what she wanted to do was in some way capture our home cooking. And I egged her on because I knew that she was a very good cook, and she found the book very difficult to do. It took her a long time.
And anyway, what came out of this agonized process was a kind of something close to a classic I think, you know, is sa in Russian's Indian Cookery it's called and she really did capture the flame. I mean not all the recipes are memories of my mother's kitchen, but but that's where the book started. And then she added stuff of her own. So it turns out she's ridiculously.
Food and memories.
You know, as we started out, food and stories, food and family, food and comfort because food is comfort, isn't it? And so if I were to ask you is I ask everyone that my last question. If you have a comfort food, what would it be?
Well, I mean, my comfort food is always going to be Indian food, so it's it'd be something very simple, not at all complicated. I'm very happy with yellow dil in white rice. One of the bad habits I have, which you're not supposed to do, is to have bread at the same time as rice. You're supposed to have either all. You know, if you're having dial and rice, you shouldn't also have a chapati or et cetera. But I do. So that's my bad behaving comfort food.
Yes, thank you, someone, I love you.
Thank you.
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