Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeart Radio and Adami's Studios. I would like to remember exactly when I met Sam Taylor Johnson. Was it at the Tate in nineteen ninety eight when she was awarded the Turner Prize, Or the day she entered the River Cafe a beautiful young woman with her first baby, Angelica in her arms. Was it when she came to see Richard with a
book of her astonishing photographs. Were we just invited to a wild and glamorous party in her home that was part of, as Sam says, the blur of what London was in the late nineties. And when was the last time I sat with Sam? Was it in a bar with the love of her life, Aaron, or recently when they missed a flight to Sicily and joined a lunch. And how often have I asked where is Sam in London?
Preparing to director Amy Winehouse, trekking in Nepal, in the south of France with Elton, or looking for a school in Somerset for her young daughters. The one thing I can always know is that wherever she is, whatever she is creating, Sam is an extraordinary woman. I love her.
Oh, how do I go into that without tears streaming?
Well, we go into it with food. We can start off with a recipe that you chose, which is.
Risotto with puccini and girols. One kilogram of mixed fresh puccini and giroles, cleaned and chopped, extra virgin olive oil, one garlic clove, peeled and finely chopped, one teaspoon of fresh thyme, one liter of chicken stock, one hundred grams of unsalted butter, one medium red onion, finely chopped, three hundred grams of risotto rice, two hundred and fifty milli
liters of extra dryvermooth. Now that's the thing that sends me running around the house when I'm about ten minutes into cooking it, just like, do we have the mooth?
Do we read a recipe twice?
Two hundred grams of parmesan, freshly grated. I actually cooked this last night. I thought I practiced, just to remind myself what happened about five minutes in Aaron Aaron's here?
What did what happened?
The mood do we have? I can't make this without the mooth?
I'm going to go.
And everyone was running around trying to find the but it's what makes it. In a frying pan, heat three tablespoons of olive oil, Add the mushrooms with the chopped garlic and thyme, season and fry for a couple of minutes until any liquid has evaporated. In a saucepan, heat the butter with the remaining olive oil. Add the chopped onion, and cook until the onion is soft. Add the rice
and stuff. Now, what's so great about this recipe is it's really good if you want to have people around for dinner but not necessarily engage with them the entire time.
Yes, I cared you you at the latest movie. I'm stirring a resulta.
Exactly, I'm stirring a result. But it sort of also gives you something to do, so you're you know, you're active if you're not sure what to talk about. It's sort of a perfectly sociable, unsociable meal to cook. Pour in the vermouth and cook until it's been absorbed, stirring all the while, then adding the hot stock ladle by Ladel. Continue to cook until the rice is identity. Add the wild mushrooms, the remaining butter, the parmesan and the chopped parsley, and well, the best rosotto ever good.
It's comforting resulta.
But this was the first thing I ever cooked from your cookbook, which is why I think it was in one of the earlier ones. Yeah, I'm going to be brave and attempt to resott it. Did you cook when you were a kid? Did you?
No?
Not at all.
I didn't grow up in an environment where cooking was celebrated. Food was made to eat to live. Frozen pizzas, margarine, you know that that was to put in when you come home from school, make for yourself and eat just a.
Make for yourself. So would you sit down to a family meal or everybody taken care of that?
I almost can't remember family meals. So I think that's again why I feel so excited about a kitchen very alive, with food being cooked and bread being baked, and aromas and activity, because as was definitely not not that environment.
Sometimes I talk to people who grew up with the romantic idea of the family sitting down to a family supperer and sitting and talking about the day, and some people described having a mother that worked the night shift, or a mother or father who came home from work and were exhausted, or they came home from work and they would prefer to do homework with you then cook.
I mean, there are many reasons why the image of the family perhaps is somewhat romanticized, but it is important something that, as you say, we try and create for our kids. But you didn't have a role model for that, so you had the reverse, but you changed it for your own family.
I did have the rest.
And you know, sometimes, especially doing something like this, you sort of look back and try and find that memory.
Now.
I definitely remember my mom made a dish that she would be proud of, which was a rabbit dish with mustard, I think, but that was something that was that would come out. I don't know it would be a big thing. But the rest of the time, it was moral survival.
What was she doing or your father doing? Was your father there?
It was my stepfather?
Really?
Who who my sort of that part of my life is more of a memory.
And so do you think they were doing other things rather than cook or did they just not?
It's a complicated history and it's hard to go into not because not because it is sort of full of sort of trauma and pain, but it's more that I actually have this sort of almost blackout of I don't actually have that much memory from that.
Time in my life.
And also if I do go into it or I talk about it, I sort of feel a hope that I've evolved to a place where I don't I don't want to sort of talk about it with malice. It's not that they were working. I think it was more struggle survival and mental health, to be honest, and a lot of a lot of just difficult scenarios.
Did you have coparts?
But they died when I was quite young, so I don't really have a memory of them in terms of, you know, I had sort of I had a great Auntie Gladys, and a great uncle Les, who I felt very close to, who lived in Shepherd's Bush. There was a lot of time around their house in Shepherd's Bush, and they were very much sort of meet and too veg and I remember going home one day and saying to my auntie Gladays, I'd say, I can't have roast chicken.
I'm a vegetarian, and she said, what chicken is not really an animal?
Of course you can eat it.
I can't.
But but that was the sort of stability.
For me, they were this, you know, the stable hold, the home where I would go to as a student to know that I could be fed.
Did you struggle with food? Did you enjoy it? Did you? Yeah? And I have school lunch when.
I did, but I was a free school dinner's kid, so I was in the opposite queue.
To my friends.
Well, they had different queues.
They had different.
Cues, disgusting.
There was the queue on the left, which was the regular queue.
Of Dickens, and then there was the free school dinner's line. And and I wasn't always in the free school dinner's line. There were moments where I was in it, and there are moments where I could bounce over to the other side, and I just always remember the dread of today I have to go in the free school dinner's line, and that fear of just like you know, feeling separate from all your friends and just that sort of feeling a little bit of shame that comes with.
Him or maybe a lot. So you had school lunches and then.
School lunches and then home. Yeah, mostly yeahs and pizzas. Where did you go out? Firstly in London until I was eleven in stratum and then after that we moved to the countryside to Sussex. But that was a big shock. I was terrified of trees. It was so funny because I was such an urban girl until then, and then the idea that I had to walk down these country lanes with trees.
It was quite funny.
Interesting because a lot of the people that I've talked to think about the way they struggled in their youth, whether they were from another country, whether their parents were uncomfortable in being in England, whether they or in the United States, wherever they were, people who struggled with money, with divorce and all this is to do, you know, with food and how those memories above and also I don't know if you feel, but they measure and I
don't know if you do, measure their almost their success by being able to order something delicious on the menu. Paul McCartney, the able to order a good glass of wine was something away that they measured their their own success totally.
I mean, we never ate out, so eating out really came to me in adult life. And I think that the first time I realized food was for pleasure. Yeah, was actually a college trip to Rome or post college. I can't really remember, but we went to a small little restaurant and I ordered something because I had absolutely no idea what to expect, tabulatary with lemon lemon pasta, and I remember eating it and just having this sort of total, you know, explosion of flavor and thoughts and
feelings about is this what food can be? And that feeling of tasting something which just kind of completely opens your mind to potential. I guess that, and that you know, it wasn't expensive, it was affordable, and that I could
eat this amazing food and not frozen pizzas. It was a revelation, Yeah, and probably in my sort of probably when I was about nineteen, I think then I went to art school in Hastings, which was like a massive turning point of excitement in my life, and then after that into London for art school.
I always think it's another conversation about artists that creating art is very solitary. Yeah, activity that you are in your studio and your paint and everybody sort of had these kind of wild nights of eating and drinking together because it was so solitary during the day. Did you find that.
Or was it?
Yeah? I think art school for me was like a huge door had opened into a world of so much possibility and excitement. And I feel like for the first two years when I was at Hastings, I was just sort of wide eyed and in sort of slight shock that I was in this environment and just kept very quiet. And then I went to Northeast London Polytechnic, which was a very robust sort of shipbuilding yard feeling because I
was in the sculpture department. And then I left there after the first year and went to Goldsmith, which by comparison felt like a sort of Swiss finishing school because people were very elegant and they were talking about ideas, and I, again I felt very like I was sort of sitting on the outside, watching and feeling this environment being so alien.
Was that the days of Michael Craig Martin and Damian Land and it was and.
That freeze had just happened, So there was a lot of debate around this huge exhibition that had sort of thrown all these young artists that were still at art school onto the map, and there was a sort of freeze and an anti freeze, and I just sort of sat again and sort of listened and felt the debates between everything and everyone, but sort of also knew I was in the eye of a storm, and I of a very exciting transitional moment in the art world because
these artists like Damien had a studio outside of art school and was already you know, functioning as an artist and selling and having exhibitions, and Gary Hume and Sarah Luca you know, it all was just this sort of bubbling energy that I felt but didn't quite know how to access because I was still sort of feeling a
bit quiet on the outside. It really took going to Tracy Emmen and Sarah Lucas had a little shop in the East End, just off of Brick Lane, and it really took going to that little shop to feel that anything was possible, that anything they made was art, and they were artists and they were allowing themselves to be that. And it was that moment for me that was quite pivotal in understanding I could allow myself to be an artist, that I could actually sort of say it out loud
and actually be creative. And I think up until then, you know, you sort of feel like you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you're not meant to be there feeling.
Were you as adventurous in your I guess development as an artist as maybe in food? Did you go to Chinese restaurants or Indian restaurants? Did you Indian restaurants or drink whiskeys?
No, Indian restaurants was absolutely where we all went because once I kind of, once I, you know, became friends with Tracy, we all would you know, sort of be in that neighborhood and we'd all, you know, go in and out of all the different Indian restaurants around that area and find our favorites, and that's where we would gather.
I felt like.
Exactly how you said earlier about McCartney saying it was a measure of success. I'm growing into my own person because I understand food. I'm growing into my own person because I can take myself to a restaurant and I can actually order something that's completely different to anything I've
ever tried before. And I think it is it's a feeling of one, you're sort of stepping into being an adult, but also you're stepping into sort of a feeling of new success, not necessarily you know, huge financial success, but beginning to be able to take yourself places. My first job as a waiter would have been when I was at school. I worked in a local beefeater steakhouse and used to have to wear a beefe to Little Apron and then Vic Naylor's and Clarkhall. Do you remember Vic
Naylor's and Clarkwork. It was a great restaurant and I I mean it was just fun, fun, fun, but it was also terrible because I used to we all used to get absolutely trashed. And I remember going to a table and someone said do you have any bread? And I said yes, let me go and get it. And then it was just up the road from Saint John, and I said, quick, where's the bread. They're like, oh, we don't have any. Can you run to get some
from Saint John. Absolutely I ran to Saint John and then my then manager was.
Sat at the bar. I come, I have a drink with me.
So I sat down and had a drink which turned into two, and I was the bread. I quickly got the bread from Saint John and ran back. I've got you some bread about an hour ago. This place is terrible. Let me see the manager. Let me go and get him rundown Saint John. Pull him out the bar, and the whole story is that. He then went up and said, you asked to see me. Yes, the service is terrible. He said, yes, I agree, Now you should leave.
What year was there?
That was right after I left art school?
So lit.
Nine?
Yeah? Maybe yeah, times have changed. I think you think maybe there's still those places, but we've all become much more. Do you know the story about Damien.
And which one?
Which one? The one at the grad Show club where he and aunt completely trashed. I had just I banned somebody from the River Cafe for being rude to one of my waiters, and I was telling the story I was telling out and he said, well, Damien, I went and we got completely you know, trash, and we were They closed the doors and we were kicked out, and we went on the street and then we found a ladder and we climbed up and we broke a window.
We came in and then we got sick over the pool table, and then we went and got some alcohol out of the out of the fridge and we drank that. Then we you know, we took something and we crashed out on the sofa. Was Mary Anne, the manager came in the next daye said, you know, I could call the police. You broke and new enter, you damage my property, and you stole stuff, you know, but instead of calling the police, I am going to ban you for twenty four hours.
Twenty four hours, brilliant are the days I had a customer who just was slightly rude to somebody, and I said, you could never come back again.
You know, that's the difference.
It is a measure of a person.
Well, that's why it's good to I think people date people in restaurants, you know, you go on a date and see how they are to the waiter, or you interview lots of people. Have you ever interviewed anybody for a job in a restaurant?
Totally? Yeah, yeah I did you Before I came here, I met someone was.
Higher for the movie actually yeah, perfect, perfect, perfect and brilliant O.
Good good good. And so from from being an art school and then being an artist, what was it like in the once you were all working and I hate to use the word successful, but successful when you and Jay lived in that house and parties? Was food? Did you care about food then? Did you think that you all wanted it?
Was?
It was hard.
It's hard to sort of cast my mind to that era, because it's that thing I think Koko Chanel said it, it's you know, I'm six people away from the person I once was. I think, yeah, I sometimes feel like that. And so when I think back to those times, I think of myself as a very different person, and so so much sort of shift and change within myself happened
during that period. I was suddenly sort of living in this very sort of grand house and living a very different life, and and it was all sort of fast rolling and high octane, and fast rolling and high octane is fun, and then you can't. It's so hard to maintain. And I couldn't maintain it. And I definitely sort of felt like, you know, throw these parties and then I would disappear off at about ten o'clock.
I remember the part that you didn't talk about. What we haven't talked about in terms of food and being an artist, and in that lifetime was when you were ill, yeah, and the diet that you then, and I remember very well your rigor in dealing with your illness, in the way you ate, and I think it was really before a lot of us thought about food and health, and you were unhealthy and you use food to think about health.
And you also took you know, you went the scientific route, so you went for the medicine and for the but it wasn't alternative. You did it. But you did do a diet. I remember you very clearly talked no dairy.
Yeah, I mean I have.
To sort of almost step out I sided myself to talk about it. But yeah, nineteen ninety seven, six months after I had Angelico's, my oddest of four daughters, I got diagnosed with colon cancer. And of course it was, you know, a shock, but there was such an urgency in my mind to be well and to get back home and be a mother and be present that I just sort of, you know, almost jumped out of the hospital bed and I'm back, I'm fine. And then three
years later I got diagnosed with breast cancer. And then I didn't leap out of bed, and I didn't say I'm back, I'm fine. I got sort of quietly retreated into myself, I think, and I went to a very sort of almost a totally different personality to somebody I knew myself as in a way in order to figure out a way to get through it.
And it's it's a.
Trauma, and in that trauma, you have to sort of figure out what are my options, what are my options of survival? And obviously when you're in it, you're not thinking clearly in that way. But you know, it was very much the first time I didn't take it seriously. Almost second time, I'm going to take this very seriously.
You know, I want to live.
I want to be a mom and be around and that was my you know, that was the thing I had Angelica as my purpose and goal to survive for. You know, it was chemotherapy, mastec to me and everything medical that I could.
But at the.
Same time, I knew that I had to support that for myself with I had acupuncture. I gave up I gave up drinking and the party life, and I gave up, you know, anything that I felt was detrimental to my health. Sugar, I gave up dairy and pretty much set still.
Do you still not.
Have Yeah, okay, let's not be too puritan sugar. Yes, there's every so often, but I'm conscious about eating and I'm conscious about if things have you know, very strict about milk, very strict about cheese, butter, I'll allow it then, you know, and I'm not going to be too because there's also a point where you just have to you know,
you have to function in the world. And you know, there was probably at least five years where I was absolutely I would read every ingredient and nothing could be because I was frightened, you know, and fear is a very good reason to make sacrifices and changes in your life. I just shifted into a completely different person in a way.
Would you tell somebody who came to see that if they had cancer and any form, would you say to them to try to do.
This because you don't.
It's difficult because also you know, there's varying. You know, your case is different to the next person. It's the next person to what level you have it or you know, it's hard to advise people in that way we talked about to people who are in it, I try to be you know, get up in the morning, put on a great song, move around, care people when you're feeling down. I try to sort of keep it, you know, let's keep it in a place where we're going to get through this.
It's a job.
It's a job, and you know it's also you can't people say, well, you're so brave to have gotten through it. But it's not bravery that gets you through it, because it doesn't mean that people who haven't survived aren't brave. Getting through it is you know, an amount of medical intervention, amount of luck in terms of diagnosis and what you can then do to support all of that.
But when you talk about the energy or the you know, the getting up and doing that has shown that actually a kind of activity with any illness, with grief. You know, you say that, having been through grief in my life, that I sort of know the drill, you know, which is you get out of bed or I mean you can stay in bed and cry all day too, that's fine, but the you know, the activity, and.
He's in the support of you know, friendships.
When I was, when I would have chema, i'd have Gary Hume and Georgie and Johnny Shankid and friends would you know, bring the food and sit around and sort of laugh and sit with me for a few hours and you know, you sort of feel, you know, the
chema going through your veins. But on the other hand, you could be eating some strawberries and chatting with friends and watching watching everyone just you know support you in that way, and I think and yeah, and that's also you know, that was definitely sort of food related in the sense that you know, chema can taste bad in your mouth. It's sort of metallicy. And my friends had
researched that a little bit. I've heard if you have you know, some boiled sweets, or if you have this, or and then another friend mango.
Mango is really good.
Because Rose Gray, you started the cafe with and had breast cancer, just found that. I always say that she ate her way through chemo, you know, just ate everything. But she she was careful, yeah, as she was before she got sick, but she loved having mangoes.
Serotonin I think it's good for but I think it's also I mean still now really education around nutrition and what's you know, what's good for you to live, Like I said, as a keep the machine at optimum level, you know, and maintenance. We maintain our cars sometimes better than our bodies.
And hi there, My name is Hamish. I am one of the chefs here at the River Cafe. One of the sauces or dishes that I think is very special to us, and it's coming back onto the venue a bit more often. Is our Banya Kouder. We make this sauce by reducing down a bottle of Italian red wine or champagne or prosecco, and then we melt in about twelve to fifteen cloves of garlic anchovies and this creates
a really ten salty, amazing base to a sauce. Then copious amounts of butter to make it extremely smooth, silky and just rich and delicious.
Is my favorite an sourdi bread.
This is the saltiness of the anto.
But I think growing up what it equates to, so that would be my I'm successful and knowledgeable and I can eat anchovies on toast.
It comes from growing up with Marma on toast.
Yes, it's one of.
Those, and Mama on toast for me has been a constant constant from child all the way through my student life, artist life.
So I was trying about the solitariness of being an artist. But what about as I go back to the to the cinema when you directed Noaby or when you do directed Fifty Shades of Gray, do you do you think about how you feed the people on the set. Is that important to you? The way you start for food? Break was Anderson that he hates a lunch hour because it makes everybody stop, and then you have to get tired, and then but you know, he tried to give everybody soup, but then the crew wanted meals.
How do you deal with It's interesting.
I feel absolutely with West in that way that I don't like when everyone stops for lunch. But at the same time, I do like the communal break of everyone sitting and sort of literally digesting what we've done and talking around food. And I always try to make sure we have reasonably good caterers so that everyone's just sort of enjoying that time rather than just complaining this is disgusting.
Was there a difference in doing nowhere By and fifty Shades of Gray from.
I'm sure there was. I can't remember. It's own trauma. But but we Aaron and I made a movie in twenty one days. We didn't We made a million little pieces and it was the smallest, smallest, smallest.
Budget, but we had the best, best food.
There's a food touch to feel very different from Los Angeles. We've moved from l A to English, the English country. I mean, what about food and that feel different?
This particle shift not in our house because we cook the same things, but definitely a different culture of Well.
The difference is avocados. There's certain things that grow differently so Africa. You know, when you're were West coast, if you had these sort of you know, anything California or from Mexico. The avocados a difference to Guacamole's like amazing have avocados here. They're sort of imported from Spain and they're hard and there there's just no point.
There's no point.
There's no point in avocado and you just don't eat that.
I really respect that you said, because it is to do with the ingredient.
Absolutely.
What about do you go to fewer restaurants here? Did you eat out more in La.
We did, probably, I think, but we are in the middle.
Of the urban there too, probably, yeah, And there was I don't know, it was a different I had a sort of different routine I think there for food, you know, I was.
Really into and I'll have a shake and yes, could you put some racio mushroom and a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and there everyone seems so knowledgeable about what about what each ingredient of this certain mushroom is going to give you. You know, this one's for the brain and cognitive function, and this one's for memory, and this one's for your liver, and this one's for you know. I was getting quite good at all of that and understanding how it was going to
benefit me, and then you know, I got here. I was like, where am I going to get my charger?
Do you drink coffee?
Do I drink coffee?
New to coffee?
Very new to coffee, Like the American coffee was just the sort of the diner coffee, the all day for filted coffee.
It's just sort of, Yeah, tell.
Me about food in your house? Well, how many children? Four?
I mean for this weekend, they're all four at home. I mean my specialty is the pancakes. I'd like to say I'm the pancakes person Tenesca. I have my dishes, but the pancakes are in the mornings. I can make creps, I can make big fluffy pancakes as they're called, or I can do the green pancakes, which are roamy. My youngest one absolutely loves. She's very What is that how
they made? It's they're basically one egg, one banana, gluten free flour, a handful of spinach and cinnamon and vanilla, and and and a cup of almond milk blitzed, and then and then Friday coking up oil and they puff up and then absolutely up do they puff up with a little bit of baking powder in there, and and then Yeah, Aaron's good at cooking, literally sort of seven seven weeks, so many dishes.
Are on the table when he cooks.
I'm just like, that's so nice. I can't bake.
When Aaron ever goes into the kitchen to bake, we all are literally waiting for a blood splattering because.
We're always with the blender.
The cherry that.
He put his finger in it, well, I was trying to take what was left over dough off around the thing my fingers, but my hand was obviously gripping the top of the button, so it went, it went, blits the top of my I don't have much of a.
Nail on that finger off. So what do you do for desserts? Do you have dessert?
And Roamy? Our youngest is a bit of a baker, actually, so we recently got really rumble a gorgeous apple orchard in Somerset, and with a mixture of cooking apples and cider apples, and could eat blackberries everywhere right now at the moment, there's tons of blackberries. So recently it was a BlackBerry an apple crumble.
My last questions to you Aaron and to you Sam would be if you need food for comfort, is there a food that you would reach for?
Marmite and a jacket potato is probably actually a could trump the avie on, but marmite butter jacket potato.
That is my comfort food. I know I'm looking at you.
Thank you, you will be You're my comfort. Thank you, Sam, thank you, thank you.
This was a joy.
Thank you so much. The River Cafe look Book is on sale. One hundred pages of beautiful photographs that will inspire you to cook. It's a look book, It's a cookbook. Order one now. Ruthie's Table four is a production of iHeartRadio Anatomized studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.