Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios.
Last week I spelled on a paddle with Vanessa king Or celebrating International Women's Day. Listening to Vanessa that evening, it became apparent that it really wasn't necessary for the rest of us to be there. It was her views on social justice, women in business, creativity and leadership that
everybody wanted to hear, most of all me. Her path towards Chief Business Officer of Conde Nasty International is a story of a young girl from Kenya a chieving remarkable amount in a British world through sheer, intelligence, motivation and determination. This we all know, but for me, the revelation was when Vanessa began talking about the food of her family, her culture, especially the cooking of her grandmother. Today we're here together to hear more about memory and food, change
and connectivity. As always, I will listen with awe, with love and deep admiration the recipe that you chose. Yes, you love artichokes.
I love artichokes and I love that you can only have them for a certain time in the year properly, and Italians do them incredibly well. I hope I pronounced this correctly, but it's for Carchoffi ala Piperno. You wanted to explain a little bit about the Piperno element.
Well, first of all, carcioffi. They're also called karchoffi, which is a word for artichoke in Italian ala Judea. And there's an area of Rome which is called the Jewish Quarter, which I suppose, like in many Italian cities, was a ghetto, and it's right near the Colisseum. And there's a restaurant there called piper Now and Richard and I used to go there. It's on the top of a little hill and you actually can overlook the cabin Ilia and it's
just a great little restaurant. And like a lot of Italian restaurants, you go there for one reason and yeah, one dish. And so there it's the artichokes dala Judea. And we call them for the cookbook artichokes al Peperna, because that's the name of the restaurant. Yeah it's good.
Well, I mean, get ready to be absolutely swarmed with exactly.
It might not be there anymore.
Okay, So this recipe serves six.
You need twelve reminiscent art chokes, sunflower oil, sea salt, and black pepper, and three large lemons. Right, so, you heat the oil to one hundred degrees in your deep fryer.
You need to have a deep fryer.
First of all, well, you can use a large saucepan with olive oil.
Peel away the leaves of the art choke, cut the stalks two centimeters from the heads. Fry the artichokes in batches until the leaves begin to crisp and the hearts soften. Drain on kitchen paper when cool, peel off the outside leaves, trim the tops of the artichokes. Increase the temperature of the oil to one hundred and seventy degrees. To fry the second time, this is a healthy one.
It does strain. We off the oil.
I have to say it's tasty. It's healthy in love.
So to fry the second time, you place two to three art chokes at a time in a hot oil and fry until crisp for about two to three minutes. Then flatten out the artichokes, set each on a board and gently separate out the layer of the head, exposing the heart. Squeeze between two plates season and serve with lemon amazing recipes.
But than I said, an choke has a head and a.
Heart, So I was thinking about myself, what do you read it for?
Can you start for lunch?
It depends.
So I'm very lucky because I entertain lot our clients and business partners. So we go out to We're in Mayfair and we go out to lovely Mayfair restaurants. So I'm at Scott's a lot carriages, I love the Mount Street restaurant and things which I all now associate with work, right, But then there are lots of days where I'm doing the business end, so I don't leave my desk all day, and my assistant will go and fetch me a salad and all some sushi.
I try to eat raw food in the day.
But the way it is that Vogue House is each magazine kind of dominates a floor.
So I worked on GQ for years.
I was running that business, and I was that's the first floor, and then you graduate up and Boga's the fifth floor. And there was always this idea that nobody eats at Vogue, you know, so people would deliver. You'd see in the reception of Vogue House. You know, cakes and these amazing things being delivered, and we'd all sort of scoff, Oh, well, you know they'll be in the bin and needs them up there, and you know a GQ.
We all sort of it was food everywhere all the time, you know, and actually is a big misconception because.
We were Yeah, we work really hard.
It's a really hard working team, the Vogue team. I still now I'm overseeing all of the brands at Conde Nas but I still sit with Edward on the fifth floor. And he loves to eat.
We love to eat.
We love to plan a dinner. We love to incorporate a bit of our culture into dinners. So even when we did his wedding, his wedding was at long leads and it helped him to plan that. It was amazing. But we were saying, you know, we need to have John Off in there, which caterists can go. Yeah, we did, and we had you know, he loves spicy food. Anytime he comes here, he'll always say, can I have chili and chili Island, So we had chili sauces and everything.
So it's talking about food eating a lot of times he and I eat our lunch at desks you know, across from each other. So he'll have steam vegetables and you know, some fish or chicken or something, and I'll have sushi. But we sit together and eat it if we're if we're doing a working lunch. Otherwise I'm out with clients.
When we talked to Edward Nifl, and he just felt quite a lot about wanting to change the culture of you know, the stick thin model and the denial of food and the denial of pleasure and in order to show clothes at their best. Now that you're in such a senior position at Cande Nast, does that does that into your yes world? Yeah, what do you feel about it? Well?
I think that you know, the reason that Edwind and I's partnership kind of is so important to me is we had been separately and a bit together talking about this challenge in our industry, not just about beauty being about stick thin, which is kind of a bit preposterous, but just the idea that magazin scenes in media represented this kind of one really hard to reach version of being a woman, which we didn't grow up surrounded by my friends, weren't those people, and yet there were these
magazines that we loved representing that in an industry which we loved and we were a part of, you know, and so you know, the joy and beauty for both of us was all around, in different shapes and different sizes and different color And what we did behind the scenes at Vogue was build a group of people who didn't think like us. That's how you learn about new, exciting things if you're all speaking to each other. And you you know, Edwin and I actually have quite similar backgrounds.
I was laughing with Steve McQueen about our mothers did exactly the same thing.
Nurses in the same hospital did your mother?
Yeah, and so our background, you know, he can start a sentence, I can finish it because our backgrounds are so similar. And so what's really fascinating is talking to I mean, I could talk to Steve forever in a day or Edward forever in a day. But what I really love is to talk to people who didn't grow up like me. That's where and I think that's what I really want to challenge not only the media industry
but the but any organization to do a little bit more. Is, you know, how can you connect with people and wider audiences if you don't have them.
In your midst.
And food and food is the great connector with him, and he remember him talking very much about growing up like you, very very interesting conversations about his mother and the markets and kind of keeping the food of their parents and their grandparents and adapting to the food of the culture.
The keeping food alive through food is everything, you know, when when everything was planned around food, I remember all of our great excursions on the weekends being about going to get food, you know, so particularly in London in the nineties late eighties nineties, where a lot of the foods that we ate in the Caribbean in particular were
not readily available. You couldn't pop to, you know, Sainsbury's, so you'd go from West London to Dulstone Market because somebody told you that there was something there or what have you.
And Wembley Market.
We used to go to south All Market lots because the Indian community had lots of the ingredients and spices and so on that we used. And so that's really unifying. But I think with one of the best ways to get to know people and groups of new people when you're trying to connect and create these kind of diversity of perspective, spaces where you know it's through food.
Where were you born?
So from the very beginning, I was born in Kenya, in Nanuki. My father is Kenyan and my mother is from Saint Kitts in the Caribbean, Saint Kittenita, it's tiny into the islands. And they met here in London. It's kind of a strange pairing in the seventies, and it was quite a radical relationship.
There's because.
At that time Africans and people from the Caribbean did not spend that much time together.
They certainly didn't end up in relationships.
And London is the great sort of unifying space, right It's a true melting plot I think in the world.
They met here, they.
Fell in love, and my mother moved with my father to this strange land where she knew no language or the culture. Lots of her family didn't speak to her because of the move, and indeed lots of his family didn't speak to him because someone from yeah, from a different culture, and he was a very eligible bachelor.
So I was born in this kind of context.
Why did they both plan to come to London for a short time and then go home or did.
My father what did he do? He did some of his education here.
He's a military man, but he studied engineering, came to London with studies and works and things. And my mother, who is a great inspiration in my life, has moved here at seventeen on her own. She took the flight and came to London to become a nurse with the NHS. And it was a time where British were recruiting heavily in the Commonwealth to establish the welfare states to come and become nurses and.
Bus drivers and all of those things.
And she had a big kind of dreamy heart and came here thinking this is going to be an incredible life.
Then to us supported to yeah, Kenny.
Was it a small village, Quite a small village, yes, And it's in a sort of mountainous area. His family were in Coffee, so yeah, quite rural, but they were very well off. But my mother had a very difficult time settling in there. And this is where food comes in because she was encountering women who didn't understand her literally and figuratively. She only spoke English and they often spoke five languages, you know, and so the language barrier
was there. She didn't speak Swahili, she didn't speak the dialect as well, and so food was her way to connect with people. She used to say to me, it's quicker to learn addition than to learn a language. And I think one of the most ingratiating things you can do in a new culture is you know, know some basic words to greet people. And she looked at food in the same way. If you could cook the food really well, it was a show of respect. So she learned to cook, which I also found strange because she
had cooks and nannies and all of those things. But she loved to cook, and.
She loved to cook before.
Yeah, my grandmother was a great cook.
And grandmother and Saint KITT's.
Yeah, so we're all over the place, and my.
Family are not a family who say I love you a lot, but we're incredibly loving family and expressed through stories, like everyone in my family is a bit of a joker, you know, funny stories and food.
Yeah, she was a kitchen Like do you remember the kitchen in the house?
Well, I didn't.
I we left Kenya at when I was eighteen months old. I don't have any real memories. But again, she would cook the dishes to keep I guess the Kenyon in me alive. So we left when I was eighteen months old. We moved to Saint Kits and then we came to London and she would cook ugalley and soka mawiki and mung beans and these are Kenyan dishes.
What are the first two? I know? Mung beans?
Yeah, So soka mawiki is it's like collared greens or kale with tomatoes and onions, and you tend to have it with rich dishes, so like a beef stew or stewed mung beans and ougalley, which is like a maze kind of it's almost like a not a mashed potato, but it's quite a firm, dense carrier almost for shoes and things. And the soukamwiki is like a palate cleanser.
So she would make these dishes for us, my sister and I, I guess, to keep that Kenyan culture alive in us growing up, moving around, living in belonging to three places. Food was a brilliant connector to places we'd left so that they didn't become lost, but also a really good way of connecting with somewhere new, with new people, with new communities and within new life almost.
Well. Okay, So at two we went to live with my grandmother. My mother and father got divorced.
My mother came back to London to try and re establish herself by a house and all of those things, and we stayed in Sant Kits with her, visiting frequently with my grandmother. So I was very young, so I was stuck to her all the time. And she is definitely the most powerful sort of figure in my life.
My mother's a very powerful figure. We're very close.
When my grandmother is almost my heart, you know, and I gosh, I'm welling up.
Even talking about her.
It's so because when we spoke about this, No, she's not, but she's very much alive in me. I think about her every day, not only through food but also just her advice. Was amazing because it's so funny, it's really evocative thinking about this.
I'm getting emotional.
No, it's kind of happy to you know, when someone leaves a mark on your life that's so powerful and kind of runs through everything in my working life, whenever I'm up against any kind of challenge, in the way I raise my son, in the way that I connect to people, and what I place is important. These kind of figures are so strong, and I miss her, I really miss.
Her, but she's alive.
What was her food like? Describe? Was she in the kitchen all day long.
I don't remember her not wearing an apron or some sort of overalls. So she made food that was needed, constant nurturing, you know.
Her house was also.
Where everyone dropped in, so my sister and I lived there on and off. Four of my cousins lived there, and my uncle's children, and then she was sort of everyone's grandmother. So her house was, Oh, it was so fun. It was a wash with children all the time. And I was the youngest, so I was always with her. I slept in her bed, and I was literally on
her apen strings. So her food was very rich. It was like almost like a warm embrace, you know, hearty, and lots of sort of stews and meats and heavily marinated delicious comfort food, dumplings and you know, sort of starchy, delicious things. And she kept her own little farm, at least it felt like a farm to me. She grew her own vegetables, she had her own fruit tree, She
would graft her own strains, of mango. She grew herbs and things that people would come and visit her to buy, and she kept her own animals, and I used to help her tend to those little gardens, and then she'd make up these amazing dishes from food, and she'd tell me stories of the food as well.
So did she grow up in poverty or did she grow up any Yes? She did.
And I look at sort of my life now, which is so much on her shoulders, and all of the opportunity I have now, and I think about how important circumstances. So she was a really intelligent woman. She was the most prolific reader I ever knew. She was either cooking or reading. But she was forced to leave school at fourteen. Her mother was a She also had a slightly strange parentage in that her father was previously a slave and her mother.
Was grandfather was a slave. Yeah in syn kids, yeah, and probably like the Civil War probably yeah.
But her mother, which is really strange, was a Portuguese woman from a slave owning family, so it's really really unusual that way around. And her mother was not very maternal at all, and so they fell upon hard times. Her mother was seen I think as having made bad decisions, and so she didn't grow up surrounded, as I understand it, by lots of love, and so she created this love loving world. But the reason that it's important at how she grew up is her food was very much worker food.
You know, she made food that they would have made for men and women who worked picking cotton.
She was picking cotton at fourteen.
Years old in the fields, and then after that taking books under the house to read them in evening and cooking and supporting the households and so on. So she had this really eclectic upbringing where she really valued education and missed her opportunity I think, to have a full education. But food was also the key joy.
Yeah, and so would you sit down? Would you go to school and then every evening come home and sit down for dinner. Would there be for dinner on the table for you? Yes?
Yeah, So my grandmother always liked us to sit and eat together again because I think sharing stories and storytelling was really important, and food's a really good way to get everyone together and understand what their days were like. I was very young, so I was always around the house, So I looked forward to people coming home with their stories of the day and enjoying that over food.
And so.
We would have great mounds of kind of rice and vegetables and these kind of incredible with me and everybody would pile in and pour in and go for second plates. It wasn't a very formal sit and the table was also off the kitchen, so it was kind of part of the action, and it was just a really lovely way to be connected with the people around you.
Breakfast, what was breakfast? Icen that? Do you remember?
Do you know what's so funny? I do not remember breakfast.
What I remember, really really vividly at my grandmother's house is the back door of her house was at the.
Base of it.
We called it a mountain, but it was really just a big hill and there were mango groves and things, and so we would take buckets in the morning. We'd just run out barefoot, all the kids together with the older kids, and go and pick fruit and slightly gorge ourselves on the things.
So you left this kind of your mother took you to London, then, did.
You, Yeah, so my mother, while we were having this lovely time, you know, with my grandmother, learning these amazing lessons about life and opportunity and food and you know, all of those things. My mother was in London, toiling away. She was very focused on us moving to London and having the kind of cultural access that you could have in London. Being part of different communities was a big thing for her, and getting a really, really great education.
So she was working very hard. She'd managed to on a nurse's salary by a three bedroom house in West London, which was her dream, and were all while coming back every three months to sink it to visit us. But this sort of sad thing happened where she became this kind of glamorous figure in my life. But I didn't. I didn't really connect that we were ever going to live together. So when we came to London, it was a bit of a room awakening, to be honest, Like, I missed my grandmother terribly.
Had you ever experienced, either in Kenya or in Saint KITT's any form of racism, you probably hadn't, had you No.
That was also really strange, and I'm also really grateful for that, because when I did encounter any forms of racism, it just didn't touch my soul because it just seemed preposterous. You know, the idea that I could be anything bad or good just because I'm black was silly because I'd come from these cultures where everyone's black, good, bad, you know, and.
Everything in between.
And so I think I'm really with retrospect, you know, grateful to that foundation where I was never affected deeply by any kind of racist comments and things like that.
It just felt a bit silly.
I went to Catholics, where there's a lot of immigrant communities anyway, you know, lots of Irish Catholics, Italians, Eastern Europeans, and so there was that unity in difference anyway. And then I really think I definitely remember to encounters in primary school. I told my mother and she was, of course, you know, came down to the school and frustrated, but it just didn't really really affect me. I think the comments are don't affect me as much as seeing injustice
so more discrimination. But I didn't I couldn't understand that until later on. Yeah, but I was very lucky to be surrounded by lots of people who had had their version, you know, of the kind of immigrant experience. The other thing was my mother is an incredibly charming woman.
Everybody loves her.
She just brought people together all the time, and so our house was always filled with quite people from all different backgrounds. And again I'm really grateful to that. Now I tend not to walk into spaces and feel uncomfortable. I don't mind being the only person of a I don't mind being the only woman in the room, or the only personal color or whatever. I think that's because
of her, because she was hard not to like. And I remember my mother used to host these dinners and Sunday afternoons and you'd have, you know, her friend, her nursing friends, the High Commission of Saint Kits would be casually there and like other sort of dignitaries are our little house, you know, and these people for you know, the woman from a counsel estate around the corner who sometimes helped to pick us up from school because she
was working and things like that. And she just threw everyone together and served up food.
And did she adapt her cooking when she came here, did she change to more British cooking or did she keep for cooking Kenya?
She kept the cooking a lot of sink it and Kenya, But she did we did do these sort of English nights so Fridays we'd have would have like British food, and we thought it was really exotic. We'd have egg and chips for breakfast, no for dinner, which we kind of was. Really this was so bizarre to us, you know, that's like, wow, potato and an egg and that's the whole meal. And lots of different sort of cuisines that you could get here, which you couldn't get so readily
and sink it and things. So Fridays and sometimes Saturdays were days to either eat out or she'd recreate frankly with much more flavor, you know. But yeah, no, she cooked, and I remember everybody loved her food. I always thoughts when my friends came to my house, they came to see her rather than going to see me, you know.
Other people's houses for food. Would it be very different from your own?
Yes, yeah, and it was such a culture shock. I always loved to go. A very close friend of mine is Polish and she in her house, her grandmother had a sort of annex in her house. She was blind, actually her babcher and we became very close. And now I think about it, it's probably because i'd never really made the connection of my relationship with my grandmother, but she would teach me to make pierogies and all of these amazing sort of Polish dishes which I would never
have eaten before. And I would have Irish shoes at you know, my Irish friends out. I had a friend called Margaret who had she was one of thirteen. I found initially the food really bland, and my first encounter with English food was at school, so it's kind of you know, the worst, yeah, and then it sort of London opened up to me through having these experiences with different families from different immigrant backgrounds and how they cooked
and so on. So that was really important in me falling in love with being in London after arriving in that cold October and feeling ripped away from my favorite place. The idea of Vogue was that it was at the time that Edward took over exclusive really in an excluding way, unfortunately, which was the style of the time. But the idea that you would critique the industry, which was our bread
and butter. So the business of Vogue is advertising from luxury fashion brands who at the time celebrated very thin, very white, a very particular youth, and a very particular type of beauty. So although everyone loved Edward's idea and vision, there was also this almost unanimous sort of gulp and fearful, very fearful, this, this is going to destroy the business evogue.
I remember before the first issue on the talk about you know, the change, the vision of yourself and the Edwards and that first issue was amazing. Tell me about that first issue, and it kind of does relate to food, doesn't it about food?
It's true, I think that. I think it's very much about joy.
And if you deny yourself anything right, you deny yourself getting older, you deny yourself gaining a few pounds for the joy of food, you deny who you are in terms of your demographic makeup, it's not joyful. And so that's what I read, That's what I articulate from what Edward's vision was, and it was also my shared views, you know, and everything I've described about how I grew up.
It's about great storytelling, it's about joy, it's about connection, it's about acceptance of difference, and so this just spoke to me.
It also instills a sense of failure if you're not you know, yes, so damaging too. Definitely, and growing up that sense of failure if you don't fit into what it was.
You know what was so incredible in that first year is so Edward and I went on this mission where he basically said, you know, if this doesn't make money, then I'm not going to be doing this for very long. I know I can do what I need to do and people will love it, but I need to be able to do it for a while. And no one can see a path to making this business work. And so I set about creating a new business. And it was scary stuff because Vogue is half of Condinas business.
So we have ten brands and half of the business is Vogue, so you really don't want to mess that up, right, So everybody was sort of saying, it ain't broke, you know, it ain't broke, leave it alone. But I knew what was coming, and so we had to speak to the brands. We had to try and ask them to be different. We had to say, you are going to need to
make samples in different sizes. We can create content for you because your ad is now going to look slightly strange in the backdrop of this kind of melting pot with different races and sizes, and so I had to create a different business model for Vogue, which invited in different brands to work with us, invited our existing brands
to work differently. Also that we could bolster up this incredible vision where women felt seen and they felt like they weren't excluded, and that the idea that a magazine like Vogue didn't have to be excluding, it could be aspirational and inclusive was radical creatively, but it was radical from a business perspective as well, because a lot of the times when people take those radical creative risks, it's on it with a platform which is not so big
and not so visible and not so scary. And that first year issue after issue getting letters, you know, people taking the time to write letters or long emails to say, thank God, I finally see myself. This is amazing and was so gratifying. It just you know, powered us on. But it was an amazing time and still is.
You've changed the world. Would you say as well? In fashion, is that you see more runways with different models of different sizes and different shapes. You know, the friends that I've had who were in models, not many of them, but I just saw it was almost painful to see the relationship with food to being able to do their job, you know, to be.
Able to I think we still have a lot of work to do there.
I definitely feel that British Vogue has changed the magazine world and the content world significantly. I remember the first September that we went. Rihanna was our first, the first black woman I believe, to be on the cover of British Vogue, and in.
September that was twenty twenty.
You know, it's very recent, and you know, every time we did these and people would say that's the first or the first, and you'd say, my god, this is crazy.
It's not like we're going for someone obscure. It's realnit, you know.
And then I remember the subsequent September after that first set, remember issue having a black woman on the cover. I went to the newsstands as I do, and every single magazine cover had.
A black woman on it, and I think this is.
Incredible, you know, because everybody thought, well, this is what we need to do now. And then I became a bit afraid that it was trend base. So people were saying, what would Edward do? What would they do at Vogue and let's create the output without the work behind the scenes. Talking to different people, having different people create a real melting pot. And this idea of diversity of perspective is really.
Important to me.
It's one of the big criticisms when Edward was appointed and I was appointed, was you're going to appoint two black people, you know, so it's like all or nothing, and lots of people felt it was kind of fad like. And I had been at Conde inass at that point for nearly a decade. I transformed GQ. I had, you know, a really Jonathan knew how disappointed me without interview to the job of running British for based on my track record.
But what people could see externally.
Was Okay, they're doing a it's a thing they're they're bringing in, you know.
And so there was lots of criticism.
It was quite shocking actually that people were quite vocal about it.
And so.
When I saw those September covers, I initially thought, this is amazing, this is what we've always wanted. There are plus sized women and women of color, and this is amazing. And then I looked at the mass head and I thought, ah, not very much has changed Behind the scenes and to really make the industry change. And really the new frontier is not who's on the cover, it's who works.
Behind the scenes. And how mixed is it?
If food is memory and you have so many memories and it's been so good here about this journey from Kenya to sak Kids to the first Law of g Q and the top floor of FO and food is all that. It's also comfort. And so the question we ask everybody is if you need food for comfort, is there something you turn to.
When you do? I'm going to pick two.
One is pasta isn't past the universal comfort food?
Certainly mine?
I think almost everyone you know, A really good fresh pasta is just comfort. But food from my grandmother's kitchen is my ultimate. It's the if the food, the European food I love is like a kiss, amazing kiss. My grandmother's food is like the warm embrace. And so I would have. One of the things she would make for lunch were something called saltfish fritter. So it's again I think from her mother, who's Portuguese. The Portuguese have a thing called baccalout Yeah yeah, yeah, salted cord in sync.
Its my grandmother would make saltfish cakes from them, which is just mixed with eggs, onions, chives, peppers, chilis and then fried into these patties. And you'd have that with planting and some eggs and it's absolutely divided.
Do you make it?
Yes, Yeah, that's that is my comfort food that I make for myself.
And yeah, it's slightly adapted.
But I wish i'd met your grandmother.
She's amazing. Well you're kind of meeting her. Foo.
Thank you so much. It's a beautiful conversation.
Thank you, it's so special.
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 Look Book Recipes for cooks of all ages. Ruthie's Table four is a production
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