Next week is our hundredth episode of Ruthie's Table four, and to celebrate, we thought we would turn it over to you. If you have a question for me, a food memory you'd like to share, or a recipe you just need help with, Record a message and send it in the phone numbers in the text below. Ask me anything. Happy Birthday, Ruthie's Table four. I would like to think that Simon sebag Montefiori and I have much in common. We both had what he calls a loving and indulgent childhood.
We believe in trust, and openness and flexibility. Our families fled the pogroms of Romanov Russia. We see food as one of the focuses of our life. Simon and I also love to tell and listen to stories, food and history, food and fiction, food and exploring.
I love the stories.
Simon has lived them his books and television programs. Katherine the Great Potempkin, Stalin the Court of the Red Star, Erusalem, The Biography Titans of History, the Romanovs sixteen thirteen to nineteen eighteen, and most recently a fantastic book, The World of Family. History of Humanity, educates, informs, and inspires us who read, listen, and watch. Today we're here together on a beautiful autumn day in the River cafe to discuss this and more.
Lucky me, lucky me, too great to be here.
Thank you for coming. So Simon, you've chosen. You wrote to me, you called me, We spoke about it that of all the recipes in our twelve cookbooks, you wanted to do the Canelini bean.
And jacorea soup.
So you could read the recipe and then we could discuss why you chose this.
Of course, chaquaura and canelini bean soup. So this serves six two hundred and fifty grams of cooked cannellini beans, two hundred grams of chacorea leaves, half a garlic bulb, fresh sagely, two garlic clothes chopped, three tablespoons olive oil, and parsley leaves chopped with extra virgin olive oil. This has been marked up by Ruthie herself. This is a proper This feels like an archival document. It reminds me
of working in the archives. When you see Stalin or Kafine the Great, I think in the grate.
Of restaurants, not to Stalin, you might ask the my stuff. They might say, I'm the style.
I'm not asking that question, Ruthie, because I might not like the answer.
I don't know enough about it, but I'm happy to take a woman over anybody over Starlin.
I think that you're a stalin, but anyway to cook it? In a large salespan. Cook the garlic, then the olive oil until soft but not brown. Stir in the parsley, Add the checoria leads to the oil and braize until slightly soft before adding the beans. Put three quarters the beans into a food process so with some of the reserve cooking liquid, and the mixture should be thicker and thicker,
and return to the saucepan and season. Reheat if too thick, add more cooking liquid, serve with a generous amount of extra virgin olive oil. And I've already tried it.
God, am I going to be able to eat all that looks delicious?
I think I'm going to switch plates now from the Sea Bass too. I'd say this is going to River Cafe, Georgian lobbyo Beans because people always compare Georgia, which is one of my favorite countries, to Italy, especially to Sicily and the food there is a real mixer of Lebanese, Ranium, Persian and Italian, and they're basically my two favorite countries in terms of food.
So this soup is the ideal mix. Hi, I want to take it home with me? Can I take you home?
Remind Joseph? It is absolutely delicious, absolute delicious. Cannot waste a single bead, it's so good, and I think you've got I'll take thank you.
I'm here with Joseph. This is a River Cafe classic recipes.
It really is. It's in the Yellow Books, in the book two of our first books, and it's a real classic that we make. Almost every portion of the suit that I've ever eaten. Ruthy's made herself, and it really reminds me of her and arriving here and learning how to cook.
You know.
It's that is early days River Cafe for me. Anyway, it's more than maybe a bit more wintry. It's one of those recipes like many that it's just has few ingredients, you know. So it's has this chequoia, which is a wonderful green which gets labeled a kind of bitter green, but really, when it's well cooked, loses an awful lot of that bitterness and it's really rather sweet. And then Chile and then if you've got really lovely cannellini beans,
and that's kind of all it is. But it's amazing how those combination of a few things can be tweaked in different ways and it can actually be rather different. But it's you know, it's one of those rather hearty, quite thick country suits.
What do you think.
I absolutely loved it. It's a delicious mixture. Italian hammer Smith.
Would you say?
Georgia your part, the River Cafe part? And I love the way you've marked this up. Okay, well to keep And because because I found out I liked it, say much, I found out that they had a bigger pot of it. So I'm taking that home with me if I'm allowed, rather calf from the grade of the River Cafe.
So why did you choose it?
I chose it because bean soup has played a big part in my life, because I started off in the very early nineties with the fall of the Soviet Union, and I was always in Georgia, and Georgia became my favorite home from home.
I was there for all its.
Wars, its coups, it's tragedies, but also I came to love it's food, food, and the heart of its food. At the heart of Georgian cuisine is the bean soup, and lobbyer bean soup is the national Georgian dish, one of them, along with satze, via, kadschapori and all these other delicious dishes. But in Georgia they have the Georgian Supra, which is a feast, and there's a tamada who's elected the toast master. By the way, Stalin was always, of course toast master at his feasts, but he was a Georgian.
But of course normally the toast masters are a little bit more benign than that.
What does a toastmaster do?
He tells stories, He makes toasts quite often, he goes around the table and clinks glasses with different people. Basically, what's unique about the tamadam is that he's a storyteller as well, which brings us back, which is why I thought food and stories. But you know, I have many. When I was there, the Soviet Union was falling apart.
This is nineteen ninety.
Eighty nine, nineteen ninety, nineteen ninety one to sort of ninety four, and I was very lucky I've been an investment bank, I believe it or not. And I left investment banking and I went out there and I was in.
All the wars of the former Soviet Union, but.
Some of my favorite moments were in Georgia eating lobbyo beans once. I remember in the Assetian Wartias north of Tbilisi. It's a region that broke away from Georgia and was backed by Putin and is still backed by Putin.
But I went up to the.
War and I was with the Georgian side, and we were up at the top on this kind of amazingly beautiful mountain with these amazing Georgian churches on the mountaintops, and the fighters all lent their guns against the tree and a bit, so I was kind of imagining I was a a heming, you know, for whom the bell tolls. It was a little bit like that.
And there was this huge table laid out for a Georgian.
That's interesting that, during you know, the fighting, they had a table for a while.
Three boys had been killed in the village, so this was their funeral supper. So we all sat down and the Tamada took control. We all made toasts and everyone got drunk and drunk, and the food, more and more food kept arriving. And then after a bit I said to them, you know, you're gonna imagine we're on the top of this mountain, the blue sky in the distance. And I said to them, you know that I guess in the funeral happened earlier, because you know the boys were
buried earlier. I guess this is their funeral supper. And they said, no, they're with us, and they lifted up the table cloth and their bodies were under the table. So you can see why I have a visceral feeling for Georgian feasts.
Would it be very regional the food?
Did you find that Georgia is very different from Chechna, which is different from very.
The Caucusus is fascinating because it's it's the sort of borderland of empires. So there's a huge Persian influence. They controlled it for a long time. There's a huge Ottoman Turkish influence. They controlled it for a long time, and then the Russians, and now of course it's three independent republics, and Chechnya tried to break away. I was in the Chechen War in nineteen ninety four, so I witnessed all this amazing stuff happening. There's nothing like Georgian food and
Georgian food. It does have a touch of Lebanese food, touch the Persian food, Persian, Arab and Turkish, but it's not like any other because it's filled with coriander and tarragan and walnuts and a jeeka which is sort of chilli sauce. It's very original, it's not like anything else. I think you'd love it as it.
Was with me.
He has a brother in law based in Osborne and he's Georgian and he's actually doing the Georgian Film Festival. He called me this morning and has very very strong roots in Georgia and brought me a cookbook with a chef who had written it.
And it was so interesting. It was beautifully done.
First of all, it had a sense of the culture and that it had the cooking, the dumplings, a lot of dumplings too, which.
I forgot the name of.
But all the dishes have a sort of role, and in that way Geordian foot food. It's almost like the a story behind many of the dishes. It's not quite like a passover Sadan Knight, but the Georgian super That's the thing it's most similar to him is a pass over dinner because of the storytelling. Yeah, and of course Stalin used to sit up with his cronies and have these Georgians.
I think you alluded to the fact that he was a good that he was interested.
He loved Georgian food. His real name was Joseph Dugashphili. Many in Georgian names end in Adzi or Shwhili, which means son of and he came from Gorri, which is a small town in Georgia. Till it was about thirty or forty, he was completely Georgian. He spoke Georgian. But his mother was very ambitious for him and she wanted him to be a bishop or an archbishop.
She was very religious.
She got him into the seminary in Tibilisi, which is where he was trained to be a priest. There they were taught Russian, very good Russian, and if he hadn't been taught Russian, he could never rule the Russian Empire a Soviet Union.
Do you speak yeah, I can tell, well, I can tell when you were naming the soups and the names.
If you speak Georgian, you have to learn what it's nothing to do with, nothing to do with no.
It's nothing even has a different alphabet, and they have an amazing history in the sort of twelve. In the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth century, Georgia was a huge kingdom and at one point under the great Queen Tamara, who's another great female ruler who I write all about in the World Book. It ruled from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea and was one of the great powers of the Near East under a female ruler, which is quite something.
So going back to Stalin and being a good eater, when you were writing your book about him, what did you find out about his food?
He loved He loved lobbyo, and he loved kadjapori, and he loved all the soups. He loved loved chakapouli, which is the lamb stew, and he used to put Georgian bread in it, soak it and eat it. He was a great trenchman, one of his few winning features, I should say. But the interesting about Stalin was he reinvented himself several times. I mean, he became Stalin which means man of steel, in about nineteen twelve and before then he'd been basically Georgian and Stalin is a kind of
Russian style name, and so he really infented himself. He was kind of always a Georgian in terms of kind of eating and drinking. He loved Georgian wine, for example, and the thing he really loved was Georgians singing. Because Stalin surprisingly was the star choir boy of the seminary. His full setto was supposed to be the most beautiful full settle, very high and very pure, and when his voice broke he became a tenor. And even when he was dictator, even during the terror.
Just after the war.
During the war, he liked to sing to piano and he used to sing that there's a very famous Georgian song called Suliko, which he was his speciality was singing there. So he was this rather sinister choir boy, a choir boy.
Going back to the beginning and tell me about growing up in the Montafoury.
Father was a doctor who was also a psychiatrist. He had a very fascinating practice, so we grew up in a very kind of strange household because the surgery was under the house in Kensington. He had all sorts of patients. He was the sort of person that saw lots of people for free. But also he had people like Peter Seller's and Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. And they actually
did of sketch about him, did they. Yeah, because whatever you said to my father, whatever terrible thing you'd done as a child, he'd always say, don't worry, Simon, that's perfectly normal.
That's what from a psychiatrist and a father.
Five Yeah, and a father.
So their sketches, there's there's a sketch where they where they go to a psychiatrist based on my father and everything they say to him.
He says, don't worry. That's perfectly as it was the connection between the Montefori hospital and the Monterefori family.
Yeah, go back, because I tried to do your family treat I would say to Michael Ignatief, who was a mutual friend of ours, that his family killed my family probably. Yes, they were very white Russians, and my family were the you know, the fiddle around the real family that came from me tour. No, but they don't have a hospital named after our so there might be a diversion somewhere.
So just go back to the roots, because I think it goes into the eighteenth century, so maybe I can trace mine back to about nineteen o six, so I think it's quite different.
But tell me, well, my mom's family are from Lithuania like yours, right, V are you from Kiev?
So we were.
We were lit Vas and some of them for Odessa and some of them from Galitzia and Galitzianas a notorious which were dusd from Galicia which is sort of southern Poland around and Levolv which is in Ukraine. And Galitzianas were famous playboys, notorious womanizes and boulevardiers and food and they loved food. They were set, they were, they were.
They go together, don't they and you know, do you know.
What they were? They were Epicureans.
Yeah, nice, notorious and so that's my mother's family. But they were interesting because they got out when all the programs begun in three to four, just around the same time as we may have been on the same boat.
Yeah, but us got off in England and mine went to you know, Ellis Island.
Well, mine were tricked. We bought tickets for Ellis Island. But when week after about two days at sea, they said I'm afraid that you're getting off here, and so my family said, but hang on. So we bought tickets for New York and we haven't seen the Statue of Liberty, and they said, sorry, look at your tickets. And they looked at the tickets and they said, that's.
Not New York. It's New Cork. New Cork, Yeah, which is Ireland. So they got off there. But the Montafis have a longer story.
So that's your father's family, Yeah.
My father's family, and they would come the sea banks. Came from Morocco sebah Sebach, so that's an Arabic name. And the Montafiories were originally called, we think called Carvero, which was Spanish, and they were expelled from Spain in fourteen ninety two. They went to Portage and in Portugal they were expelled in fourteen ninety eight. So they went back to Spain and converted to Catholicism. But they were
only pretending they were crypto Jews. And when Philip the second was trying to recruit governors to govern New Spain, which was Mexico, he gave them the job of governing a huge province. But there was a feud. They were denounced by their servants who spied on them, and they would announce for secretly being Jews, and most of the
family were burnt alive in Mexico City. It's very sinister because when you read about these after Cortez, after this is about sixteen hundred and one son got away and went to Italy and adopted the name Montefiori because it ends.
As sort of is.
Yeah, yeah, So you grew up in this household a mother from his families from Lithuania. Your father felt did he identify very strongly with being Jewish, and the.
The family was the very Jewish family.
But my father's family, monte Seabag Montefuries were sort of fox hunting Jews.
They were very different.
While my mother's family, she would kill me for saying this, but they were stettle Jews from Lithuania and Poland and so on.
And and your mother's mother then she would have been born in Lithuania, and she took Lithuanian food.
No, they didn't cook Lithanian, but they didn't really eat lat kids and that because bagels and chick but chicken soup was key. I remember when I was a child, my parents had a huge row once and my father was being impossible and my mother just got a thing of chicken soup and pored it over his head.
Was it hot?
It was not that hot, lucky, but then they started laughing. But it was a very good for a psychiatrist. Right, did this psychiatrist say that's not Do you say that's normal?
I think he would.
He would say that was perfectly normal kitchen behavior. I don't know if that happens in your kitchen, We don't know.
We stopped short of boring super people. So your father would be downstairs with his patients. Would there be family meals? Would there be would you say, how many siblings do you have?
I've got three brothers. I'm the youngest of the whole family. We were always aware that the surgery was going on downstairs, and we were always told never repeat anything that you see in this house because it would ruin your father. But they were very open us, so we knew all the stuff that was happening, and all sorts of crazy
stuff happened. People will kind of arrive in the middle of the night with their sort of having had a row with their wife, or you know, somebody was giving birth to a baby or something.
It was like growing up in a theater. It was very exciting.
And then but she would have would he come up for dinner?
And then you come up for dinner?
And who did the cooking?
My mother did the cooking, and there'd be there would always be delicious kind of food, but not really Jewish food but actually very English food, like roast chickens, roast lambs.
Yeah. So she was born and she.
Was born in h She was born and she was born in Nottingham or Newcastle. Our grandfather was the first Jewish Lord mayor elected in Newcastle and he ran for He ran for Lord Mayor and when he was painting, they used to say, we hear you you lie in bed all day and he replied, so would you if you were married to missus Wolfe, which was which was which worked.
Very well, the one in the election.
One on the election and I've got her picture in my room and she does look.
Quite quite.
Campaigning.
It was food important, though, it was it the family meal that was important.
Food, food was all important.
We're absolutely epicurean ruth and we absolutely live for food and we love delicious food and hate bad food.
Did your father.
Cook no, you never cooked. You never cooked.
Did your mother have help? So that she did have help domestic she.
Did have help, And it was all about meals, and everything happened at meals, and I still live for eating.
And then your boarding school was that a shock?
There was a shock? Was a shock.
Well, the food was appalling for a start, But on the other hand, my parents were so kind of over indulgent. And I think if I hadn't gone to boarding school, I'm not sure I've ever been able to function at all in the world. I mean, I was so close to my parents because I was eight years youngers and after.
Mistake and then boarding school.
And because I was Jewish, I had to have special food. I remember once go into the kitchen and there was a very old lady plucking a chicken, and they said, that's your food, because that's all you can eat.
There are other Jewish.
There were virtually no other Jewish children at my prep school, and then at Harrow there were quite a lot of Jewish children.
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Thank you you are now historian.
But in the beginning, did you feel that sense that you had to not just write about what was happening but livett.
Yeah, I wrote long letters about describing everything I saw in the minds, the politics, and of course I worked in a kibbutz as well in Israel and that was also fascinating. And I saw amazing things now as well, because that was the beginning of the invasion of Lebanon, which was appalling mistake on the Israeli's part. So both of those things were good preparations. And the third adventure I went on was going to visit Jewish Refuseniks in Russia in the Soviet Union with my father.
Was that the first time you worent yes.
And that was the beginning of my relationship with Russia. And so all of these things kind of were good preparations.
But year was that.
Eighty four, As I say, I went with Richard to Moscow. He was chairman of the tape at the time, and the idea was to go with the director to try and get an exchange of turners that Britain would give them for the and I'm in the hermitage that was in Leningrad, and we ate nothing. I wanted to have the bors. I wanted to have the Russian.
Food, but it was quite severe, it was it was miserable.
Really, did you discover good Russian food?
I didn't find any more food. I mean, I love stirle at fish.
Sturgeon, surgeon.
Yeah, and that is there's are fish that sort of mainly live in the Caspian and that they create caveat of course, but Prince Potemkin loved sturgeon. He was obsessed with sturgeon. He used to continually roast sturgeon wherever he went, and he had it brought for him packed in ice, of course, all for hundreds of miles. But we didn't have any of that when we were there. But when I went back later after farding school, I went to Cambridge.
Let's talk about that for a moment.
What was it?
Did you live in rooms and did you eat? Again?
I live in rooms in the dining room sometimes, but what I really loved doing was eating. But there was a great Turkish kid bab house there and we lived in there. It was called Omar and Ossy. Omar and Ossie are very key figures in my university year. So that was the sort of best food we had. We used to go there every night and we lived on that delicious food. And whenever I travel anywhere, I want to experience the food. And you know, one of the reasons why I've often written about family history.
I mean, all of these books.
Like the Romanovs All the World is just because family is a way of writing, conveying continuity but also depth and grit of life. And so I always wanted my books people to know what people were wearing, what music they listened to, and what food they were eating. Hopefully, if I could find out food is what families do together, even sort of families that barely hang together still eat together normally, don't they.
Pre nineteen seventeen, that would be the Roman Macaractor.
Yeah, the Romanovs.
Yeah, was there a real sense of pleasure and food? And for wealthy people. I mean would the Romans, what would the aristocracy have eaten?
Well, I mean they love French food. Of course, they all had French chefs who they brought over. What they would have eaten all these splendid proper Russian dishes borshed.
Yeah, let's talk about the very garlicy with beetroot.
Do you like it hot?
Ginger? I like it hot? You how do you like?
My experience of Russian food was there was none of none of that in our house. But my father is a treat would drive us maybe once every couple of months and we'd go down to New York City and we'd see the big ships and then we would go to the Russian tea room for love before seeing a musical.
What would you eat that?
And so we would have the bleanies and I think you could have the choice of cold or heart borsh. I prefer it hot as well. You can really feel the flavors.
I think it's delicious. And also there's cinnamon and it isn't that ginger. And even in my time we used to have massive amounts of caveat and believing and it is huge and that is delicious when it's done properly. And that's course named after the Stroganov family, and they
are fascinating family. They were the conquistadors of Russia. They were the they were the family that conquered Siberia because they were called the Cortes of Russia other Strogovs, and they were They rose from merchants who started off having sort of salt farms and doing mining and training, and then they i'ven the Terrible allowed them to expand into Siberia and in just a few decades fifty years or a little over fifty years, the Russians made it all
the way to the Pacific and conquered. They had to just there was an amazing there was an amazing kingdom there called the Karnate of Sibia, which was a Genghist rule by Genghis Khans descendants, and they destroyed that, that Karnate, and then they went unconquered Siberia and the strong offs, of course became very rich and became counts and aristocracy. But they started off with their own private army of Cossacks conquering Siberia.
So that's my struggle. And they were the ones who was invented. Be strong invent it.
Because I always thought, how fabulous to have a have a dish named after you, you know. So we used to go to a restaurant in Paris that had the Grand before and there was a big treat and they would have a dish called pigeon, Prince Ranier whatever.
Yeah, I thought that would be quite bad. I didn't know that beef struggle. There's a dessert, isn't its?
Yeah, I think it's very I'd love to have a dish.
Okay, we could we could name we can think of a name.
Well, that would be exciting.
You're interested in history and food and culture and family. Let's just take Prussia and you know, growing up in Russia at a different period of the twentieth century or the twenty first century, how would food explain some of what you're seeing the wealth of the nation, the poverty of the nation, the Gorbachev period, the Oligarch period, the Putin period. Do you see that kind of.
Reiving food was Food was a hugely important part of world history and Russian history. And it's interesting because until about two hundred, one hundred and fifty years ago, it was still massive famines of the time around the world. But scientific improvements in fertilizer and medical advances were the two things that really enabled the explosion of world population and the reason why most of the famines in the
twentieth century were actually man made famines. They weren't the sort of famines that used to happen in the eighteen forties or in India, and most of them were failures of supply rather that or man made political policies. And an example of that is that you know, is the other famines in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties were there was a huge famine in Russia which the Tsar
Alexander the Third denied existed. Then, of course, after the Russian Civil War, there was another huge famine in Russia. Then in the late twenty stalin the civil war do you mean nineteen eighty nineteen eighteen.
To twenty one, do you call it a civil war?
Called the Russian Civil War?
There were two revolutions, one in February seventeen, one in October seventeen, and for a while the Bolsheviks looked like they'd keep power but lose most of the Russian Empire. And then they launched a series of wars from the center, basing themselves in Moscow again not Petersburg, and they reconquered.
They defeated the divided white powers who were trying to stop them, and then they started to retake all the provinces and the ethnic groups that had been part of the Tsarist Empire, so that included Georgia we were talking about in Armenia.
Central Asia.
They failed to take Poland, but they succeeded in taking Ukraine, which was very decisive because Ukraine was the bread basket of the Russian Empire and traditionally Ukrainian grames exported out
of Odessa and Nikolaiath to the world. But when Stalin started to collectivize the farms in the late twenties, he specially victimized the Ukrainians and other minority peoples to the Kazakhs, like a million and a half Kazakhs also died during collectivization, so there was a huge famine while selling food abroad. So the creation of the Soviet Union, the creation of the Stalin dictatorship, all really was based around shortage of food.
And that was how Stalin broke the peasantry and broke the Ukrainians was by starving them.
Do you think one of the reasons why Putin still gets so much support is that he has managed to create a sort of secure food environment, unlike his processors.
Of course, Putin has a special connection to food because his grandfather was a chef. I didn't know as a cook, and he cooked at the store. He was the chef at the Astoria Hotel which is now owned by Rocco Forte.
Story Hotel Moscow in St.
Petersburg, in St. Peter and he was the chef. The grandfather was the chef, was one of the chefs there. And while he was there, of course he cooked for everybody, but he cooked for a Spoutin and then when there's where evolution happened.
Strap father grandfather and he joined.
He then joined the secret police the nkv D as chef and cooked for Lenin and Stalin was one of Stalin's chefs. So he's one of the most world historic chefs in all of history because he cooked for us boot In all sorts of grand dukes of course in the Astoria Hotel. But then Lenin and Stalin, of course Stalin chefs were all in this all secret police. They were called the service staff and they were within the n k v D.
I wonder if I have any in my kitchen put is interested in food. Did you say, do you know is he a good eater?
I don't think. I don't think he's an epicurean at all. To be a very very.
Unsympathetic, harsh somewhat joyless man. I would have I would have said, not very interested in culture. So he does readly never you've never met I've never met him.
Why not? Did you before? He was before?
I'd like to like to have met him. But then I'd like to have met everybody. Yeah, you know, as a historian, you want to I'd like to have liked to have met everybody.
And I've We all have our fans and are not fans, and our detractors. But I know that Putin is a fan of your work. Hey, how do you know that? And also what's it like?
Well, you know, the bizarre thing about Putin was that, as I said earlier, kaf from the Grade and Potemkin and the Romanovs like Peter the Great were the people who got Ukraine for Russia. And so when I wrote my first book, Ka from the Grade and Petemkin, you know, I was approached by the Minister of Culture and also
people in the President's office. They said to me, could you write a little essay because the book isn't translated into into Russian, could you write a little essay about this subject?
Which I did.
They said to me, like, we're very interested a certain important person is very interesting in reading your book and finding out about the Crimea and how Patenkin took Ukraine and the Crimea. This is in nineteen ninety nine and two thousands, twenty three years ago. We were all filled with hope about dad Emir Putin and that he was
a liberal, and Tony Blair raved about him. And you may wonder why Russians don't have their own books on this subject, but the reason is because under Stalin and the Soviet Union, Catherine the Great and Patenkin were very out of fashion and weren't studied very much. Anyway, I did that, and then afterwards, when the book was translated into Russian, I was approached again by the Minister of Culture who said, a certain personage has loved your book
and he would like to give you a present. So, of course, with Vladimir Putin was always a little worried about what the present's going to be. But the present was we're opening Stalin's archives. Would you like to be the first to study to have access to them. So that was the book Stalin The Call of the Redsar but jumped twenty two years and when Putin wrote his essay about how Ukraine didn't exist as a state and as a people, and started quoting stuff from the history
books like mine. I realized that he was going to invade Ukraine. And it's fascinating because when he took Kierson, the city of Khison, one of Potemkin's cities, that's where Petemkin is buried. And when he withdrew, which was just over six months ago, he stole Patmkin's body.
So the history, well, we don't know where it is.
But what I think he's going to do is create a sort of big tomb in mausoleum in Moscow for Prince Potemkin. But Prince Potemkin and ca from the Great were children of the Enlightenment. They'd have hated Putin and his Russia today. But the full story is in my books the Romanovs and Caa from the Great and Potemkin.
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Dot co dot UK.
When you described Ukraine as the bread basket and the grain, I mean that is something we read really since the war started. What is happening with the food now? In the war is the grain going that?
This has really made Africa sotham more than anywhere right now.
Right now.
Many African states like South Africa for example, had very good relations with the Soviet Union and their liberation movements were backed by the Soviet Union. They blamed the West and the hypocrisy and in of the West, even though it's the war of the Russian War and Russian invasion of Ukraine that has actually caused the food shortages. But such as human affairs, it doesn't always it is not
always based on reason. But you know, Ukraine became independent when the Soviet Union broke up, and in some ways Ukrainian sense of nation has intensified thanks to Putin's viciousness.
And food in Ukraine. Have you been during the what have you been to Ukraine?
I haven't been since the war, but I was there when I was in the late nineties and I traveled to a death I loved. Odessa Do Desa is one of the great cities in the world. One of my favorites. And everyone there eats caviat and of course and sturgeon, and sturgeon steak is the best food you have there.
And that's a piece of sturgeon which you've grilled.
You grill.
Yeah, you can have it with some sort of spicy Caucasian sauce like Adjiki sauce.
It's delicious.
Tell me, so you are a writer, you have of you work at home. I know that your studies in your house and your wife, Santa also is a So tell us about food in your house. Now, we've been at your parents' house and boarding school and college and traveling as an historian.
We're very pescatarian. We eat a lot of fish, and we love tuna. We love swordfish, and we grill a lot of sortfish. We love fresh kind of Mediterranean style food. But I also have various specialties. I do some of the cooking. And my favorite dish is an amazing sort of pasta filled with fresh tomatoes, fresh onions, fresh chili, garlic, and fish. I often put sardines in it, or sea bass, and it's quite spicy.
I put a lot of chili, a Sicilian sardines.
Yeah, it's interesting about you because the Italians had this rule of you never have an egg pasta with fish, but we do crab an egg pasta and then and you would never have all these kind of rules. You won't have cheese with fish in a pasta, and we put we do a langustine with peccorina and Parmesant's like a fish that I actually ate in Verona, and so I think, you know, fish pastas are.
Really Another thing I think is Italian rules are made to be broken, Yeah, some of them, because they're quite augmatic about what you can do with their food, and sometimes you know, one has.
To break rules. Even though this is heresy.
Of course, it's also a regional you know that somebody in one town will do something and then the next town they won't.
Well, it's the same even in small even in Georgia, which we started off talking about. You know, there's that they put eggs in everything in a Jaria, which is on the coast a Jarian Akazi, which is the Black Sea coast where Stalin had all his houses, by the way, but they always put an egg on everything there, while you know in land in that in the most of Georgia they don't.
As true writers. Do you have a routine for your writing? Do you know that you started a certain time?
It's total chaos, is it. I mean, when I'm not writing, I don't. I just don't do anything. And I spend the whole time sitting in cafes, phony people and texting people and reading the paper, which is the best thing. But when I am I'm writing, I live like a Kohener bite, like a monk. I live in a very sort of very disciplined way, and get up it really early.
In the morning, like at six in the morning.
And I mean, writing The World, this is my Natus book was definitely the hardest thing I've ever done. It almost killed me. I mean, obviously it's an insanely ambitious project.
You tell us what it is, well, it's called it's called The World a Family History, and it tells the whole of world history from the Stone Age to the Drone Age through families in a single narrative.
Some of the families you'd have heard of, you know, the Robinovs, or the Habsburgs, the Rothchilds, the Kennedy's, and many of them are quite unpleasant families like the Kim family, of North Korea as a big family, we follow them over five generations, or the Herold family of Judea who built the temple, all the Ptolemys of Egypt. They are some of the most vicious families. But another families you won't have heard of. Some of them are enslaved families,
some are families of doctors. They're not all rulers in other words, And the great thing about covering family is that in terms of diversity, it's a great way you can cover everywhere the same. And so this book is probably the most diverse world history ever written. It covers Europe is in its rightful place, but also there's Africa, there's Asia, the South and North America in immense detail. And of course the other great thing about family histories
it includes women. And we were talking Ruthie about about, you know, the great women that are covered in this book.
And again some of them.
Will be familiar Cleopatra Kafrom, the Great Margaret Thatcher, and some of them you won't have heard of, but are astonishing characters that we should have heard of, like Queen Tamara of Georgia. But you know, as the spectator said, it's succession meets Game of Thrones. They has how the review described it, So I.
Hope that it's I read this and I thought it was a beautiful ending to this book and kind of leading us to the end of our really great conversation. In this book, I've written of the fall of noble cities, the vanishing of kingdoms, the rise and fall of dynasties, cruelty and cruelty, folly upon folly, eruptions, massacres, famines, pandemics,
and pollutions. Yet again and again in these pages, the high spirits and elevated thoughts, the capacity for joy and kindness, the variety and eccentricity of humanity, the faces of love and the devotion of family run through it all and remind me why I started to write. And I thought, you know, the optimism and the joy using the word joy and life. And that is a very moving piece to read by a writer whose work, as I said,
informs tell stories, takes us places. And so before we do say goodbye, what food would you go to for comfort?
Or what I love is tar tatar, but sugar burnt, so that there's it's burnt with a with a sort of flat with a fire on top. And I love eating sugar burns.
Tartta and you make it. I have made it, but I prefer I prefer I prefer I'm eating it in delicious restaurants.
Well, thank you so much for today, and thank you for coming.
And thanks for having that. So lovely to be lucky me, lucky me to thank you so much.
Thanks.
Ruthie's Table four is produced by Atami Studios for iHeartRadio. It's hosted by Ruthie Rogers. It's produced by williem Lensky. Our executive producers are Zad Rodgers and Fay Stewart. Our production coordinator is Bella Selini. Special thanks to everyone at The River Cafe.