You're listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair. There is a well known cartoon in the New Yorker magazine depicting President Franklin Eleanor Roosevelt in his pajamas on his knees next to his bed, saying a prayer for his wife, the most active first lady in history. Dear Lord, please make Eleanor tired tomorrow. I can imagine the friends and family of Stephen Frye saying the same prayer. For
there is very little Stephen doesn't do. Actor, comedian, television host, director, prolific writer with four novels, three autobiographies, and countless columns in national papers. But should you ask, as I've been doing, the people who know him really well, what Stephen is best at, they will answer being a friend. As for me, I love this man, all he stands for, and quite say who he is, and I would change FDR's prayer.
I would say, Dear Lord, we all need Stephen fry Please do not make him tired tomorrow.
Ruth, I don't know what to say. You're going to have to tiptoe out of the room now. I can't possibly live up to such an introduction.
So I'm sitting here in the River Cafe in our New Sylvia's dining room. So shall we read the recipe for the polenta and almond cake.
So here is the recipe or receipt, as upper class people used to say, we have torta di manoli mandole. Of course he's also you know those pictures that the Renaissance artists did of a face in a in a frame that has a point at the top and a point at the bottom. I sort of point. They call that a mandola because it's the shape of an almond. Yeah, anyway, tooni polenta almond and lemon cake. This serves ten or right, So have you got your pencils out and you're licking them?
These first three dry ingredients are grapes, the same quantity four hundred and fifty grams of unsalted butter. That's not a dry ingredient, stephen softened. So remember in the morning, first thing, take the butter out of the fridge. Four hundred and fifty grams of casta sugar, four hundred and fifty grams of ground almonds, six of your finest eggs, the zest of four lemons, and the juice of one lemon, then two hundred and twenty grams of polent of flour,
one teaspoonful of baking powder. I never really know the difference between baking powder and by carbonate of soda. There is a huge difference. I'm being told in my ear by my expert. So it's baking powder. Don't substitute with anything else, baking soda or anything. So one teaspoonful of baking powder, quarter a teaspoonful of salt. You will have preheated the oven at this point two one hundred and sixty degrees centigrade, I would say one hundred and forty
or fifty fan. Then butter and flour, a thirty centimeter cake tin, which I hope you have lying handily around. Beat the butter and sugar together until it becomes pale and light, and that really does happen. The butter is good British butter, yellow to start with. But it's amazing how as it beats and beats and the sugar gets released into it, it does become notably lighter. And that's your signal to add the ground almonds. Then you stir to combine them, and then you add the eggs one
at a time, and beat the mixture through. Fold in the lemon zest, the lemon juice. The smell will rise up into your nostrils. Then the polenta, which gives the cake its major name, of course, the baking powder, and the salt spoon. The mixture that then is now nice and smooth into your prepared tin, and you bake in the preheated oven for forty five to fifty minutes or until set. I guess the old toothpick taste test will do, and the cake will be deep brown on top. That
that's a cue. It's delicious on its own, as I can absolutely testify. With a cappuccino perhaps, or a glass of vincanto. And when in season here at this place of joy, the River Cafe, it says we caramelize blood oranges. Can you imagine what you're doing this morning, Darning, I'm caramelizing some blood oranges. It reminds me of wonderful Les Dawson, the Northern comedian. Well, I can't stop chapping. I've got a cape on to baste, I've got sausages to prick
and so on. Anyway, I've I've got blood oranges to caramelize and you serve that with the cake, and you just couldn't do better. It's one of the great great recipes.
I think that if I, even in the last four minutes, I have now understood that you are a great cook. You're a great eater. But you are you know, are you a passionate cook? Would you describe yourself? Tell me about cooking?
I was. I had a strange shout, and which was in it sounds if I said, it sounds like it's I don't know, Downton Abby or something that it really wasn't. But my parents did have a cook, and we had gardeners, and we had an old fashioned Victorian kitchen garden, and so I was used to the fact that every day the gardeners would come to the back door and missus Risebro, the cook, would select some of the vegetables or tell them to go off and get something else, depending on
what she was cooking. And I would hang around, age five or something watching her. I'd see her do things like I mean, she was what used to be called a good English plane cook. So she didn't do anything terribly fancy, but everything she did was just right. Pies and tarts and things like that. She was very good at and she would take her thumb and put little squares of pastry on it and pull them back to make a rose that would go in the center of
pies and things. So touches. Yeah, and she made pork pies. She made, oh yeah, basically anything but you could make she made. We had a game larder and a things and so we'd have birds hung and things like that.
Sounds good, missus Er.
She was one.
Would they entertain?
Oh yeah, they were, and they were very social. Yes, my mother would do dinner parties and when I was young, and up until I was about twelve fourteen, maybe that the there would be dinner jackets and black tie and the men would be left alone by the women in the dining room. So that's you know, that tradition that's still going the women.
The men's stayed the women withdrew.
And I remember my mother saying. My mother read history. She was was she was a history graduates and she taught it occasionally. And I would say to her white, the men's stay behind. And I think someone had said to me, so they can tell dirty jokes that women don't hear. My mother said, no, you know what it is really, she said. The Victorians, the women did not like drawing attention to the fact that they had to
use lavatries. So if they all went in one go, they would go up to the lavoratries, use avatures together and then get down into the drawing room and they'd be sitting there. But if everybody went into the drawing room together after the meal and the women said I'm going to go now, everyone go, oh, she's off for a piss. And so it was just a discreet way of women having that chance to do that without being noticed, as it were.
And so you have your memories are of home and good food and a care for food.
Because my mother had food. I went say issues, but she would drive the gardener's mad because she'd go out when the peas were ready and she would just eat the entire crop of peas out of the pod. Yeah.
I remember one sitting on a railway train and we're going from one small town in Italy to another, and we'd go into the market and bought some peas, and we had children with us, and we were all eating the raw peas on the train carriage. Italians went mad. I mean, the idea of eating a raw piece. Those people were sitting at it, and we could have taken off all our clothes and had more respect than giving our children raw pies out of it. But what's more delicious?
Raw pie? And we make a salad? Do you ever have? You know, you can make a salad with delicious.
But the other thing is that it was natural because of the kitchen garden was everything was in season, so you know, and there were fruit trees, you know, trained against the outbuildings, plum trees and things like that. And there were goosberry bushes and raspberry and black currants, and four fantastic asparagus beds raised asparagus beds Belgian asparagus, quite
small and delicate asparagus. And my mother had constant war with the gardeners because well, she had this theory and that you shouldn't eat asparagus after ascot mid June something like that. I don't know anyway, she'd heard that somewhere or been told that, and she of course was desperate to get hold of Once the asperance was getting all the ferns would come up, and she loved it for flower rangings.
She sounds amazing.
She is sounds like she's still here, she's ninety two.
Because that I do think that inner knowledge and passion for the garden, for the ferns, for the seasonality of saying. And there is a very short season for good asparagus saska. It is there isn't you know? In Paris one minute you'd go down to the market and you know, there were white asparagus and green asparagus and thin aspects, and then they were gone, and we're just gone. And I think it's here as well. And they do come from Norfolk.
Yes they do. But the criminal thing now, I think in some ways is people don't understand that you can store fresh fruit and vegetables. We had outhouses and there would be newspaper and potatoes, and when we lifted all the potatoes and there there'd be and they'd last all the way through as long as it was dark and cool, which naturally would be being an outhouse. And the same with apples and pears. They lost forever.
Your parents were interested in food come from their cultural.
My mother, yes, my father lesson. My father just did everything that was put in front of him, and his mind was on his work. He was a scientist. But my mother was from a Jewish family, and Jews always compared to the British in those days less so now were obsessed with food, partly because in some cases they knew poverty between the walls when things were really short in Vienna and in Hungary, where my grandparents came from.
My grandfather was a good cook, and I remember, yeah, he made the most beautiful sort of dill and cucumber salads and things, and I really got a taste for that kind of Central European flavor from him, things like cucumbers and so on, which are very Central European polition, hungering and other such things. And spicy, spicy, but not in not like Indian or Mexican food spicy, but in that sort of paprika spiciness, which I'm very fond of.
My grandparents were Hungarian. One side were Russian Jews who left Russia, and the other were Hungarian Jews that left Hungary. They came to the United States as part of the Ellis Island in Flux in nineteen probably fifteen, right really early. They got it early. So growing up in this household, going to you then went away to school at age seven, and was that a food shark as well as a home shop.
It was. We grew up in Norfolk and obviously my mother wouldn't force me to eat anything I hated. And they arrived at this prep school age seven, which is in Gloucestershire, two hundred miles right year was this, This is in nineteen sixty four, and there are things like semolina and tapioca hot milk puddings. Something about milk that's been boiled makes me actually kick, makes me a dry heave. And I saw these and I said, no, no, I can't, I can't. And they forced it, literally holding my nose
like like a hunger strike thing. It was cruel in those days, but of course you know it happened to other boys, so you just think this is this is life. But I really and I forced myself to throw up at the table so that they stopped doing it. And and it forced yourself. And it was written down Stephen Fry or Fry s probably or Fry Junior because my brother was there, allergic to hot milk.
Clever to figure out what to do.
Yeah, but it was I mean, it was all I would say to Kensian. But it was a world of chill blains and constipation and cold, you know. I mean the way they heated a dormitory was just to have a hot pipe running along the bottom, you know, no radiators or anything. And so it wasn't ju desperately, I mean, yes, very much. So what it does I've spoken about this before, and what it does is you start to obsess about sweets. There's a touch shop in the school. We are called
the touch shop. Tuck is the school slang for goodies for confectionery. And you start to get really obsessed with when the touch shop can to be opened and how much pocket money you've got to buy these things. And this was the golden age of confectionery. Cabri was producing new things like curly whirleyon and Aztec bars, and there were these amazing you know, foam shrimps and flying sauces made of rice paper and fruit salads four for a
penny and black jacks four for a penny. And I became so obsessed that I would start breaking out of school bunds and going to the village shop. And it was in Gloucestershire, a little village called Yuli, and I would spend whatever money I had on getting those sweets, and it became a kind of obsession that my teeth suffered by. You know, by the time I was twelve, I was having huge amounts of fillings and even having
teeth out. But also interesting and this is you know, I'm not using an excuse, but a lot of it was preparation for smoking. There were these coconut shredded brown fake tobaccos in a little wax paper with a Spanish galleon on it, which was like rolling tobacco. There were these candy cigarettes that you would have licorice, Yes, that's it.
They were, and in sort of fake Chesterfield packs softly looked exactly like Chesterfield or something, or camel and licorice pipes, and so they were getting you ready, well like pipe smoker's pipe made out of a licorice. Yeah, and even more sort of weirdly, the glamour of the white powder Sherbert, so you'd suck it up through a licorice straw and a Sherbert fountain. So it was preparing you for a
life to come. Yeah. So you then go from the you know, when you were fourteen or fifteen, you go for the real cigarettes and smoking, and then when you're a little bit older than that, the real white power. It's a terrible thought. I'm not excusing it or saying that it was the school's fault that I, in later life did become something of an addict.
I was even not to interrupt your story, but I was going to say that culturally, if your parents were Hungarian Jews background of that, did going to boarding school come easier to them?
So my parents are both bought it all their time as children, so there was no Yeah, there was nothing. And you have to remember, if you're thinking how coral to send a child away at the age of seven, if that seven year old child has other friends as I did in the Norfolk countryside, they were all boys who were also going to go to school. And then when you get to the prep school, obviously everyone's in the same boat. So you just think this is what life is like. You don't think this is so unfair.
There are people who are not going to boarding schools. You just think you might.
Not, well, this is another discussion. You might not think it, the child might not think it, but the parents might think yes.
And I was aware that because because we would go my mother and I from Norwich by train and breakfast on the train.
You know.
It was so good because they had these silver they did silver service. They had stewards in short white little tops, tunics, whatever, and they would you know, the silver service in the sense they would use a spoon and a fork in the same hand, and they could definitely put the bacon on a train, egg on a train exactly. And we got to know them. Then they would recognize us and say, oh, school again, young man, is it and all that, you know, we would get the train and then we'd spend a
day in London. Sometimes we'd have lunch with my grandfather at the walled Doff or the hotel. Yeah, that's sort of Verre. He liked the yeah, the big.
Yeah there you go in there. That's what you got their dances.
So that's a nice hotel. And and then go to Paddington and that's where my heart wouldtart to sink and flutter a bit because you'd see at the end of the platform on boys in these straw hats that we call boaters, and that was the school compartment. But then you'd notice, or I'd noticed that my mother was crying.
She was trying not to so touchy it's making me move now because you know, everyone thinking how cruel of parents, but they don't want to lose their child, but they just feel that's the right thing for them.
You stayed in school till.
Oh ah, well, now we don't have enough time to cover the chapters of disaster, do we. I went from prep school. Prep school in England is age seven, which is the youngest, and two thirteen, and then you would take what was called a common entrance exam, which was for public schools. I private schools, and so I went to private school called Oppingham and my behavior was dreadful. And then worst of all, I fell in love with
a boy. And I was so confused by this, so absolutely astonished by the power of the emotion, the sheer power that you could be obsessed for twenty four hours a day and of nothing else and change your walking habits. So you would bump into this person and knowing just phenomenal obsession, not really sexual even I was, you know, just something overwhelming. Was it reciprocated eventually there was a nice moment, but yeah, yeah, it threw me completely and
certainly threw my concentration away. But the actual casus bellies I think well, and should say the cause of the war, the originating disaster was. I was a member, the youngest member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, and I got permissioned from my housemaster to go to a meeting of the Society in London in some grand club, and I read a paper, I delivered a paper, and the idea was that the next I was staying overnight at the club and the next morning I would take a
train back to school. Well, the next morning I went to a cinema and in those days, cinemas would sort of start a program at ten in the morning or something, and then just you could stay in the same cinema and what the same film again and again. And the film was Cabaret, and I was completely obsessed with it. I just never seen anything like it. It was fantastic.
And then chose it, yeah, I mean almost randomly, not knowing what it was or anything about it, not naying you know about Christi Riischerwood or Eliza Beanelly or any of the sort of background to it. And then I wandered in the days to another cinema and there was a clock work orange was on and unfortunately I was although I was fourteen and a half, I could pass as X, which was eighteen, I guess, and because being tall,
I suppose. And so there were there were three or four films, I think The Godfather as well, and Fritz the Cat, which was a sort of pornographic cartoon. Mem do you remember so four days past?
You stayed four days?
Yes?
And was anybody out searching?
Yes? And there were terrified and they didn't know what had happened to me, and they'd run away. What's going on? And then I kind of came to in a sort of days and went back to the school. There was a lot of folded arms and tapping of feet on the carpet.
And will anybody call the police?
Well they had done, Yes, they reported me as missing after three days. I think whatever it was, so, yeah, it was just a disaster. And I remember getting in the car with my parents because I was expelled from the school, and my father saying the words, we will talk about this sorry incident when we get home. Sorry, sorry incident. It was a sorry incident.
Did you know? The River Cafe has a shop. It's full of our favorite foods and designs. We have cookbooks and linen Napkins kitchen ware, toad bags with our signatures, glasses from Venice, chocolates from Turin. You can find us right next door to the River Cafe in London or online at shop the River Cafe dot co dot uk. When you went to Cambridge, what was the food like there? Then you were away from both the boarding school and
you were away from your parents. Could you create your own food world more?
Yes, there were some students got friendly with who really understood food.
Did you cook for yourself at Cambridge? Or was that hard?
If you were in college, you had your rooms and you had what was called a jip room, which was like a little kitchen, but it didn't really have a proper oven or anything, so you couldn't do much there. But because of the acting, I would, in particular after the May term, which is like the summer term at Cambridge, when it was over, I would stay on to rehearse with friends all the plays we were taking up to Edinburgh.
And then one might stay at totally different places, and I stayed with it rather than in your college, because your college would be given ever to conferences and things like that, and they wouldn't let you stay there. So I remember staying with friends, and one of these friends, Ben, who was really good. He taught me the mill pois that the preparation for almost anything, you know, the carrots, the celery and chopping them up, and.
Called the Italian cooking Sofrito.
Exactly exactly, and he's the basis of everything from Bologniers upwards, as it were. And so I really enjoyed learning that and seeing how all that worked. And he showed me as well what I now know is called deglazing. You know how you had I say, everything's stuck, and he goes, no, just just take a glass of wine and just throw it on, and I'm getting what are you doing? And then it would all just come into life, and you know, he had that confidence.
So was he really the first person to do he.
Kind of was. Yeah. He taught me not to be afraid and not to have to follow every syllable on a page, because once you knew the principle of certain kinds of cooking, you could just then do very Oh we haven't got any that with his fish instead, but it says it's for Lamb's just that's all right, you know, and you just sort of take that.
I was saying cooking is a bit like poetry. You know, you have to know the real poetry to go to free verse.
Yes, exactly, once you know the fourteen line Sonnet, you can then exactly escape the prison of the form. But it was really when I left Cambridge I was so fortunate because you know, our comedy stuff I was doing with Hugh Lori and Emma Thompson. One prize comedy, what it was, Camebridge this club called the Footlights, which is well over one hundred years old and it sort of specializes in comedy. I say it is whoever the undergraduates are at the time who happened to be members of
the club. But it famously had Peter Cook and John Clees and Eric Idle and Grifflies Jones and Douglas Adams and Clive James and all kind of Baron Margerleyes, Yes, Stephen and then Stephen Frown, Hugh Luri and Emma Thompson. We were all one bunch and we went to Edinburgh and we won this new prize called the Perrier Award for Comedy, and this involved going to Australia. Well sort of it didn't. The prize didn't, but because we won.
It's an Australian entrepreneur called Michael Edgeley saw our show and then said, you guys want to come out to Australia. And that's where I learned to eat because it was an absolute revelation. This is nineteen eighty one, starting in Sydney. Doyle's of course, the amazing seafood place. You walk along the dunes and come to this beautiful shack where the food is well, things you've never heard of, like Barry Mundy and Morton Bay bugs and all these extraordinary seafood things.
But also oysters. I mean, oyster is so plentiful and not oh my goodness, I'm having oysters. I must be in Bentley's or in you know some posh you know London restaurant that does oysters. But it was, yeah, I have some oysters, mane I mind Rockefeller or Killpatrick, you know these different ways of preparing them, kill Patrick Acrosse the mind because it involved was the source. Yes, So I became really obsessed with oysters and would have and
they were cheap sometimes you could that's the point. I have some plump, half a dozen plump specific oysters not cooked, and then half a dozen cooked more neat Rockefeller and Kilpatrick with the one with bacon to kill Patrick. Yeah. And and there were cheapest, cheapest chips, as people say so. And wine was the other thing I finally moved off the lampres.
We haven't talked about, yeah, because they.
Had things like Grange Hermitage, which at the time was good but nothing like as expensive as it is now. Three or four hundred pound a bottle at least, isn't it. But they you know this, They had this way of categorizing wines which is so ridiculously obvious but was unheard of by grape Vatal. So they would say this is a Sheers, you know, and and this is you know, Kevin I Servignon, and this is a Semion or whatever, and they'd tell you about the grape and you go, oh,
I see. Then you get back to England and every restaurant just a shadowed nerve to this shadow that and you get what does that mean? But when I got back to England, we were like for two months and traveling everywhere all the big cities, in some of the crazy little towns like Albury, Wodonga, eating fabulous food, cheaply and happily and the whole day really was around the fact we'd finished the show and what restaurant we're going to And but when I got back to England, I
was wandering around. So we were doing a TV show and I was feeling lucky and flushed with cash relatively compared to being a student, but not very rich. And I was wondering, to say, when I was getting lost, as you do, and before you understand that, what's the
cross street? And you know? And so I was going down this street called Greek Street and I saw on attractive looking restaurant and the restaurant was called Let's Gargo the Snail, and I wandered in and this fabulous woman about three foot tall came up to me and said hello, dear, and I said, oh, it was obviously very nervous. She said you come with me, and she sat me down.
You'll know who I'm talking about, Ellen Salvatina, this amazing woman, phenomenal, and she sat me down and I said, I'm not and she chose for me, somehow brilliantly, things that were just cheap enough for me to be able to afford. And so from then on, the richer I got the luckier I got I would go there, and this was in the high days of Let's Cargo. We know Princess Diana,
we'd go and all these people. But most importantly again it was Chancey's Robinson's husband Lander, his name was Nick Lander, who ran Let's Go Go and Jancey's Robinson's great Wine created great the first woman to be made of Master of Wine, fabulous person and she made the wine list varietal. So it was the first, I think probably in London to be like that where it was, and gosh, I had some marvelous times there, absolutely amazingly recognized someone. We
became very good friends. She then moved to Lettual in Charlotte Street, and her husband Aldo was a fat fascinating man as well, because they lived in Noel Road in Islington in the nineteen sixties year and their neighbor their neighbors were a gay couple called Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton, and it was Aldo who there was a they'd heard some shouting and then the next day they were worried and and and Eleanor had said, how's what's what's up
with Joe and Aldo? And she looked through the keyhole and saw him dead, and Alder had to break down the door, and of course Kenneth Halliwell had killed his lover and then himself, so she never forgot that. But I remember once, for example, I was having dinner there with Ron Atkins and my friend Rowan, the wonderful Great. Yeah, let's go and go upstairs. And Rowan is the most wonderful person in the world. But he's not a late night figure at all in those days, I quite was.
So we'd had dinner and it was like halp us nine and said, right, well, I'm I'll get a cab and go home. And I thought, oh, well, I'll do the same. So I ordered a cab. His cab came first, and I was just about to leave it, and I said, could you go and cheer up John Hurt. He's just left his wife and he's was all very unhappy and he needs a bit of cheering up. So I sat down and there was John had, you know, sit down, and every now and again Ee said, your CAB's still here.
I said, oh, tell him, I'll be five minutes. Yeah, it's five minutes. We were getting home, and the cab bill was two hundred and twenty pounds and I saw John about a week later and said, I have told everyone I got hurt on Thursday night, and he said, well, I told everyone I got fried. I got to know him even better later because he moved to Norfolk.
Was Europe at all an influence? Did you travel to France or Italy or did you do Greece? Was there any food experience from being in Europe?
Just as I was really beginning to love food, I went with Rowan, whom I mentioned ron Atkinson had bought a new Western Martin and he said, I really think
we should try this out. And so we booked ourselves an amazing holiday, going all the way down France through basically through as many three star, three Michelin star restaurants, so mioneise in outside Leon and Chappelle's restaurant thing, and then down to the Moujen restaurants outside Cannes, you know in the column door, which is not through star, but it's one of the greatest restaurants in the world.
Oh that menu.
People who don't know it's up from up from cann in the hills and it's this beautiful, beautiful place. It's like your ideal image of a promo soul house with the tiles and everything else. But it has added to it these extraordinary pieces on the walls by Matisse and others and mirror and yeah, that's right, these extraordinary paintings because the original patron and his wife would allow the artists to give pictures instead of paying the bills. And it has since become, you know, one of the great
restaurants of the world. Really it's it's atmosphere and for all its fame and uh, you know, they're not necessarily easy to get a table, especially during the Canned Film Festival or something. It is the friendliest, warmest place. It's really, you know, like all these good places there, you might think they're going to be frightened the river. Under the river, you won't find people looking snooterly at you at all. It's the opposite of good restaurant to have snootiness, isn't it.
When I boat you couple of months ago, you were talking about your schedule and a lot of it was around being in London or being in Los Angeles. And I think that California is so interesting in terms of going back to Alice Walters and food farm to table and restaurants like Wolfgang Pugs, Mamaison becoming Spago where he made pizzas, and now the very kind of healthy eating
of California. And I think if we're talking about a kind of food culture, would you say that in Los Angeles you're finding a certain type of food culture unquestionably.
And one of the interesting things is people picture Los Angeles and they think of smart movie people. And obviously there are a lot of movie people, but the food culture is driven from below, and the smart movie people follow it. And over the last ten years, the major thing has been street food food trucks, which a lot of British people. When you would say to them, oh, look there's a fish taco truck. Let's going to have that lunch, I'll go crazy. Is it hygieniic? You know?
I mean, there's sort of weird British idea that a food truck couldn't live up to a restaurant. And very often the que is the indication. You'll see a big line and you'll know that's a good one and you make a note in your head next time I'm driving down here, I'll go and try try what they've got and they and there's that side of things. Of course, there's the glamorous side of places. The movie people go. Yeah, the Polo Lounge and it's like Craigs. Now you'll always
see a Kardashian in there if you want to. And again, you know, because they're the paparazzi outside and what in America they call videographers who are called TMZ the this kind of news channel, gossip news channel. But the quality of food is good for you know, good for vegans and vegetarians, and so it's a good place to say, oh, I'll go, I'll go vegan for a week, you know, just just out of fun really, because there's so many options.
Do you only eat out?
No, not at all. No, I'd love to cook really good kitchen in the house in La So I really enjoyed it. Well, it's open. It's this long, long run because the house used to be an art gallery when it was built in nineteen twenty three. It's I give too much of a detail, but it's the under the Hollywood side Beechwood Canyon, and there's an art It was an art gallery. So there's this very long room in this upper upper room which used to be where the
pictures were. One end of it is the kitchen and it's open to the you know, the dining room part of it and the other parts of it, so you're kind of when you're cooking, you're cooking, you're chatting to everybody who might be there, and there's plenty of room. It's really there's good surfaces, you know how somehow surfaces disappear when you cook put it.
Did you cook there more than you would cook it? Yes?
Yeah, yeah, I do, yeah, and I love it. And my husband's are good, you know, a good customer. He seems to enjoy it.
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Hi. I'm Sean and I'm making Lemon almond and Palenticate.
With Stephen Fry.
I am a convicted lemon Plenticate user and I was on the road to recovery, but now that's all been set back. I'm afraid, so shall I make this? You tell me what I need to do and.
Think we doo apart from we've got that better here.
So that's just someften on its own took.
The liberty of giving it a bit before you arrived, because I thought, we don't need to watch that. But as it goes from the yellow color to the pale color, it's to your point of knowing that it's been beaten. And then you've got your four hundred and fifty grams of cups of sugar, and then this is going to get beaten until the sugar dissolves.
Right and again, I mean, it's one of the loveliest tastes in the world, and there's a child butter and sugar to get that's just covered enough.
Exactly be in the noise of it.
We can talk about to yourself.
It's a very high tech Okay, then you know some people will put a bit of egg and a bit of flowering alternately, but I'm just gonna brazen it out quite frankly.
I think it all ends up in the same in the end. Yeah, lovely, lovely, I.
Mean, just and then this is the plent of flower and the ground almonds.
So I'll just get that in.
Let it get around the slowly, so don't get covered.
You made this one quite recently. It's still warm, yeah.
So that that's actually can have gone the menu for lunch. Now do you want to have a piece of that?
Why not?
Do you want to cut yourself?
sEH, so soft? So I'm gonna have to say the word moist, no escaping?
Is we just do you want to find you before?
I'm quite happy to just frankly drop my head into it and go like that. But probably that's.
Got cup of tea written all over it.
Espresso.
It's got espresso written all over, isn't it.
Hmm, Oh my goodness.
You can have that while you talk to Ruthy.
That is so good, honestly brilliant.
Thanks.
You've just made a palantic cake with Sean. Tell me what that was like.
It was a tremendous experience. It's so simple on the one hand, but like all great dishes, it can be made better by people who are confident. It's my theory about food is that certain ingredients know when you're scared.
You know when you're scared.
Yeah, I love making mayonnaise, but it's a mood thing. Some If you're not quite confident enough, it knows, and it will split. If you're too confident, it will split. You have to just sort of come up to it and show that you are master, but that you respect it. And I think that's true of a lot of ingredients. And polenticate no less so to get that gritty moisture and that sweetness and that's citrus, all in the right proportion, it's a simply joyous thing to eat.
I was going to also ask you about work and creating and food. So when you are writing, when you're directing, when you're doing your beautiful voice audio.
Books, I can't. I find it very hard to eat anything, eat anything before a performance of any kind. That that's as if your nerves sort of shrink you up and you and your metabolism is fast, which tends to reduce appetite. Anything that makes your metabolism go quick reduces appetite, doesn't it, Like again, for example speed, But those drugs are are appetite suppressants as opposed to the slowly down ones that can you know that famously cannabis gives you the munchies,
you know, and so on. So aside from external forces and chemistry, the actual act of being nervous before a show, I find has that thing that I just couldn't eat. But afterwards, yes, and that's everyone tells you you shouldn't eat, you know, two hours before bed or whatever, because you know, I.
Don't know if they say that anymore.
Maybe they do, maybe they don't.
We always look for that study that you want to read which says that actually you gain no more weight. Am I eating before you go to bed than you would if you had it at six o'clock?
Well, that's because I am a bit obsessed about my weight. I mean, I know I'd be fitter. I would snow less and and and puff less at the top of the steps if I if I lost her.
We don't want any less.
I tried that zempic. I'm the earlier docter of these things, and I happened to be in America and I'd read about it, and I asked them, my doctor in America and my physician as they like to call them, and he said, I can get you some, and he tried me on it. And first week or so, I was thinking, this is astonishing. Not only do I know want to eat, I don't even want to I don't want alcohol of any kind. This is going to be brilliant. And then
I started feeling sick. And then I started feeling sicker and sicker, and sucker, and I was literally throwing up four or five times a day, and I thought, I can't do this. So that's that's it. And the new variant to zeppeedeie manduras it's called it makes it even worse parent if you have those side effects. So as he's probably good.
I think you look great, you are you are eating and so food and work.
Yes, I mean I do. I love. I love to work on an empty stomach as well when if it's right, yeah, and then writing mode at the moment. Well, it's the fourth in a series of books I've done on Greek mythology, and it's the final one. The first was the kind of birth of the gods and the creation of humankind and the kind of gods and the humans interacting and interbreeding. And the second one is called Heroes and is like Hercules and Perseus and Theseus and Jason and Atlanta and
these you know, the heroic race. And then the third one was the Trojan War with Achilles and Helen and all that. And this fourth one is the all Coming Home. Agamemnon has to come home to be murdered, and Helen and menelais her husband, have to go home. I picture that voyage home as had a lot of folded arms, and it didn't try very hard to escape from Troy, did you, darling. And then of course the Odyssey, which is the main story of it.
Do you think the gods eight eight they did and what did they drink?
The gods drank nectar nectar nectar nectar, which is not quite the juice of you know, the hollyhock or the flower, but a sort of honey and alcohol kind of thing that was good for gods. And they ate ambrosia. It was called ambrosia. No one's quite sure what ambrosia was, but it was. It was the food of the gods rather than the drink of the gods. And this is what an ambrosia kept their blood in a silvery form. The gods had silvery blood rather than red or blue
or green, and it was called kor. And if humans had or if they tasted kora, it was on them it would kill them straight away.
So it was.
For the gods. Yeah, but it's a nice that one of one of the best words in the English language language is petrich or petrik or pet Petross is rock in Greek, as in petrol and petrify and all those things. Petroleum and kore is that blood, that strange silvery liquid. And petricore is the word for that smell that rises up from the earth after rain, which is not lovely. That there's a word for it, and that's what it is, this kind of holy, holy, sacred smell rising.
Up from the earth, and that note of smell and comfort we were talking. I think I suppose we were talking a lot about comfort that you derived from your life in going to school and needing comfort in sweets or going up later, and the memories of seeking comfort as well. Before we go to lunch. What would be a food that you would go for comfort.
It's a small silvery fish in a tin, not a sardine, although I like sardines. It's called skipper. You see them in supermarkets. At first you go, oh, there's obviously skip jack, do you know, which is a different but but skippers are little I don't know if there's another name for them, but they are kind of bonelets who you have them whole, and they're sort of soften, spread on toast and on toast. They are absolutely.
Comfort.
I think I think my mother used to get them, and that's probably what it is. I mean, it's a terrible admission, isn't.
It a terrible admssion answer this question will say something from their memory of sharing their mother, their father, their grandmother, the culture they came from. Thank you, what a great question. Pleasure, Thanks, thank you, thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair.
Ruthie's Table four is produced by Atamei Studios for iHeartRadio. It's hosted by Ruthie Rogers, and it's produced by William Lensky. This episode was edited by Julia Johnson and mixed by Nigel Appleton.
Our executive producers are Fay Stewart and Zad Rogers.
Our production manager is Caitlin Paramore, and our production coordinator is Bella Cellini. This episode had additional contributions by Sean Wynn Owen. Thank you to everyone at The River Cafe for your help in making this episode.