This now is getting very official.
Yeah, you're on the red chair. Have a sea Oh my headphones? Yeah? Yeah, get headphones.
Okay, do I put my hands onto it?
Yes, of course, Okay. I've always lived with and loved only connect Im Foster's epigraph in his novel Howard's End expressing the moral importance of connections between people, and this is one of the reasons I'm so happy to have Trudy Styler, producer, actress, activist, farmer here today, for she and I are connected. Trudy and I are both passionate
about the landscape, wine. Trudy has her own vineyard, food and history of southern Tuscany where every summer we fill our houses with our children, our children's friends, and our friend's children, occupying every bed and making space for yet another chair around the big table. So here we are. Trudy has stories to tell, a recipe for grouse she's chosen, and knowledge about all that she produces. Trudy is a woman I admire, a woman I adore. What a connection.
Hello Ruth, Hello.
Judy, I'm crying. Okay, it's been a long time since I've seen I.
Know you chose of all the recipes in all our books. The grouse.
Yes, I'm very excited about roast grouse from the River Cafe. One grouse, plucked and cleaned, and two hundred and fifty mills of Aliatico di Pulia. So preheat the oven to two hundred and thirty s, place the grouse in a roasting tin, and roast for twenty to thirty minutes. Depending on the size and how rare you like your grouse, we saw them slightly pink. The easiest way to test for dumbness is to pull the leg away from the body at the thigh. Remove from the oven and leave
the bird to rest for two to three minutes. Remove and untie the string. Heat the roasting tin over a medium high heat. Add the remaining wine and reduce by half. Return the bird to the tin and turn to coat it in the juices. Then serve. This is delicious, served with braised gaboloniro.
Can I introduce Sean. We know and who is the executive brilliant chef at the River Cafe, and she knows more about grouse than probably either of us or even a grouse, don't you, Sean, Yes, and everything else. So we can talk with Sean as well, what do you think that grass? Is it your of the game birds? Is it your favorite? Sean?
I think it's when you get them in August September, before they've become high and really aged. You can they're very perfumed and that you can really taste you know, what the grouse feed on for example, you know, like heathers and little berries, and you can almost imagine the hills that they've they've eaten off, and you can really taste it in the flesh.
Yeah.
Well, I can't wait because this really is the bird that I have never and I don't ask me why I've never tasted grouse, but I haven't. So when I saw it on the menu, this is for me today.
Yeah brave? Yeah, yeah, it's good. And when you cook it? Where do you think if you were, if truly wanted to go home and cook a grass, would you say to be brave as well? Would you think?
I think in English restaurants or like people cook the game very pink, But I think in the way we cook at the River Cafe. If you think of dishes like a rosta misto in Italy, where things might go on an open fire and cook for for longer you can cook the meat slightly more.
We also put brisketter and really for just for the juices.
Today we're doing it with a massive big tomato, like a Sorrento tomato and a bit of brunello actually, and cook all that with the grouse. And tomato works with the grouse at this time of year, because the grouse isn't too strong.
Why does it get more pungent as it goes on India?
So I think if it's hung so once it's being shot, that they'll hang them for a while and they seem to get more punchy. And I'm sure that's why they would have served them in gentlemen's clubs followed by cigars.
Because Richard, my husband, used to come in and always embarrassingly to me, I always say, I'd like a grouse to the wage it and I'd like it really well hung, a well hung grouse, which could have another connotation like okay,
but he liked it. He liked it. When a friend of mine once told me that Peter Rice tell me that he was sent to grouse and it was over the holiday, and so it just sat in the post office of some Irish small town and then he went home and cooked it and it was just he said it was the best grouse he's ever had, but just
been probably about to disintegrate it was so old. So this recipe for grouse seems to not be something that you might have eaten in your childhood, because I know that you had a very very different kind of childhood, probably from your children's, And so maybe we should go back to the very early days. What was it like growing up in your family food wise?
Well, I was born in the Midlands, in the West Midlands, that little village called Stokebriar, near to a town called Bromsgrove, near to the county of Worcestershire, and so we were brought up on a council house estate in Worcestershire, where sort of being post war I was born in the mid fifties, there was still this feeling of people had
to come serve and preserve. My mum could go to the butcher's just once a week for the roast on the Sunday roast, and then the Sunday roast was made to stretch, you know, throughout the week, and she was very inventive with how she could stretch it. And in fact, I became a lover of awful, which I preferred over the Sunday roast, just because it was just very flavorful. And so we would have liver, liver and onions and kidneys that she'd sote with some mushrooms, and then we
would have do you know what fagots are? Or savory ducks? Because my mother was from the north, few was about faggots.
What are faggots?
So fagots were sausage.
So no, it was using up the rest of the joint that hadn't been used on the Sunday, so you could use cooked meats or if you hadn't gotten enough to stretch for three kids in our cades and mom and dad, then she would buy some sausages.
And then raw on you.
Lots of raw onions were used, and I got the job of being her apprentice to mince everything up.
And then she.
Would buy a pigs bladder and then the cooked meats and raw sausage meat with the onions, salt and pepper wrapped up in the bladder the pigs bladder and into the oven it went and was utterly delicious the.
Way to describe her. To take that effort, you know, to do that. She could have easily made kind of cold beef sandwiches or done lots of other things that they've leftover joint that she actually did that work was going to get the pigs bladder and to make the faggots shows.
But I think it was really you know, at the time, living in rural England, you had a butcher who had every part of the animal and nothing was ever wasted because you know, now we have you know, so called superfoods. I live in New York and so oh, let's have bone broth, you know, But we were having bone broth because my mum made stock from big animals bones, and she would make soups from her stock.
And that was very typical of the time. I think.
Did you sit down for dinner as a family every night? Did she work during.
The day, Yes, she worked at school. She was the school dinner's lady.
Have you had faggots, yes? Did you ever make them? No?
But my mum the same had that kind of post war kind of do you think with faggots? And I vaguely remember having gravy on.
Did she also cook one big roast and then do that with it?
My mom did?
Yeah, and then in Welsh actually the day Thursday actually translates into liver day, and that was the day you just have liver.
I love liver, but I like very pale, real liver, really.
Really, but bring on the blood sheep's liver.
I think would be gun normal for us.
To have lambs.
Yes, lambs liver was the sort of the po one, yes, and pigs.
Pigs liver was the cheapest one.
Lambs liver was actually very tasty tho, yeah, very yes and bigger.
Yeah.
But also I have to say that before you know, it was just that if you look at Italian food, you know, the food of Tuscany, and one to particularly, you'll make a miniestrone on a you know one day, and then you'll make rebalta and then you know you'll have tomatoes, and then you make you know, using the bread as a way of extending the food again, no waste, you know, everything is always used, was it? You're only your mother who cooked?
We all, I mean, we were three girls in my family and dad worked in a lamp shade factory and he was also the school caretaker, and I was also co opted to help him, which was always much more fun than helping mom sort of like because I got the washing up jobs, but with Dad I got to change into my overalls and sweep the playground with him.
And in the summer we were given permission from the headmistress to go into the orchard which was part of our playing ground fields and was full of plums and apples, and we would put the ladders up against the trees and we would take home literally boxes of apples, and as we both rode bikes, we'd have to sort of do copious journeys to get the apples back. So we'd wrap up the apples in newspaper or brown paper. It's
usually newspapers. We had the Daily Express every day, so we had piles of Daily Express papers and they would all go under my bed. So under my bed I would have throughout the winter my little pals piles of our apples. There's smell, and yes, yes I did like an apple. And then we would sort of start to use them through the winter bit by bit. But still by March they were going strong.
Why wouldn't they go off?
Having them in a dark place. They didn't go off, but they did get a bit wrinkled, but it didn't stop being able to make, you know, baked apples, and she made so many apples. She made toffee apples for Walls Road when Yeah, in November, November fifth, Bonfire night, she made all the kids in our street toffee apples from the the purloined with permission apples that were under my bed.
We used to get sent out BlackBerry picking with a big tupple thing and my mom would be like, you can't come home till it's full, and then she'd make obviously chutney jam and then apple crumble apple pie. Because you've got your in your We've got the.
Suet, haven't you, Rucy?
Yes, I don't know. Have you come across the Torah suet in your No.
I grew up in upstate New York. You have to remember, truly arrived in the River Cafe with a basket, a beautiful basket. And I would like you to tell Sean and I what's in this basket?
Yes, so Rucy. This it's called the original, a Torah shredded beef suet for fluffy dumplings, pastries, puddings and pies.
And we're going to throw up. Yeah, but that's right, that's a classic. I love it so this.
This is my appointment to his majesty, And actually.
I really like the packaging, if I'm allowed to say that, because it does look of its time, didn't it beautiful?
So fluffy dumplings were one of the first things that my mum taught me to make, and they couldn't be simpler to make because it's three ingredients. It's a tora beef suit, which is lard. Really, it's sort of like made from a cow. They've shredded it for you.
It doesn't have to be refrigerated.
You just this is no I just keep it in the pantry. And so you have say, eight ounces of a tora suit, eight ounces of self raising flower, pinch of salt water, combine the lot, and then as your chicken casserole or chicken stew is bubbling away nicely, you put them in at the last twenty minutes, and so the gravies go into the dumplings, but the dumplings are
rising because of the self raising flower. They actually sort of like provided much needed carbs for kids in the growing up late fifties sixties, So if you couldn't afford potatoes at the time, this was a very sort.
Of cheap fare, but you.
Make that, yeah, yeah, let them put them in soup, in stews and soups, and yes, it's a And of course I live in New York too now, so I have chicken soup and mulcible I know. I mean, I was going to say that, I'm sure every culture has their dumpling. Chinese food has dumplings, and Jewish food that I grew up with. My grandmother always made mats of ale, so mars is that cracker, and there would be chicken soup and mulcibles. These are probably better have you cooked with sup?
I mean that is really familiar to me as well. My mum and my grandma used to make dumplings. It was such the most delicious thing, really. Yeah, but it does sort of slightly explain. It's just pure saturated fat, isn't it. Like nowadays they probably have a health warning on them, like too many dumps.
And eight hundred and sixteen calories in one hundred grams of this. So yeah, they're so yummy.
Yeah, but then you could use that to make pudding as well, can't you.
So you can make.
Puddings.
They're good, and so grow up food was it was clearly important there was a value to sitting down and having a meal.
Yeah, I don't think my mom had it in her to open cans of things and make pies. I mean Stingh talks about his mum making frey bentoss pies from cans of beef cubes and then making a pastry case, you know, and that's pretty inventive. But my mother was
just what she'd say, it was a scratch cook. She would begin with the stock, and she'd begin at the beginning and then and the end of it was that we would sit down, even in a council house, with an embroidered tablecloth that she'd embroidered, and sit together.
It was important to her.
Did you ever go to a restaurant? No, you'd never been in a restaurant.
No. We went to a restaurant once with my nana that works cook grandmother, and she brought us to sort of was like a Lion's tea house in Cheshire and that was the first, my first memory of being in a restaurant six seven something like that. And I saw somebody eating or looked like a plate of worms to me, and it was they were these long, long strands and it was red and I could not believe my eyes. It's like, are they eating worms with all that red sauce?
Is that the worm's blood? And I think back to that image spaghetti, Yes it was spaghetti, and declaring I'll never eat that in my life, only to now sort of like spaghetti. Ili olio pepperoncino is actually my favorite thing and it served every day in our house in Italy because I just love it so much I could I could eat it all day long.
And you said that you had an accident you had to get through, which has sounded very scary and very disabling.
I was only two and a half, so i'd toddled out of the house. My mum was bathing my younger sister, and I went down the stairs and the little girl from over the street had called me to see if I could if I could come over to her place, and did I want to have a sweet tea? So I said, oh yes, And she was only about five herself, I think, and she took me over to their house. She got me a suite, and I think her mother thought that I was going to be escorted back to.
Our house and I wasn't.
So I was crossing the road and a fifteen year old kid had jumped into a baker's van. The baker was delivering his bread, and the kid had jumped into this lovely big van and knocked it from neutral into first and took the hand break off, and the truck started to The van started to roll down the hill the same time that I was on the ground, and luckily the wheels missed me, Otherwise I wouldn't be telling
the story now. But the exhaust pipe caught me at the back of my head and dragged me along the street. So I sort of like really taking off quite a lot of the left hand side of my face.
Do you memory of that?
No, don't have a memory of it. What I do have a memory of.
Because it must be sort of deep in my cellular system of being fearful of the road, So yes, being I think growing up, you know, kids can be a bit cruel to children who look a bit different. And I did look a bit different as a youngster. You know, I had the very livid marks on my face. But mom got a job as the school as dinner's lady, and she's sort of like she was very formidable looking
at my mom. She was about fifteen and a half Stone and like nobody was going to mask with Pauline Styler, so she protected me from a lot of you know, unfair remarks that would being made.
Did you know The River Cafe has a shop. It's full of our favorite foods and designs. We have cookbooks and then in 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 curl uk. So you grew up in a house that valued food, picking apples and with your father it seems like a very close, you know, childhood with a very severe trauma. What was
it like when you left home? You know when you decided to be an actor?
Right, yeah, I decided to be an actor. Well, things weren't so good when I decided to be an actor with my dad and me, because he was very fearful of you know what is that nobody in Walls Road has become an actor And it was just an upsetting time because I was headstrong seventeen year old who you know had been had been to a grammar school and had a great education and loved literature and loved everything
to do with the performing arts. And I think it's a way to sort of like express myself too, that I felt that all those years of not knowing who I was was expressed.
Through a character.
And so it was very it's a big passion to become, to become somebody in the performing arts.
That was his ambition for you. Do you know did he want you to go to university.
No, he wanted me to have a safe job that guaranteed a paycheck. And the Harris Brushworks was the paintbrush factory. That was the closest to us. That he wanted me to get a job in the typing pool and make
use of my grammar school education by an office job. Yeah, I've suddenly my life changed profoundly being an actor, the student actor, going to Bristol, learning the arts, getting a job sort of like going off to Manchester, so exploring areas in England and then eventually the Rawal Shakespeare Company in London. And I had a season at the Warehouse when it was the don Mar was the RS's.
Other home other than the Old Witch.
And then they moved to the Barbicane and put all the blaze into the barbecane, So you know, the horizons just being opened and opened and opened with these life experiences, and then you know, sort of then if we're talking food and wine, sort of trying new new things. Traveling to Morocco was a big change of scenery for me when I was eighteen, hitch hikings through the country with
my boyfriend and staying there for three months. It was sort of like an amazing experience of the first time I'd had Middle Eastern food.
So you know, all these.
Sights and sounds and smells or evocative, aren't they to the country's palette and what they are like? And so you begin to be inclusive in your own diet of so many different flavors and tastes that you acquire with the years that go by.
I think it's exposure, isn't it. And I always think that one of the defining things for our families. You know, I know that my grandparents were immigrants from Russia and Hungary, so their vision was very small. So my father and mother were a product of that and grew and grew. But when I think about what my children are exposed to in terms of travel experiences, food, restaurants and exposure factor is so much greater than what I had. But did your father hold it against you? Did you see him?
Was he a friend or did.
He We took a while to become close. But when Sting and I bought Lake House, it's a farm that we've had in Wiltshire for thirty two years now, we've had two kids, he came and visited and then I found my dad again, because you know, he was a man of the country. I loved the country and we would go through the grounds and I'd say, Harry, what shall we Well after we fell out, I never called him dad again.
He was Harry to me.
And I'm proud to say I've got a beautiful grandson who's named after him. But we became house, you know, and that was important that and I didn't need him as my dad anymore because I'd sort of found my
place in life without my parents. But he became a really important component of steering and guiding me with how to create a really good organic farm and made me sort of feel more more courageous about us having this sort of diverse farm, and it was an organic farm and Soil Association were like pastically helpful and Dad was always coming over and giving me his you know, his ten cents worth of you know, you know, just plant different varietals and of apples and of potatoes and uh,
you know. He we'd had like even in our very modest garden in the Midlands, we because we were in middle House, we sort of had this double lot and so we grew a fantastic amount of of veggies and Dad was very proficient with that and didn't use any fertilizers or anything. You know. It was what we were always rapturous when we saw so many worms in the garden.
Even with lake House, your first home that you did an organic garden. Was that a family decision? It was something that you no, I think.
I think it's to do with my very early childhood of I'm not afraid of the soil. I know that if the soil is good, good things will come from good soil, bad things will come from bad soil. So when you know, having lake House, creating an organic farm was sort of easy because it was England. Getting to Pellagio.
And I was going to ask you how Tuscany and so culture Mary so Pelagio.
I didn't I certainly planted a veggie garden so many tomatoes, because that was sort of like hugely satisfying that these brilliant tomatoes just grow and thrive in the heat, and you can smell the heat in them and the sweetness that comes from them. But taking on Palagio, which just was a whole different animals than taking on lake House.
But what I did decide, after two years of just having vegetable gardens and seeing that we've got rather wonderful olives, that probably just I should learn a bit about the vineyard. And so with that started to get the hands into the soil.
It was a vineyard when you bought the house.
There was a very broken down vineyard, not really tended that world, no drainage really, what was.
The wine like?
The wine was well, it was being sold into the community at that point. But I was having my neck adjusted at a chiropractice and I said, that's where is that picture? It was a picture of a marvelous vineyard. And I said, what is that vineyard doing on your wall, Stefan? And he said, oh, that's my vineyard. And I said, oh, can I come of see it? And I said how are you doing this? And he said, well, this guy called Alan York and he does biodynamic wine, and would
you like to meet him. I said absolutely, cut to Alan York coming to Pellagio. And so for the first seven years we worked together Alan and I and I had the great pleasure to learn a lot from Alan. And two thousand and two we planted a lot of varietals and so.
We placed all the vineyards with your own grapes.
We kept some and we created more. In two thousand and seven we had our first vintage for Sister Moon and when we dance, and.
Then we have to say that the wine name after the songs.
So a lot of the wines are named after sting songs. Message in a battle, message in a bottle.
Moon when we died, Yeah.
And I bought you today my favorite, which is a white Vermentino. Actually it's called back, it's called batch Sealaboka. We made this in twenty twenty when we were full on, you know, pandemic and wearing male Nobody seemed to be kissing anybody. So I said, let's call this kisses on the mouth and hope for the day to come back. And so that's that's the Vermontino. This is a Canti Reserver called when we dancels me.
Do you do that? Yeah? I do them. I love that label. It's beautiful. Why don't you describe it? Because nobody can see it.
So the picture of of a lady dressed as catwoman and she's in point shoes, ballet point shoes, and she is very nimbly walking across the top of two wine bottles, perfectly balanced. Because I think that wines should be balanced, and food should be balanced, and in all things in life we aim to be balanced.
I always think when we do the olive oil trip to taste the new olive oil and the wine in November, it you know, we have a romance about wine. We have a romance about olive oil. We see these beautiful bottles of the product. But you know, in the end or in the beginning, it is agriculture. It is a farm. It is about the weather. And when you talk to them about what olive oil were going to have and when it's going to taste like, they'll talk about a bug that they had, you know, or they'll talk about
this year. You know, everyone is very, very worried about the fact that the heat of the summer has going to mean that both wine and olive oil production is going to be very endangered for this year. Are you involved to the extent that you are concerned about whether.
We're quite lucky where we are because we we have a cooler evenings. There wasn't one evening I don't know about for you, Lucie, but we so we had those insufferable forty one degree days, but in the evenings, you know, we went it went down to you know, maybe in the late seventies, and that is the best news for the vines because they recover themselves. And it wasn't morning without the sort of being a sort of feeling of dewey, sort of mourning.
And how can we talk about the olive oil? Is that olive oil that I see in there? Yes? Okay, nice, nice part? Is it all from your yes? Absolutely, don't mix it with other no.
So it's extra virgin, biological means organic and the olives of front Oyo, Mariolo and Licino.
So we do you want to when you talk about the wine trip and the olive oil trip, because this is a big deal in the River Cafe that we've done since almost the day Rose and I started. But when we did it the first years there were like five of us or four of us actually Rose and myself, and now.
Every October we take anyone that's worked at the restaurant, for any of the chefs, if worked for a year or above a year. We taked to Tuscany to do big olive oil tastings and wine tastings at the main wineries that we that we kind of buy from, but I mean, we can always swing by if you're around.
It's a very special relationship that we have to meet the people who grow the olive oil, who produced the wine, who live It's all mostly in Tuscany, although now we've we've extended to Piermonte and Pulia. It's now probably about six producers that we go to that are really like family.
You taste the wine, you taste the olive oil, and you learn and what it is for the people who've worked here, who've been cooking you know this food, who've been making the brusquetoes or frying cavalon you know, cavalonaro or whatever they've been working. They haven't it's a bit
back to our children. It's it's about exposure and some of them have never been to Italy or have ever been, certainly to Tuscany and have certainly never sat down at a table where the food was cooked in the kitchen and the ingredients were grown in the garden in Tuscany. And so it's a really important trip for us that they do this. We go for about four days, don't we.
And you do it sort of after presumably the grapes have been harvested, and then during the time of the vendemia of the of the olives. Yeah, so we're talking November.
No, beginning of November, usually early early November, and then and what I think what it shows the chefs often is the fact that you'll only get maybe two bottles of oil of one tree, and people just chug oil in until they've been to Tuscany and Sunday they're like, this is it's insane the amount of trees that you need to produce bottles of oil. And they suddenly have more respect for, you know, the ingredients, and.
They're inspired when they come back, and they they're so proud of having been.
Don't you think it's Yeah, just to sit on the bus going up the mountains and down the mountains after drinking a pint of.
Oil, I'm here with Joseph Travelli. We just were talking to this truly style and we've just been cooking lunch in the restaurant, and so did you do a grouse today?
We did grouse today. We'd had them for a few days.
That was quite nice, and tell me about it.
So today we cook grouse in red wine, which one we use the canty. You know, grouse is a very traditional thing. You have these kind of old fashioned London restaurants that serve grouse with sweet little sauce and game chips and all this stuff, which is lovely but really quite different to what we do, which is we just put it in the wood oven and it gets kind of heat from all over in some wine, and this
kind of becomes this kind of self sourcing bird. Very often we put a piece of bread, a bit of brisquet underneath the grouse and that kind of soaks up the flavor and the wine and you know, a little olive oil and you've got the most wonderful dish.
If you were telling somebody at home who doesn't have a wood of it wants to have a grouse, what advice or what tips would you give to the person cooking a grouse at home.
Rest it a little bit in the pan that you cook it in, you know, maybe cooking in a pan with some wine. It doesn't have to be wine, actually, it could be anything. Sometimes we might have a little brandy and a little bit of tomatoes is also quite nice.
Olive oil or.
Butter definitely inside the grouse. It's nice to put a little bit of oil or a little bit of butter because that gets hot and then it cooks from the inside out as well. So I'd say that's a pretty good tip actually, and then you know, we bring it to the front of the oven. But I would say, you know, after a little while of roasting, just leave it on the side.
If you like listening to Ruthie's Table for would you please make sure to rape and review the podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Tell us about what you were doing in Naples.
Two and a half years ago, I was asked would I like to direct a documentary about Naples. I said, well, I don't know Naples, and they said exactly, so we would like as sort of like a foreign pair of eyes on a city. They don't know anything about and what do you think of it? And this two and a half year journey has been this revelatory really in the humanity that is there as well as the art and the extraordinary food that you can be served in Naples.
I can honestly say there was not one bad restaurant that I visited and with a camera or without a camera that didn't sort of like give you just wonderful food that is just so just the quality as just couldn't be bettered anywhere. And so this feeling of this city that is ignored and passed over started to give way to a city that i'd rather sort of started
to fall in love with. And I would visit certain people that I thought were interesting for me to interview and what they were doing, and got to hear their stories and listen to them. And so I've covered a sort of like a big spectrum of what Naples is and what it was looking at through the eyes of two nonagenarians of the Second World War, which was brutal for the Neapolitans.
I even have a rapper.
Give us the three thousand years of its history in three minutes to sort of like just put things in perspective, how can I see it? So I was going to the Roman film and which I'm very happy about, and then it'll have a theatrical release in Italy.
Title it's called it's called Posentrare.
An ode to Naples, so means may I enter, may I come in? I would ask permission to people who lived in these very sort of modest homes on the street level, and they didn't even have windows. Some of them they had just shutters, and so the shutters are open in the day to give daylight. But I would tap on their shutters and say pass, and they'd say.
Marci.
The falls road, who welcome, And before I knew it, there was an espresso delicious on the table and biscotti, and then we've become friends in minutes, and I would
hear their stories. And the thing about the Neapolitans are there, it's it's actually no accident of Felini or even though he didn't really make any movies in Napoli that I can name, but he always cast out of Naples because they are the most telegenic natural just they will give their all in front of the camera and their most incredible faces from the you know, the amount of DNA mixtures that that I alluded to three thousand years of history in these twelve conquests, so that the DNA is
as in their words, very contaminated. And they don't use that word as a pejorative. They use it as absolute pride in who they are.
You tell me that you are going to now have a new home in New York. As there a way that you would bring the kitchen to New York, or you can for it in Central Park? You know, I once did a dinner with Alice Walters in New York, and I tell you, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to call Alice and say, Alice, what are you cooking? We're doing a charity bed for Edible school Yard. And I said, where are you gonna You know, we've ordered this from here and that from here, and the
vegetbles from here. What what? Who have you ordered your vegetables from? And she said, oh, Ruthie, I am going to forage in Central Park for our food. Did she find little ala for the wrist? She found salad leaves, and she found some herbs, and she fought, probably she probably didn't find anything. She made me feel really inferior. What will you do for food in New York?
Do you think, well, we go you know, it's of course it's no, you just can't compare it. But we've got really good farmers markets. And I go go there on a Sunday and take the little grandchildren along now and they like to carry them to baskets and get some fruits and veggies put in. But I like supporting the folks who've come in from the different areas and traveled three or four hours.
I mean, I grew up in Upstate New York and there was corn in the summer and sort of you know, I don't know, cabbage and whatever in the winter. And now you see these farmers in this market. Did we go there together? I kept remember if we went. We were there to Union Square and they have like five different kinds of rugelo. They have, you know, all these tomatoes and they're growing them in Long Island and it's very it's very inspiring.
I think, yeah, yeah, No, I like.
To do you eat that much in restaurants?
Do I eat out in restaurants? Yeah? A couple of nights a week, yeah. Yeah.
And you've described food being part of your family values, your grandmother's cooking, your father's picking the blackberries, your apples under your bed, you know, buying, living in houses, producing wine, producing olive oil, honey, having children and grandchildren to cook for and to take to the market. So food is all that, and in a life of ever changing times,
we have also food which is comfort. So I suppose my last question to you, one that I've asked everyone since Kirsty Young told me, Ruthy have one question for everybody. And the question we ask is if you needed food for comfort, for comfort, not because you're hungry, but because you need comfort. What is there food in your past, or in your future, or just that you love that you would go to when you need comfort from food.
Yes, I brought you my ultimate comfort food in my basket this morning. Ruth Torah shredded beef suet to make the most fluffy dumplings.
I'm really looking forward. Will you make some for me? I'm coming.
I'm going to make you.
I can't wait. I'm going to have a fluffy dumpling. And until then, you can make the Okay, we'll make Yeah, we'll come with the stew at the soup, but we can make it. We can make a great chicken soup. So thank you Sean, thank thank you to this is such a good, good error and we will connect. Yeah, yes, please, thank you so hungry. Listen to.
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 Selini. This episode had additional contributions by Sean win Owen.
Thank you to everyone at The River Cafe for your help in making this episode.