Speaker 1: Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and
Speaker 1: Adamized Studios.
Speaker 2: Last week I spelled on a paddle with Vanessa king
Speaker 2: Or celebrating International Women's Day. Listening to Vanessa that evening,
Speaker 2: it became apparent that it really wasn't necessary for the
Speaker 2: rest of us to be there. It was her views
Speaker 2: on social justice, women in business, creativity and leadership that
Speaker 2: everybody wanted to hear, most of all me. Her path
Speaker 2: towards Chief Business Officer of Conde Nasty International is a
Speaker 2: story of a young girl from Kenya a chieving remarkable
Speaker 2: amount in a British world through sheer, intelligence, motivation and determination.
Speaker 2: This we all know, but for me, the revelation was
Speaker 2: when Vanessa began talking about the food of her family,
Speaker 2: her culture, especially the cooking of her grandmother. Today we're
Speaker 2: here together to hear more about memory and food, change
Speaker 2: and connectivity. As always, I will listen with awe, with
Speaker 2: love and deep admiration the recipe that you chose. Yes,
Speaker 2: you love artichokes.
Speaker 3: I love artichokes and I love that you can only
Speaker 3: have them for a certain time in the year properly,
Speaker 3: and Italians do them incredibly well. I hope I pronounced
Speaker 3: this correctly, but it's for Carchoffi ala Piperno. You wanted
Speaker 3: to explain a little bit about the Piperno element.
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, carcioffi. They're also called karchoffi, which
Speaker 2: is a word for artichoke in Italian ala Judea. And
Speaker 2: there's an area of Rome which is called the Jewish Quarter,
Speaker 2: which I suppose, like in many Italian cities, was a ghetto,
Speaker 2: and it's right near the Colisseum. And there's a restaurant
Speaker 2: there called piper Now and Richard and I used to
Speaker 2: go there. It's on the top of a little hill
Speaker 2: and you actually can overlook the cabin Ilia and it's
Speaker 2: just a great little restaurant. And like a lot of
Speaker 2: Italian restaurants, you go there for one reason and yeah,
Speaker 2: one dish. And so there it's the artichokes dala Judea.
Speaker 2: And we call them for the cookbook artichokes al Peperna,
Speaker 2: because that's the name of the restaurant. Yeah it's good.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, get ready to be absolutely swarmed with exactly.
Speaker 2: It might not be there anymore.
Speaker 4: Okay, So this recipe serves six.
Speaker 3: You need twelve reminiscent art chokes, sunflower oil, sea salt,
Speaker 3: and black pepper, and three large lemons. Right, so, you
Speaker 3: heat the oil to one hundred degrees in your deep fryer.
Speaker 4: You need to have a deep fryer.
Speaker 2: First of all, well, you can use a large saucepan
Speaker 2: with olive oil.
Speaker 3: Peel away the leaves of the art choke, cut the
Speaker 3: stalks two centimeters from the heads. Fry the artichokes in
Speaker 3: batches until the leaves begin to crisp and the hearts soften.
Speaker 3: Drain on kitchen paper when cool, peel off the outside leaves,
Speaker 3: trim the tops of the artichokes. Increase the temperature of
Speaker 3: the oil to one hundred and seventy degrees. To fry
Speaker 3: the second time, this is a healthy one.
Speaker 2: It does strain. We off the oil.
Speaker 4: I have to say it's tasty. It's healthy in love.
Speaker 3: So to fry the second time, you place two to
Speaker 3: three art chokes at a time in a hot oil
Speaker 3: and fry until crisp for about two to three minutes.
Speaker 3: Then flatten out the artichokes, set each on a board
Speaker 3: and gently separate out the layer of the head, exposing
Speaker 3: the heart. Squeeze between two plates season and serve with
Speaker 3: lemon amazing recipes.
Speaker 2: But than I said, an choke has a head and a.
Speaker 3: Heart, So I was thinking about myself, what do you
Speaker 3: read it for?
Speaker 2: Can you start for lunch?
Speaker 4: It depends.
Speaker 3: So I'm very lucky because I entertain lot our clients
Speaker 3: and business partners. So we go out to We're in
Speaker 3: Mayfair and we go out to lovely Mayfair restaurants. So
Speaker 3: I'm at Scott's a lot carriages, I love the Mount
Speaker 3: Street restaurant and things which I all now associate with work, right,
Speaker 3: But then there are lots of days where I'm doing
Speaker 3: the business end, so I don't leave my desk all day,
Speaker 3: and my assistant will go and fetch me a salad
Speaker 3: and all some sushi.
Speaker 4: I try to eat raw food in the day.
Speaker 3: But the way it is that Vogue House is each
Speaker 3: magazine kind of dominates a floor.
Speaker 4: So I worked on GQ for years.
Speaker 3: I was running that business, and I was that's the
Speaker 3: first floor, and then you graduate up and Boga's the
Speaker 3: fifth floor. And there was always this idea that nobody
Speaker 3: eats at Vogue, you know, so people would deliver. You'd
Speaker 3: see in the reception of Vogue House. You know, cakes
Speaker 3: and these amazing things being delivered, and we'd all sort
Speaker 3: of scoff, Oh, well, you know they'll be in the
Speaker 3: bin and needs them up there, and you know a GQ.
Speaker 3: We all sort of it was food everywhere all the time,
Speaker 3: you know, and actually is a big misconception because.
Speaker 4: We were Yeah, we work really hard.
Speaker 3: It's a really hard working team, the Vogue team. I
Speaker 3: still now I'm overseeing all of the brands at Conde
Speaker 3: Nas but I still sit with Edward on the fifth floor.
Speaker 3: And he loves to eat.
Speaker 4: We love to eat.
Speaker 3: We love to plan a dinner. We love to incorporate
Speaker 3: a bit of our culture into dinners. So even when
Speaker 3: we did his wedding, his wedding was at long leads
Speaker 3: and it helped him to plan that. It was amazing.
Speaker 3: But we were saying, you know, we need to have
Speaker 3: John Off in there, which caterists can go. Yeah, we did,
Speaker 3: and we had you know, he loves spicy food. Anytime
Speaker 3: he comes here, he'll always say, can I have chili
Speaker 3: and chili Island, So we had chili sauces and everything.
Speaker 3: So it's talking about food eating a lot of times
Speaker 3: he and I eat our lunch at desks you know,
Speaker 3: across from each other. So he'll have steam vegetables and
Speaker 3: you know, some fish or chicken or something, and I'll
Speaker 3: have sushi. But we sit together and eat it if
Speaker 3: we're if we're doing a working lunch. Otherwise I'm out
Speaker 3: with clients.
Speaker 2: When we talked to Edward Nifl, and he just felt
Speaker 2: quite a lot about wanting to change the culture of
Speaker 2: you know, the stick thin model and the denial of
Speaker 2: food and the denial of pleasure and in order to
Speaker 2: show clothes at their best. Now that you're in such
Speaker 2: a senior position at Cande Nast, does that does that
Speaker 2: into your yes world? Yeah, what do you feel about it? Well?
Speaker 3: I think that you know, the reason that Edwind and
Speaker 3: I's partnership kind of is so important to me is
Speaker 3: we had been separately and a bit together talking about
Speaker 3: this challenge in our industry, not just about beauty being
Speaker 3: about stick thin, which is kind of a bit preposterous,
Speaker 3: but just the idea that magazin scenes in media represented
Speaker 3: this kind of one really hard to reach version of
Speaker 3: being a woman, which we didn't grow up surrounded by
Speaker 3: my friends, weren't those people, and yet there were these
Speaker 3: magazines that we loved representing that in an industry which
Speaker 3: we loved and we were a part of, you know,
Speaker 3: and so you know, the joy and beauty for both
Speaker 3: of us was all around, in different shapes and different
Speaker 3: sizes and different color And what we did behind the
Speaker 3: scenes at Vogue was build a group of people who
Speaker 3: didn't think like us. That's how you learn about new,
Speaker 3: exciting things if you're all speaking to each other. And
Speaker 3: you you know, Edwin and I actually have quite similar backgrounds.
Speaker 3: I was laughing with Steve McQueen about our mothers did
Speaker 3: exactly the same thing.
Speaker 4: Nurses in the same hospital did your mother?
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so our background, you know, he can start
Speaker 3: a sentence, I can finish it because our backgrounds are
Speaker 3: so similar. And so what's really fascinating is talking to
Speaker 3: I mean, I could talk to Steve forever in a
Speaker 3: day or Edward forever in a day. But what I
Speaker 3: really love is to talk to people who didn't grow
Speaker 3: up like me. That's where and I think that's what
Speaker 3: I really want to challenge not only the media industry
Speaker 3: but the but any organization to do a little bit more. Is,
Speaker 3: you know, how can you connect with people and wider
Speaker 3: audiences if you don't have them.
Speaker 4: In your midst.
Speaker 2: And food and food is the great connector with him,
Speaker 2: and he remember him talking very much about growing up
Speaker 2: like you, very very interesting conversations about his mother and
Speaker 2: the markets and kind of keeping the food of their
Speaker 2: parents and their grandparents and adapting to the food of
Speaker 2: the culture.
Speaker 3: The keeping food alive through food is everything, you know,
Speaker 3: when when everything was planned around food, I remember all
Speaker 3: of our great excursions on the weekends being about going
Speaker 3: to get food, you know, so particularly in London in
Speaker 3: the nineties late eighties nineties, where a lot of the
Speaker 3: foods that we ate in the Caribbean in particular were
Speaker 3: not readily available. You couldn't pop to, you know, Sainsbury's,
Speaker 3: so you'd go from West London to Dulstone Market because
Speaker 3: somebody told you that there was something there or what
Speaker 3: have you.
Speaker 4: And Wembley Market.
Speaker 3: We used to go to south All Market lots because
Speaker 3: the Indian community had lots of the ingredients and spices
Speaker 3: and so on that we used. And so that's really unifying.
Speaker 3: But I think with one of the best ways to
Speaker 3: get to know people and groups of new people when
Speaker 3: you're trying to connect and create these kind of diversity
Speaker 3: of perspective, spaces where you know it's through food.
Speaker 2: Where were you born?
Speaker 3: So from the very beginning, I was born in Kenya,
Speaker 3: in Nanuki. My father is Kenyan and my mother is
Speaker 3: from Saint Kitts in the Caribbean, Saint Kittenita, it's tiny
Speaker 3: into the islands. And they met here in London. It's
Speaker 3: kind of a strange pairing in the seventies, and it
Speaker 3: was quite a radical relationship.
Speaker 4: There's because.
Speaker 3: At that time Africans and people from the Caribbean did
Speaker 3: not spend that much time together.
Speaker 4: They certainly didn't end up in relationships.
Speaker 3: And London is the great sort of unifying space, right
Speaker 3: It's a true melting plot I think in the world.
Speaker 4: They met here, they.
Speaker 3: Fell in love, and my mother moved with my father
Speaker 3: to this strange land where she knew no language or
Speaker 3: the culture. Lots of her family didn't speak to her
Speaker 3: because of the move, and indeed lots of his family
Speaker 3: didn't speak to him because someone from yeah, from a
Speaker 3: different culture, and he was a very eligible bachelor.
Speaker 4: So I was born in this kind of context.
Speaker 2: Why did they both plan to come to London for
Speaker 2: a short time and then go home or did.
Speaker 4: My father what did he do? He did some of
Speaker 4: his education here.
Speaker 3: He's a military man, but he studied engineering, came to
Speaker 3: London with studies and works and things. And my mother,
Speaker 3: who is a great inspiration in my life, has moved
Speaker 3: here at seventeen on her own. She took the flight
Speaker 3: and came to London to become a nurse with the NHS.
Speaker 3: And it was a time where British were recruiting heavily
Speaker 3: in the Commonwealth to establish the welfare states to come
Speaker 3: and become nurses and.
Speaker 4: Bus drivers and all of those things.
Speaker 3: And she had a big kind of dreamy heart and
Speaker 3: came here thinking this is going to be an incredible life.
Speaker 2: Then to us supported to yeah, Kenny.
Speaker 3: Was it a small village, Quite a small village, yes,
Speaker 3: And it's in a sort of mountainous area. His family
Speaker 3: were in Coffee, so yeah, quite rural, but they were
Speaker 3: very well off. But my mother had a very difficult
Speaker 3: time settling in there. And this is where food comes
Speaker 3: in because she was encountering women who didn't understand her
Speaker 3: literally and figuratively. She only spoke English and they often
Speaker 3: spoke five languages, you know, and so the language barrier
Speaker 3: was there. She didn't speak Swahili, she didn't speak the
Speaker 3: dialect as well, and so food was her way to
Speaker 3: connect with people. She used to say to me, it's
Speaker 3: quicker to learn addition than to learn a language. And
Speaker 3: I think one of the most ingratiating things you can
Speaker 3: do in a new culture is you know, know some
Speaker 3: basic words to greet people. And she looked at food
Speaker 3: in the same way. If you could cook the food
Speaker 3: really well, it was a show of respect. So she
Speaker 3: learned to cook, which I also found strange because she
Speaker 3: had cooks and nannies and all of those things. But
Speaker 3: she loved to cook, and.
Speaker 2: She loved to cook before.
Speaker 4: Yeah, my grandmother was a great cook.
Speaker 2: And grandmother and Saint KITT's.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we're all over the place, and my.
Speaker 3: Family are not a family who say I love you
Speaker 3: a lot, but we're incredibly loving family and expressed through stories,
Speaker 3: like everyone in my family is a bit of a joker,
Speaker 3: you know, funny stories and food.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she was a kitchen Like do you remember the
Speaker 2: kitchen in the house?
Speaker 4: Well, I didn't.
Speaker 3: I we left Kenya at when I was eighteen months old.
Speaker 3: I don't have any real memories. But again, she would
Speaker 3: cook the dishes to keep I guess the Kenyon in
Speaker 3: me alive. So we left when I was eighteen months old.
Speaker 3: We moved to Saint Kits and then we came to
Speaker 3: London and she would cook ugalley and soka mawiki and
Speaker 3: mung beans and these are Kenyan dishes.
Speaker 2: What are the first two? I know? Mung beans?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So soka mawiki is it's like collared greens or
Speaker 3: kale with tomatoes and onions, and you tend to have
Speaker 3: it with rich dishes, so like a beef stew or
Speaker 3: stewed mung beans and ougalley, which is like a maze
Speaker 3: kind of it's almost like a not a mashed potato,
Speaker 3: but it's quite a firm, dense carrier almost for shoes
Speaker 3: and things. And the soukamwiki is like a palate cleanser.
Speaker 3: So she would make these dishes for us, my sister
Speaker 3: and I, I guess, to keep that Kenyan culture alive
Speaker 3: in us growing up, moving around, living in belonging to
Speaker 3: three places. Food was a brilliant connector to places we'd
Speaker 3: left so that they didn't become lost, but also a
Speaker 3: really good way of connecting with somewhere new, with new people,
Speaker 3: with new communities and within new life almost.
Speaker 4: Well. Okay, So at two we went to live with
Speaker 4: my grandmother. My mother and father got divorced.
Speaker 3: My mother came back to London to try and re
Speaker 3: establish herself by a house and all of those things,
Speaker 3: and we stayed in Sant Kits with her, visiting frequently
Speaker 3: with my grandmother. So I was very young, so I
Speaker 3: was stuck to her all the time. And she is
Speaker 3: definitely the most powerful sort of figure in my life.
Speaker 4: My mother's a very powerful figure. We're very close.
Speaker 3: When my grandmother is almost my heart, you know, and
Speaker 3: I gosh, I'm welling up.
Speaker 4: Even talking about her.
Speaker 3: It's so because when we spoke about this, No, she's not,
Speaker 3: but she's very much alive in me. I think about
Speaker 3: her every day, not only through food but also just
Speaker 3: her advice. Was amazing because it's so funny, it's really
Speaker 3: evocative thinking about this.
Speaker 4: I'm getting emotional.
Speaker 3: No, it's kind of happy to you know, when someone
Speaker 3: leaves a mark on your life that's so powerful and
Speaker 3: kind of runs through everything in my working life, whenever
Speaker 3: I'm up against any kind of challenge, in the way
Speaker 3: I raise my son, in the way that I connect
Speaker 3: to people, and what I place is important. These kind
Speaker 3: of figures are so strong, and I miss her, I
Speaker 3: really miss.
Speaker 4: Her, but she's alive.
Speaker 2: What was her food like? Describe? Was she in the
Speaker 2: kitchen all day long.
Speaker 3: I don't remember her not wearing an apron or some
Speaker 3: sort of overalls. So she made food that was needed,
Speaker 3: constant nurturing, you know.
Speaker 4: Her house was also.
Speaker 3: Where everyone dropped in, so my sister and I lived
Speaker 3: there on and off. Four of my cousins lived there,
Speaker 3: and my uncle's children, and then she was sort of
Speaker 3: everyone's grandmother. So her house was, Oh, it was so fun.
Speaker 3: It was a wash with children all the time. And
Speaker 3: I was the youngest, so I was always with her.
Speaker 3: I slept in her bed, and I was literally on
Speaker 3: her apen strings. So her food was very rich. It
Speaker 3: was like almost like a warm embrace, you know, hearty,
Speaker 3: and lots of sort of stews and meats and heavily
Speaker 3: marinated delicious comfort food, dumplings and you know, sort of starchy,
Speaker 3: delicious things. And she kept her own little farm, at
Speaker 3: least it felt like a farm to me. She grew
Speaker 3: her own vegetables, she had her own fruit tree, She
Speaker 3: would graft her own strains, of mango. She grew herbs
Speaker 3: and things that people would come and visit her to buy,
Speaker 3: and she kept her own animals, and I used to
Speaker 3: help her tend to those little gardens, and then she'd
Speaker 3: make up these amazing dishes from food, and she'd tell
Speaker 3: me stories of the food as well.
Speaker 2: So did she grow up in poverty or did she
Speaker 2: grow up any Yes? She did.
Speaker 3: And I look at sort of my life now, which
Speaker 3: is so much on her shoulders, and all of the
Speaker 3: opportunity I have now, and I think about how important circumstances.
Speaker 3: So she was a really intelligent woman. She was the
Speaker 3: most prolific reader I ever knew. She was either cooking
Speaker 3: or reading. But she was forced to leave school at fourteen.
Speaker 3: Her mother was a She also had a slightly strange
Speaker 3: parentage in that her father was previously a slave and
Speaker 3: her mother.
Speaker 2: Was grandfather was a slave. Yeah in syn kids, yeah,
Speaker 2: and probably like the Civil War probably yeah.
Speaker 3: But her mother, which is really strange, was a Portuguese
Speaker 3: woman from a slave owning family, so it's really really
Speaker 3: unusual that way around. And her mother was not very
Speaker 3: maternal at all, and so they fell upon hard times.
Speaker 3: Her mother was seen I think as having made bad decisions,
Speaker 3: and so she didn't grow up surrounded, as I understand it,
Speaker 3: by lots of love, and so she created this love
Speaker 3: loving world. But the reason that it's important at how
Speaker 3: she grew up is her food was very much worker food.
Speaker 3: You know, she made food that they would have made
Speaker 3: for men and women who worked picking cotton.
Speaker 4: She was picking cotton at fourteen.
Speaker 3: Years old in the fields, and then after that taking
Speaker 3: books under the house to read them in evening and
Speaker 3: cooking and supporting the households and so on. So she
Speaker 3: had this really eclectic upbringing where she really valued education
Speaker 3: and missed her opportunity I think, to have a full education.
Speaker 3: But food was also the key joy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so would you sit down? Would you go
Speaker 2: to school and then every evening come home and sit
Speaker 2: down for dinner. Would there be for dinner on the
Speaker 2: table for you? Yes?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So my grandmother always liked us to sit and
Speaker 3: eat together again because I think sharing stories and storytelling
Speaker 3: was really important, and food's a really good way to
Speaker 3: get everyone together and understand what their days were like.
Speaker 3: I was very young, so I was always around the house,
Speaker 3: So I looked forward to people coming home with their
Speaker 3: stories of the day and enjoying that over food.
Speaker 4: And so.
Speaker 3: We would have great mounds of kind of rice and
Speaker 3: vegetables and these kind of incredible with me and everybody
Speaker 3: would pile in and pour in and go for second plates.
Speaker 3: It wasn't a very formal sit and the table was
Speaker 3: also off the kitchen, so it was kind of part
Speaker 3: of the action, and it was just a really lovely
Speaker 3: way to be connected with the people around you.
Speaker 2: Breakfast, what was breakfast? Icen that? Do you remember?
Speaker 4: Do you know what's so funny? I do not remember breakfast.
Speaker 3: What I remember, really really vividly at my grandmother's house
Speaker 3: is the back door of her house was at the.
Speaker 4: Base of it.
Speaker 3: We called it a mountain, but it was really just
Speaker 3: a big hill and there were mango groves and things,
Speaker 3: and so we would take buckets in the morning. We'd
Speaker 3: just run out barefoot, all the kids together with the
Speaker 3: older kids, and go and pick fruit and slightly gorge
Speaker 3: ourselves on the things.
Speaker 2: So you left this kind of your mother took you
Speaker 2: to London, then, did.
Speaker 3: You, Yeah, so my mother, while we were having this
Speaker 3: lovely time, you know, with my grandmother, learning these amazing
Speaker 3: lessons about life and opportunity and food and you know,
Speaker 3: all of those things. My mother was in London, toiling away.
Speaker 3: She was very focused on us moving to London and
Speaker 3: having the kind of cultural access that you could have
Speaker 3: in London. Being part of different communities was a big
Speaker 3: thing for her, and getting a really, really great education.
Speaker 3: So she was working very hard. She'd managed to on
Speaker 3: a nurse's salary by a three bedroom house in West London,
Speaker 3: which was her dream, and were all while coming back
Speaker 3: every three months to sink it to visit us. But
Speaker 3: this sort of sad thing happened where she became this
Speaker 3: kind of glamorous figure in my life. But I didn't.
Speaker 3: I didn't really connect that we were ever going to
Speaker 3: live together. So when we came to London, it was
Speaker 3: a bit of a room awakening, to be honest, Like,
Speaker 3: I missed my grandmother terribly.
Speaker 2: Had you ever experienced, either in Kenya or in Saint
Speaker 2: KITT's any form of racism, you probably hadn't, had you No.
Speaker 3: That was also really strange, and I'm also really grateful
Speaker 3: for that, because when I did encounter any forms of racism,
Speaker 3: it just didn't touch my soul because it just seemed preposterous.
Speaker 3: You know, the idea that I could be anything bad
Speaker 3: or good just because I'm black was silly because I'd
Speaker 3: come from these cultures where everyone's black, good, bad, you know, and.
Speaker 4: Everything in between.
Speaker 3: And so I think I'm really with retrospect, you know,
Speaker 3: grateful to that foundation where I was never affected deeply
Speaker 3: by any kind of racist comments and things like that.
Speaker 4: It just felt a bit silly.
Speaker 3: I went to Catholics, where there's a lot of immigrant
Speaker 3: communities anyway, you know, lots of Irish Catholics, Italians, Eastern Europeans,
Speaker 3: and so there was that unity in difference anyway. And
Speaker 3: then I really think I definitely remember to encounters in
Speaker 3: primary school. I told my mother and she was, of course,
Speaker 3: you know, came down to the school and frustrated, but
Speaker 3: it just didn't really really affect me. I think the
Speaker 3: comments are don't affect me as much as seeing injustice
Speaker 3: so more discrimination. But I didn't I couldn't understand that
Speaker 3: until later on. Yeah, but I was very lucky to
Speaker 3: be surrounded by lots of people who had had their version,
Speaker 3: you know, of the kind of immigrant experience. The other
Speaker 3: thing was my mother is an incredibly charming woman.
Speaker 4: Everybody loves her.
Speaker 3: She just brought people together all the time, and so
Speaker 3: our house was always filled with quite people from all
Speaker 3: different backgrounds. And again I'm really grateful to that. Now
Speaker 3: I tend not to walk into spaces and feel uncomfortable.
Speaker 3: I don't mind being the only person of a I
Speaker 3: don't mind being the only woman in the room, or
Speaker 3: the only personal color or whatever. I think that's because
Speaker 3: of her, because she was hard not to like. And
Speaker 3: I remember my mother used to host these dinners and
Speaker 3: Sunday afternoons and you'd have, you know, her friend, her
Speaker 3: nursing friends, the High Commission of Saint Kits would be
Speaker 3: casually there and like other sort of dignitaries are our
Speaker 3: little house, you know, and these people for you know,
Speaker 3: the woman from a counsel estate around the corner who
Speaker 3: sometimes helped to pick us up from school because she
Speaker 3: was working and things like that. And she just threw
Speaker 3: everyone together and served up food.
Speaker 2: And did she adapt her cooking when she came here,
Speaker 2: did she change to more British cooking or did she
Speaker 2: keep for cooking Kenya?
Speaker 3: She kept the cooking a lot of sink it and Kenya,
Speaker 3: But she did we did do these sort of English
Speaker 3: nights so Fridays we'd have would have like British food,
Speaker 3: and we thought it was really exotic. We'd have egg
Speaker 3: and chips for breakfast, no for dinner, which we kind
Speaker 3: of was. Really this was so bizarre to us, you know,
Speaker 3: that's like, wow, potato and an egg and that's the
Speaker 3: whole meal. And lots of different sort of cuisines that
Speaker 3: you could get here, which you couldn't get so readily
Speaker 3: and sink it and things. So Fridays and sometimes Saturdays
Speaker 3: were days to either eat out or she'd recreate frankly
Speaker 3: with much more flavor, you know. But yeah, no, she cooked,
Speaker 3: and I remember everybody loved her food. I always thoughts
Speaker 3: when my friends came to my house, they came to
Speaker 3: see her rather than going to see me, you know.
Speaker 2: Other people's houses for food. Would it be very different
Speaker 2: from your own?
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, and it was such a culture shock. I
Speaker 3: always loved to go. A very close friend of mine
Speaker 3: is Polish and she in her house, her grandmother had
Speaker 3: a sort of annex in her house. She was blind,
Speaker 3: actually her babcher and we became very close. And now
Speaker 3: I think about it, it's probably because i'd never really
Speaker 3: made the connection of my relationship with my grandmother, but
Speaker 3: she would teach me to make pierogies and all of
Speaker 3: these amazing sort of Polish dishes which I would never
Speaker 3: have eaten before. And I would have Irish shoes at
Speaker 3: you know, my Irish friends out. I had a friend
Speaker 3: called Margaret who had she was one of thirteen. I
Speaker 3: found initially the food really bland, and my first encounter
Speaker 3: with English food was at school, so it's kind of
Speaker 3: you know, the worst, yeah, and then it sort of
Speaker 3: London opened up to me through having these experiences with
Speaker 3: different families from different immigrant backgrounds and how they cooked
Speaker 3: and so on. So that was really important in me
Speaker 3: falling in love with being in London after arriving in
Speaker 3: that cold October and feeling ripped away from my favorite place.
Speaker 3: The idea of Vogue was that it was at the
Speaker 3: time that Edward took over exclusive really in an excluding way, unfortunately,
Speaker 3: which was the style of the time. But the idea
Speaker 3: that you would critique the industry, which was our bread
Speaker 3: and butter. So the business of Vogue is advertising from
Speaker 3: luxury fashion brands who at the time celebrated very thin,
Speaker 3: very white, a very particular youth, and a very particular
Speaker 3: type of beauty. So although everyone loved Edward's idea and vision,
Speaker 3: there was also this almost unanimous sort of gulp and fearful,
Speaker 3: very fearful, this, this is going to destroy the business evogue.
Speaker 2: I remember before the first issue on the talk about
Speaker 2: you know, the change, the vision of yourself and the
Speaker 2: Edwards and that first issue was amazing. Tell me about
Speaker 2: that first issue, and it kind of does relate to food,
Speaker 2: doesn't it about food?
Speaker 4: It's true, I think that. I think it's very much
Speaker 4: about joy.
Speaker 3: And if you deny yourself anything right, you deny yourself
Speaker 3: getting older, you deny yourself gaining a few pounds for
Speaker 3: the joy of food, you deny who you are in
Speaker 3: terms of your demographic makeup, it's not joyful. And so
Speaker 3: that's what I read, That's what I articulate from what
Speaker 3: Edward's vision was, and it was also my shared views,
Speaker 3: you know, and everything I've described about how I grew up.
Speaker 3: It's about great storytelling, it's about joy, it's about connection,
Speaker 3: it's about acceptance of difference, and so this just spoke
Speaker 3: to me.
Speaker 2: It also instills a sense of failure if you're not
Speaker 2: you know, yes, so damaging too. Definitely, and growing up
Speaker 2: that sense of failure if you don't fit into what
Speaker 2: it was.
Speaker 3: You know what was so incredible in that first year
Speaker 3: is so Edward and I went on this mission where
Speaker 3: he basically said, you know, if this doesn't make money,
Speaker 3: then I'm not going to be doing this for very long.
Speaker 3: I know I can do what I need to do
Speaker 3: and people will love it, but I need to be
Speaker 3: able to do it for a while. And no one
Speaker 3: can see a path to making this business work. And
Speaker 3: so I set about creating a new business. And it
Speaker 3: was scary stuff because Vogue is half of Condinas business.
Speaker 3: So we have ten brands and half of the business
Speaker 3: is Vogue, so you really don't want to mess that up, right,
Speaker 3: So everybody was sort of saying, it ain't broke, you know,
Speaker 3: it ain't broke, leave it alone. But I knew what
Speaker 3: was coming, and so we had to speak to the brands.
Speaker 3: We had to try and ask them to be different.
Speaker 3: We had to say, you are going to need to
Speaker 3: make samples in different sizes. We can create content for
Speaker 3: you because your ad is now going to look slightly
Speaker 3: strange in the backdrop of this kind of melting pot
Speaker 3: with different races and sizes, and so I had to
Speaker 3: create a different business model for Vogue, which invited in
Speaker 3: different brands to work with us, invited our existing brands
Speaker 3: to work differently. Also that we could bolster up this
Speaker 3: incredible vision where women felt seen and they felt like
Speaker 3: they weren't excluded, and that the idea that a magazine
Speaker 3: like Vogue didn't have to be excluding, it could be
Speaker 3: aspirational and inclusive was radical creatively, but it was radical
Speaker 3: from a business perspective as well, because a lot of
Speaker 3: the times when people take those radical creative risks, it's
Speaker 3: on it with a platform which is not so big
Speaker 3: and not so visible and not so scary. And that
Speaker 3: first year issue after issue getting letters, you know, people
Speaker 3: taking the time to write letters or long emails to say,
Speaker 3: thank God, I finally see myself. This is amazing and
Speaker 3: was so gratifying. It just you know, powered us on.
Speaker 3: But it was an amazing time and still is.
Speaker 2: You've changed the world. Would you say as well? In fashion,
Speaker 2: is that you see more runways with different models of
Speaker 2: different sizes and different shapes. You know, the friends that
Speaker 2: I've had who were in models, not many of them,
Speaker 2: but I just saw it was almost painful to see
Speaker 2: the relationship with food to being able to do their job,
Speaker 2: you know, to be.
Speaker 4: Able to I think we still have a lot of
Speaker 4: work to do there.
Speaker 3: I definitely feel that British Vogue has changed the magazine
Speaker 3: world and the content world significantly. I remember the first
Speaker 3: September that we went. Rihanna was our first, the first
Speaker 3: black woman I believe, to be on the cover of
Speaker 3: British Vogue, and in.
Speaker 4: September that was twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: You know, it's very recent, and you know, every time
Speaker 3: we did these and people would say that's the first
Speaker 3: or the first, and you'd say, my god, this is crazy.
Speaker 4: It's not like we're going for someone obscure. It's realnit,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 3: And then I remember the subsequent September after that first set,
Speaker 3: remember issue having a black woman on the cover. I
Speaker 3: went to the newsstands as I do, and every single
Speaker 3: magazine cover had.
Speaker 4: A black woman on it, and I think this is.
Speaker 3: Incredible, you know, because everybody thought, well, this is what
Speaker 3: we need to do now. And then I became a
Speaker 3: bit afraid that it was trend base. So people were saying,
Speaker 3: what would Edward do? What would they do at Vogue
Speaker 3: and let's create the output without the work behind the scenes.
Speaker 3: Talking to different people, having different people create a real
Speaker 3: melting pot. And this idea of diversity of perspective is really.
Speaker 4: Important to me.
Speaker 3: It's one of the big criticisms when Edward was appointed
Speaker 3: and I was appointed, was you're going to appoint two
Speaker 3: black people, you know, so it's like all or nothing,
Speaker 3: and lots of people felt it was kind of fad like.
Speaker 3: And I had been at Conde inass at that point
Speaker 3: for nearly a decade. I transformed GQ. I had, you know,
Speaker 3: a really Jonathan knew how disappointed me without interview to
Speaker 3: the job of running British for based on my track record.
Speaker 4: But what people could see externally.
Speaker 3: Was Okay, they're doing a it's a thing they're they're
Speaker 3: bringing in, you know.
Speaker 4: And so there was lots of criticism.
Speaker 3: It was quite shocking actually that people were quite vocal
Speaker 3: about it.
Speaker 4: And so.
Speaker 3: When I saw those September covers, I initially thought, this
Speaker 3: is amazing, this is what we've always wanted. There are
Speaker 3: plus sized women and women of color, and this is amazing.
Speaker 3: And then I looked at the mass head and I thought, ah,
Speaker 3: not very much has changed Behind the scenes and to
Speaker 3: really make the industry change. And really the new frontier
Speaker 3: is not who's on the cover, it's who works.
Speaker 4: Behind the scenes. And how mixed is it?
Speaker 2: If food is memory and you have so many memories
Speaker 2: and it's been so good here about this journey from
Speaker 2: Kenya to sak Kids to the first Law of g
Speaker 2: Q and the top floor of FO and food is
Speaker 2: all that. It's also comfort. And so the question we
Speaker 2: ask everybody is if you need food for comfort, is
Speaker 2: there something you turn to.
Speaker 4: When you do? I'm going to pick two.
Speaker 3: One is pasta isn't past the universal comfort food?
Speaker 2: Certainly mine?
Speaker 3: I think almost everyone you know, A really good fresh
Speaker 3: pasta is just comfort. But food from my grandmother's kitchen
Speaker 3: is my ultimate. It's the if the food, the European
Speaker 3: food I love is like a kiss, amazing kiss. My
Speaker 3: grandmother's food is like the warm embrace. And so I
Speaker 3: would have. One of the things she would make for
Speaker 3: lunch were something called saltfish fritter. So it's again I
Speaker 3: think from her mother, who's Portuguese. The Portuguese have a
Speaker 3: thing called baccalout Yeah yeah, yeah, salted cord in sync.
Speaker 3: Its my grandmother would make saltfish cakes from them, which
Speaker 3: is just mixed with eggs, onions, chives, peppers, chilis and
Speaker 3: then fried into these patties. And you'd have that with
Speaker 3: planting and some eggs and it's absolutely divided.
Speaker 2: Do you make it?
Speaker 3: Yes, Yeah, that's that is my comfort food that I
Speaker 3: make for myself.
Speaker 4: And yeah, it's slightly adapted.
Speaker 2: But I wish i'd met your grandmother.
Speaker 4: She's amazing. Well you're kind of meeting her. Foo.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. It's a beautiful conversation.
Speaker 4: Thank you, it's so special.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: The River Cafe Look Book is now available in bookshops
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Speaker 1: with photographs from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The book
Speaker 1: has fifty delicious and easy to prepare recipes, including a
Speaker 1: host of River Cafe classics that have been specially adapted
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