Speaker 1: This episode is brought to you by Me and M,
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Speaker 1: I'd really recommend heading to their beautiful, brand new flagship
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Speaker 1: In the thirty four years at Adam Gopnik and I
Speaker 1: have been friends. We have lived in the same city, Paris,
Speaker 1: where he wrote his beautiful book Paris to the Moon.
Speaker 1: We have loved and then lost our best friend, the
Speaker 1: art historian and curator Kirk Varnado. We've taken care of
Speaker 1: each other's children as if they were our own, and
Speaker 1: sung show tunes together from every Broadway musical Because we know.
Speaker 2: All the lyrics.
Speaker 1: Most of all, we have never stopped cooking, eating, and
Speaker 1: talking about our passion for food. We may be separated
Speaker 1: by an ocean, but we are always minutes and inches
Speaker 1: away all the while. Adam leads a terrific life in writing,
Speaker 1: staff writer for The New Yorker and author of nine
Speaker 1: books of non fiction, fiction and memoir. Next year he
Speaker 1: will perform his one man show Talk Therapy in New
Speaker 1: York City. Adam is here now with me in London.
Speaker 1: In four days, He's eaten in the River Cafe four times.
Speaker 2: This morning we sang You've.
Speaker 1: Got to be taught from South Pacific, Rainbow Connection, from
Speaker 1: the Muppets, and I've never been in love before from
Speaker 1: Guys and Dolls. Tonight, after seeing Giant at the Royal Court,
Speaker 1: we will go home and cook to Btapasta my definition
Speaker 1: of a good friend. Thank you, sir Adam. You've chosen
Speaker 1: the recipe and it was from the very first cookbook
Speaker 1: we ever did, the River Cafe Cookbook, and the recipe
Speaker 1: you chose was Penny with quick sausage sauce.
Speaker 3: Would you like to read it?
Speaker 4: I would love to read it, and I should ad
Speaker 4: that this is part of a diptick, as our historians
Speaker 4: would say, with a penny with a slow sausage sauce,
Speaker 4: So that is why it's quick. Two hundred fifty grams
Speaker 4: of penny regatta, two tablespoons of olive oil, two red onions,
Speaker 4: peeled and chopped, five sausages, meat crumbled, half a tablespoon
Speaker 4: of fresh rosemary, two small dried chilis, eight hundred grams
Speaker 4: of peeled plum tomatoes, one hundred and fifty mili liters
Speaker 4: of cream, and one hundred and twenty grams of parmesan,
Speaker 4: freshly grated. You heat the olive oil in the saucepan
Speaker 4: and you fry the onion lightly. You add the sausage, rosemary,
Speaker 4: bay leaves and chili all together, frying them over a
Speaker 4: high heat, stirring to mash the sausages. You remove all
Speaker 4: but one tablespoon of the fat and continue you to
Speaker 4: cook for twenty minutes. Add the tomatoes, stir and return.
Speaker 3: To the boil.
Speaker 4: Then remove from the heat. Cook the penne in boiling
Speaker 4: salted water, then drain and add directly to the sauce.
Speaker 4: Stir the cream into the sauce with the penny and
Speaker 4: half the parmesan, and then you serve the pustup with
Speaker 4: the remaining parmesan grated on top.
Speaker 1: When I asked you for a recipe that you'd like
Speaker 1: to read Ruthie's Table four, you immediately said, I know
Speaker 1: exactly what I.
Speaker 3: Want to do.
Speaker 1: I want to do the penne with quick sausage sauce.
Speaker 1: And I was wondering why.
Speaker 4: Well, because it was nineteen ninety four, we had just
Speaker 4: moved to Paris, my wife Martha and our little son
Speaker 4: Luke had just moved to Paris then, and we got
Speaker 4: your book, and by the strangest kind of syncopated cooking beat,
Speaker 4: I started cooking your food in our Parisian kitchen, although
Speaker 4: I had been raised on French food, and there was
Speaker 4: something about the logic and grammar of this recipe that
Speaker 4: was inspiring and explained so much. In other words, you
Speaker 4: were taking the pungent things, the sweet onions, and then
Speaker 4: the pungent sausages, and the hot pepper which I had
Speaker 4: never cooked with before, the dried parakeet peppers, and making
Speaker 4: all of that. Then you were reducing it with the
Speaker 4: wine and then adding the tomatoes, and that basic pattern, right,
Speaker 4: you have and it can be anchovies and.
Speaker 3: Garblic, get the flavor tomato right, then cook.
Speaker 4: It down with wine until it's almost dry, and then
Speaker 4: adding tomatoes, and then doing that. How many times in
Speaker 4: a lifetime do we do that? And that basic grammar,
Speaker 4: the savory flavors, the wine reduction, the addition of tomato
Speaker 4: or cream or whatever it might be, is somehow so fundamental.
Speaker 4: It was like this for me was a foundational recipe.
Speaker 4: Once I knew how to do this, I felt that
Speaker 4: I could do almost anything. So that's why I love
Speaker 4: it so much, even though, to be honest with you,
Speaker 4: I probably couldn't, so to speak, sell it at my
Speaker 4: dining table today because the ladies I cook for, Martha
Speaker 4: and Olivia are both pescatarians at this point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I couldn't. But do you ever have it?
Speaker 2: Make it for yourself?
Speaker 3: I always make it for myself.
Speaker 4: When I'm alone, I either make this or the matriciana
Speaker 4: as Mike.
Speaker 1: Can you get the Lucunega sausages in New York?
Speaker 3: You can get good sausages.
Speaker 4: You get good Italian sausages in New York, But those
Speaker 4: are when I'm home alone.
Speaker 3: That's what I make for myself.
Speaker 1: So you've written just written a brilliant piece about the election.
Speaker 1: You've written about the politics of our country. You've written
Speaker 1: about Paris, You've written and yet you are uniquely interested,
Speaker 1: I think, in writing and writing about food, and so
Speaker 1: food comes into your musical. I mean, there aren't very
Speaker 1: many musicals about a restaurant. There aren't very many articles
Speaker 1: in the New Yorker. Well, now there are a few
Speaker 1: more about food. Tell us about one of your books
Speaker 1: that you've written where food has come into your book.
Speaker 4: I wrote an entire book just about the philosophy of
Speaker 4: eating called The Table Comes First, which was the title
Speaker 4: was given to me by our friend Burkus of Saint
Speaker 4: John because we were having elevenses once and he said,
Speaker 4: genuine he was genuinely perturbed. He said, there is this
Speaker 4: young couple I know, he said, and they just getting
Speaker 4: married and they want to buy a bed. Said, don't
Speaker 4: they know the table comes first. They're having a bed
Speaker 4: but no table. And I thought, oh, what a beautiful thought.
Speaker 4: The table comes first. It's the altar in the raft
Speaker 4: of human existence. So for me, my fascination with food
Speaker 4: I think comes from two you know, sharply opposed places.
Speaker 4: On the one end, just pure read I love to eat,
Speaker 4: and I.
Speaker 1: See funny that greed comes into food. I have a
Speaker 1: friend who had a nanny and she overheard her child
Speaker 1: who said, I'd want, you know, a biscuit. She'd eaten
Speaker 1: like five biscuits, and she heard the nanny saying, you know,
Speaker 1: you're a greedy.
Speaker 3: Little girl, and she fired her good.
Speaker 2: She fired it right on the spot.
Speaker 1: She said, you know what, I don't want somebody telling
Speaker 1: my child that because they want more food, that they're greedy.
Speaker 1: And for me, as an American and maybe that's something different,
Speaker 1: is that greediness always meant that you want more money.
Speaker 1: So I think it's interesting the idea of sort of
Speaker 1: what greedy being involved in dispense.
Speaker 4: One of the ways in which French culinary culture is
Speaker 4: superior to any other is, you know, you use the
Speaker 4: word gourmand to mean greedy, and when you saymond, you mean, oh,
Speaker 4: he really loves to eat. And the French word gourmet,
Speaker 4: which Americans and Brits have adapted, French folks don't really
Speaker 4: use very much. You wouldn't say somebody's a gourmet unless.
Speaker 3: They were an American.
Speaker 4: But gourmand, yeah, though, it means greedy, and that sense
Speaker 4: is a totally positive benediction. Tenon you know means really
Speaker 4: loves food. So that's one part of my fascination with food.
Speaker 1: I can't remember many musicals that I've seen they have
Speaker 1: restaurants scenes. I've interviewed actors who actually had to cook
Speaker 1: on or eat on stage, or food is a part
Speaker 1: of the drama. But you've actually created a musical about
Speaker 1: a restaurant called Our Table.
Speaker 2: Can you tell me about it?
Speaker 3: I'd love to.
Speaker 4: I wrote it with the great Broadway composer David Shire,
Speaker 4: and it was inspired not so much by my book
Speaker 4: about cooking, but out of a piece I wrote right
Speaker 4: after nine to eleven about a cook's contest, and I
Speaker 4: was inspired by the two chefs, particularly Peter Hoffman, who
Speaker 4: ran a beautiful little restaurant with his wife called Savoy,
Speaker 4: and David Waltuck, who also ran a beautiful, originally very
Speaker 4: small restaurant with his wife called Chanterrelle, and the way
Speaker 4: that they poured themselves into these restaurants, that they poured
Speaker 4: all of their soul and their selves into these restaurants.
Speaker 4: But of course they were up against the inexorable constraints
Speaker 4: of New York City real estate, which basically says, if
Speaker 4: you've had a successful ten year run, we're going to
Speaker 4: quadruple your income. And so I got to thinking about
Speaker 4: about that. And Peter had been at cooking school with
Speaker 4: Tony bourdain and they were dear friends, but they defined
Speaker 4: totally opposite ends of the cooking experience. Peter an idealist
Speaker 4: making his perfect food every night for a small clientele,
Speaker 4: Tony boordena on televisions. I wondered what would happen if
Speaker 4: Tony Bourdena came back to rescue Peter's kitchen, And let's
Speaker 4: imagine that he had had an affair with Peter's wife
Speaker 4: twenty years before and they didn't know about it. And
Speaker 4: so that was the premise of our table. But what
Speaker 4: I particularly wanted to do was write about the sort
Speaker 4: of micro mechanics of a restaurant, which I observed from
Speaker 4: watching you and from watching other friends. I think that
Speaker 4: chefs are the last true artists of the old fashioned kind, right,
Speaker 4: because they're simultaneously trying to be inventive artistic. They have
Speaker 4: a high standard, but at the same time they lived
Speaker 4: to please the way Shakespeare lived to please. You can't say,
Speaker 4: though a poet can say, well, if you don't like
Speaker 4: it tough, right. Chefs are both artists and their inventiveness
Speaker 4: and artisans in their commitment to a craft that has
Speaker 4: to please. So I wanted to articulate that, but also
Speaker 4: capture not the kind of the splendid and extravagant gestures
Speaker 4: of a kitchen which you often see on television, but
Speaker 4: all the tiny little you said to me once, Ruthie.
Speaker 4: It is one of my favorite sayings, and I put
Speaker 4: it into the show. Every table is a world, and
Speaker 4: that's what a true restaurantur understands. Every table is something
Speaker 4: is going on and that a great host has to recognize.
Speaker 4: So I wrote a song with David Shire called Chopping Onions,
Speaker 4: Folding Napkins, in which the husband whose chef is in
Speaker 4: the kitchen chopping onions and his wife, who runs the
Speaker 4: front of the house is in the dining room folding napkins,
Speaker 4: getting ready for the service, and at the same time
Speaker 4: they're having a fight about her old boyfriend. And of
Speaker 4: all the things I've ever written, I love the microdrama
Speaker 4: of that because it struck me as it's true.
Speaker 2: We can listen to this on Spotify.
Speaker 4: On Spotify our Table, I narrate it, and we have
Speaker 4: a wonderful cast Melissa Erico, Andy Taylor, Constantine Marulis, and
Speaker 4: it's you know, it's it's a show about a restaurant
Speaker 4: and infidelity.
Speaker 3: Infidelity is probably more interesting.
Speaker 2: I've been sulted by that.
Speaker 1: I did nothing more interesting than a restaurant.
Speaker 3: I just wanted to write about the restaurant, but the
Speaker 3: director kept saying, no, no, no, we need lovers and we
Speaker 3: need all of you know, what about food is seduction.
Speaker 4: I My wife seduced me with a bottle of champagne
Speaker 4: when I was about nineteen. She chased me around the
Speaker 4: Christmas tree with a bottle of Bum's Extra Dry. So
Speaker 4: we kind of got that done. Of course, it's it
Speaker 4: is seduction always.
Speaker 3: You know I loved Do you remember the first Melia
Speaker 3: cooked from Martha?
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, yes, I cooked her. I was so
Speaker 4: such a pretentious kid, and probably still am. I cooked
Speaker 4: her a kish because I was learning to bake from
Speaker 4: my mom mother's kitchen, in my mother's kitchen, her recipe.
Speaker 4: But in the years since, Martha has one favorite meal
Speaker 4: which I cook her whenever I want to please her.
Speaker 4: Seduce more than please, and that is something I learned
Speaker 4: to do in France, which is a good roast chicken
Speaker 4: pole depress in France with carrots with cumin and orange
Speaker 4: potatoes roasted under the chicken and a broccoli puree and
Speaker 4: then a caramelized garlic sauce. You know, and if I
Speaker 4: know that that that will always work.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Every year, The River Cafe curates holiday gift boxes
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Speaker 1: for the holidays. Order on our website, shop the River
Speaker 1: Cafe dot co dot uk or call me on seven. Sorry, okay, thanks.
Speaker 1: You said that you were raised on French food.
Speaker 2: Where are we born and what did you.
Speaker 4: I was born in Philadelphia because my parents were graduate
Speaker 4: students at the University of Pennsylvania and my mother, who's
Speaker 4: an extraordinary woman.
Speaker 3: So they were young, they were young, and they came
Speaker 3: from very simple backgrounds.
Speaker 4: My grandparents were immigrants from the where on my father's
Speaker 4: side from Russia there were Russian Jews, and on my
Speaker 4: mother's side from.
Speaker 3: The Levant they were Sephardic Jews.
Speaker 4: That side they had been all around from Hebron to
Speaker 4: Baghdad and beyond. The previous generation actually in Lisbon. My grandmother,
Speaker 4: who I knew very well, was born in Lisbon. In
Speaker 4: any case, truly they were wandering Jews, and that's the background.
Speaker 4: But my mom, who was an extraordinarily gifted woman in
Speaker 4: the manner of so many women of her generation, latched
Speaker 4: onto French cooking and it was fascinating because she was
Speaker 4: getting her PhD. She had six children. In linguistics, in linguistics,
Speaker 4: in formal logic. She was one of the early students
Speaker 4: of or researchers in artificial languages and in computer translation,
Speaker 4: the stuff that you get now on Google in a minute.
Speaker 4: She spent a long time working on that side of
Speaker 4: things and then eventually became very well known for her
Speaker 4: work in the genetics of language. She discovered one of
Speaker 4: the first chromosomes that directly affect the way we form
Speaker 4: sentences in any case. In a addition to that, she
Speaker 4: was a passionate nightly cook, and like so many women
Speaker 4: of her generation, she discovered Julia Child and French cooking
Speaker 4: in the mid sixties.
Speaker 3: Explained to Julia Child, I guess we should.
Speaker 4: In fact, I did a little piece not long ago,
Speaker 4: long piece actually for the New Yorker about Judith Jones,
Speaker 4: who was a Julia Child's editor who discovered her really
Speaker 4: out of a slush pile of a rejected book and
Speaker 4: saw that it could be something great. Julia Child was
Speaker 4: the American doyenne of French cooking, wrote had a TV
Speaker 4: series called The French Chef. Like all people who are
Speaker 4: going to television, her great gift was complete un self consciousness.
Speaker 3: She was sloppy and gray at had beautiful high boys.
Speaker 3: Then she educated dropped a chicken famously.
Speaker 1: She was such a kind of total change to what
Speaker 1: the American cook, domestic cook, the.
Speaker 3: Benny Crocker cook. Yes, exactly too. Now you now chopped
Speaker 3: the ratit? Oh no, yes, the joe it's on the floor.
Speaker 3: Now we up.
Speaker 4: And it was wonderful and it liberates an entire generation.
Speaker 4: And my mom is a perfectionist, and she just became
Speaker 4: a great French cook. And when I say, I mean
Speaker 4: all the things that we would never even do now,
Speaker 4: like beef wellington, you know, or kleavaca of salmon, or
Speaker 4: turn itdo rossini, you know, all of those things that
Speaker 4: belong to the to the past of French cooking.
Speaker 3: Now she did.
Speaker 4: And her great triumph was a grand Marniers soufle, which
Speaker 4: to this day I would still say is the single
Speaker 4: I will put a special golden border around the lemon
Speaker 4: tart and chocolate nemesis here at the River Cafe.
Speaker 3: But was spectacular. And during the pandemic, when Martha and.
Speaker 4: I were alone, as all of us were, I set
Speaker 4: myself the task of mastering my mother's gramarnies.
Speaker 2: Do you have a recipe?
Speaker 3: I have her recipe? Did she write it down for
Speaker 3: She wrote it down for me.
Speaker 4: But it's a somewhat metaphysical recipe because the key moment
Speaker 4: in it is she says, beat the egg whites until
Speaker 4: they are not truly stiff and yet not entirely soft,
Speaker 4: which is a metaphysical zone to try and arrive at.
Speaker 3: Right and over time.
Speaker 4: I just did it by trial and error, and she
Speaker 4: had one very smart, you know, with the colin French
Speaker 4: and astus a hint, which is to have the oven
Speaker 4: at four hundred degrees fahrenheit and then turn it down
Speaker 4: once this siffley is in, and astonishingly it makes for
Speaker 4: it makes for much better loft on it. But my
Speaker 4: mama cooked every night for her six children and husband,
Speaker 4: and she loved to shop down in Montreal. We moved
Speaker 4: to Montreal when I was eleven because my parents got
Speaker 4: jobs at McGill University. As I say, and she, you know,
Speaker 4: I have nothing but memories of her cooking all the time.
Speaker 4: And on my thirteenth birthday, she knew how much I
Speaker 4: loved to eat, because I was the kid in the
Speaker 4: family who was always greediest of all. And she said,
Speaker 4: what's your favorite thing for dinner? And I said beef
Speaker 4: struggle off, because it really was my favorite thing at
Speaker 4: that point, she said, you're going to make it for
Speaker 4: your own birthday dinner. And she showed me each step
Speaker 4: along the way. Start taking the peppers and the onions,
Speaker 4: and then the beef, then making the sauce with stock
Speaker 4: and tomato paste and sour cream, and then the sheer
Speaker 4: magic of that transformation the movement from raw to cooked
Speaker 4: and then from raw to cooked to delicious was overwhelming
Speaker 4: for me.
Speaker 1: Was that a rare occasion? Then to bring her children
Speaker 1: into the kitchen.
Speaker 3: No, we were in there all the time.
Speaker 4: The only problem was my mother is, bless her, an
Speaker 4: extremely impatient woman, which is one reason why she got
Speaker 4: those things done. And so she would always yell at you,
Speaker 4: not in an angry way, but you know how that is.
Speaker 3: We all do it in the kitchen. I need the salt, No,
Speaker 3: I need it now, I need you know.
Speaker 4: And as a consequence, very few people could quite take
Speaker 4: the emotional heat in her kitchen, and I inherited all
Speaker 4: of her impatience. And as a consequence, everyone of my
Speaker 4: immediate family have tried to be my soux chef and
Speaker 4: they've all quit, all walked out.
Speaker 2: And what about your father? Did he cook?
Speaker 3: No, my dad didn't cook at all, but he loved
Speaker 3: my mother's cooking.
Speaker 2: So when we grew up in.
Speaker 1: This house of six children your parents is incredibly dynamic
Speaker 1: and interesting and meal times.
Speaker 2: Where all of you, eight of you, sat down every night.
Speaker 4: It was part of the beauty of my upbringing and
Speaker 4: it's something I took with me and have been probably
Speaker 4: unduly religious about. With my own family, we always had
Speaker 4: dinner together, and dinner was always delicious, and it was
Speaker 4: always a debating society, and it was always a community,
Speaker 4: and there were always politics being played out, older children,
Speaker 4: younger children, middle children, the middle children. Now, I'll say
Speaker 4: bitterly that the older children, my sister Allison, and myself
Speaker 4: were competing for my father's attention. But whatever was going
Speaker 4: on to the table, it was always going on in
Speaker 4: that sense that the dinner table is the altar and
Speaker 4: sacrament of family life is something that I've taken forward
Speaker 4: with me into my own existence. To my children's enormous frustration,
Speaker 4: because they became accustomed at eight fifteen am, as they
Speaker 4: were leaving for school, bleary eyed, exhausted, barely able to
Speaker 4: keep themselves together, I'd say, what would you like for
Speaker 4: dinner tonight?
Speaker 3: Would you like the salmon with lentils? Or I can
Speaker 3: do a roast chicken, but I just need to know
Speaker 3: so I can go shop for And then they said salmon.
Speaker 1: It growing up in a family where meals were taken together,
Speaker 1: or your mother may be willing to do. You remember
Speaker 1: leaving the comfort of home when you went to McGill
Speaker 1: and being exposed to a completely different world.
Speaker 3: What was that like McGill was was home, so it
Speaker 3: stay home.
Speaker 4: Martha, my wife and I were both at McGill together,
Speaker 4: but we it's a Canadian thing. You don't go away
Speaker 4: to school, you go nearby. But when we moved to
Speaker 4: New York, yes, in the summer of nineteen eighty, we
Speaker 4: had just graduated, and we got on a bus that
Speaker 4: said New York City, like in a forties musical, and
Speaker 4: my dad saw us off.
Speaker 3: He thought it was a mad adventure. We were going
Speaker 3: to go live in New York.
Speaker 4: And he said to me as I got on the bus,
Speaker 4: he said, just remember when you get to New York,
Speaker 4: never underestimate the other person's insecurities. That as a general,
Speaker 4: as a general piece of advice, and it's the best
Speaker 4: advice I've ever gotten.
Speaker 2: It didn't advise you were to eat.
Speaker 1: I thought you might say, no, you forget to go
Speaker 1: to Luisi.
Speaker 4: The thing that inspired me when we got to New
Speaker 4: York was a writer, actually was Calvin Trillin, Bless him,
Speaker 4: and he wrote beautifully about sort of folk dining in
Speaker 4: New York, Russen Daughters, the Great smoke Fishing for him
Speaker 4: the local Italian restaurants. But I arrived in New York
Speaker 4: and I had to cook. We had a tiny basement apartment.
Speaker 4: It was nine feet by eleven. No one believes this
Speaker 4: when I tell it, but we lived there for three years.
Speaker 3: The size of this.
Speaker 2: Tape about the size of this room.
Speaker 4: Yes, oh, oh my god, this room would have been
Speaker 4: a mansion. No, it's half the size of this room. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's half the size of this. I did a one
Speaker 4: man show once where I came out cold and lay
Speaker 4: down in blue tape, a nine by eleven rectangle.
Speaker 3: Then I exited.
Speaker 4: I came back on and said, this is the room
Speaker 4: my wife and I lived in for three years when
Speaker 4: we came to New York. But I was determined to
Speaker 4: do nothing but the best cooking. So we had this
Speaker 4: tiny little stove in an unventilated nine by eleven room,
Speaker 4: and I would do not you know, you know, heat
Speaker 4: and serve things. I would do, you know, tuno pav or,
Speaker 4: you know, a whole roast chicken in this tiny eleven
Speaker 4: and the whole room would fill with smoke. Right, So
Speaker 4: you'd open the one window we had and the smoke
Speaker 4: would pour out onto the pavement of eighty seventh Street,
Speaker 4: and we're.
Speaker 3: A student at.
Speaker 2: You knew you wanted to be an art historian. Did
Speaker 2: you study art?
Speaker 3: I did.
Speaker 4: I studied art history, and I was accepted to a
Speaker 4: PhD program at the Institute of Fine Arts at New
Speaker 4: York University.
Speaker 3: But for me, that was just a mask. It was
Speaker 3: a beard.
Speaker 4: I wanted to be a writer, an essayist in the songwriter.
Speaker 4: Those are the two things I wanted. But it was
Speaker 4: a way of getting to New York. I had a
Speaker 4: fellowship to go to NYU. But then my first day,
Speaker 4: my first fall at NYU, at the Institute, where I
Speaker 4: intended just to pass through and kind of wave quickly
Speaker 4: on my way to the New Yorker, actually I met
Speaker 4: Kirk Varnado, who was for both of us a best friend,
Speaker 4: who was the most inspired I get for clempt thinking
Speaker 4: of that now, a teacher who has ever lived. He
Speaker 4: was a great art historian, became the chief curator of
Speaker 4: the Museum of Modern Art eventually, and he was such
Speaker 4: an inspiring teacher and mentor and model that it became
Speaker 4: a kind of diversion in my life for the next
Speaker 4: ten years that I actually did my degrees in art history,
Speaker 4: and we ended up doing a big show together at.
Speaker 3: The Museum of Modern Art.
Speaker 2: Do you remember eating with him?
Speaker 3: Oh, my god.
Speaker 4: Kirk loved, as you know, loved good food, and he
Speaker 4: loved French culture. Not just French cuisine, but French culture.
Speaker 4: It was the first time in my life we would
Speaker 4: go out for dinner. And we were, you know, kids
Speaker 4: living in a basement. And Kirk was a young professor.
Speaker 4: Wasn't that he had, you know, a lot of money
Speaker 4: or anything. And he has just gotten married to Ellen Zimmerman,
Speaker 4: his extraordinary artist wife. And we would go out for
Speaker 4: dinner and have a bottle of white wine, champagne to start,
Speaker 4: bottle of white wine, bottle of red wine, something afterwards
Speaker 4: it was anything.
Speaker 3: It sounds like, you said, bottle of red wine. Well,
Speaker 3: we would go, you know, we would really we would
Speaker 3: eat well. And there was a restaurant in Washington, DC
Speaker 3: that we went to once called the Papallon, like the
Speaker 3: old French place in New York. And uh.
Speaker 4: The Kirk loved. He loved the intensity of that, he
Speaker 4: loved the expansiveness of it. He loved everything that a
Speaker 4: great French meal stood for as a piece of the
Speaker 4: history of the pluralism of pleasures and so on. And
Speaker 4: among the happiest days of my life, in which I
Speaker 4: believe you participated too, is that when we lived in France,
Speaker 4: we had tradition whenever Kirk and Ellen were there that
Speaker 4: we would have cathedral and the lunch and we go
Speaker 4: up to Rance or Sha and then spend the morning
Speaker 4: touring the cathedral.
Speaker 3: Richard was with us.
Speaker 2: I think they to Shark to Sharks.
Speaker 4: All exactly, and Kirkwood descant brilliantly and unforgettably about the
Speaker 4: facade and the sculpture and the changes and the meanings
Speaker 4: and the possibilities. And then after that, you know, staggeringly
Speaker 4: informative and illuminating morning, we'd.
Speaker 3: Go for a two star or three star lunch.
Speaker 1: We ate in a restaurant I think it was called
Speaker 1: something like frost Fois.
Speaker 3: Exactly.
Speaker 2: Just to introject I love for Kenneth Tita.
Speaker 1: Do you remember when in the book when she says
Speaker 1: we're going to eat in this restaurant called Styes, and
Speaker 1: he said, any restaurant called.
Speaker 2: Shay is going to be bad.
Speaker 1: I refuse, I was going to look up for Kirk
Speaker 1: Varnadov's speech. He died in two thousand and three, and
Speaker 1: both Adam and I gave eulogies for him at the
Speaker 1: Metropolitan Museum. It brought this back nineteen seventy two, an
Speaker 1: unrelenting rainstorm in Paris, Richard and I, Judy Bing and
Speaker 1: Bud Marshner bolt for shelter into the Cafe Bozaar to
Speaker 1: meet their friend. A gaspingly handsome man strides into the restaurant,
Speaker 1: wet and wind swept from the ride on his motorcycle,
Speaker 1: an eight p fifty MOTORGUTSI. He his broad shoulders, long hair, mustache,
Speaker 1: and big sidebirds. He tries to find a space for himself,
Speaker 1: his helmet and his leather jacket. As he squeezes onto
Speaker 1: our table. He's already launched into a story about artists
Speaker 1: who ate here in the turn of the century. Too
Speaker 1: big for the restaurant with a story to tell.
Speaker 2: This was Kirk.
Speaker 4: It's a beautiful, beautiful description restaurant. You know, he was
Speaker 4: a man of such expanse, of authority and appetite at
Speaker 4: this same time, such a great appreciator. And you know
Speaker 4: the two things that always come to mind for me
Speaker 4: is you know he loved the brassriye delille on the
Speaker 4: Ile Saint Luis, which is a classic old fashioned brassery,
Speaker 4: and would love the the geaurette to pork with lentils,
Speaker 4: you know, really basic things. But he was, as you know,
Speaker 4: he died of ridiculously young. And you know, when Kirk
Speaker 4: was on chemo in the last couple of years of
Speaker 4: his life, I would go with him to the chemo
Speaker 4: suite as they called it, bizarrely, and he would sit
Speaker 4: because he couldn't waste time, you know, he couldn't.
Speaker 3: Waste time being having cancer.
Speaker 4: He would sit with the IV in his arm and
Speaker 4: talk about art and talk about lectures he was going
Speaker 4: to give, or a lecture I was going to get,
Speaker 4: and we bat ideas around. He was working on a
Speaker 4: series of lectures National Gallery in Washington about abstract art,
Speaker 4: and he would just test them out on me, and
Speaker 4: you know, you were kind of curtained off from the
Speaker 4: other patients. And finally, after we've been doing this for
Speaker 4: about six weeks, the kurt and open is very sweet
Speaker 4: Russian guy Ball from the treatment with putting on his hat,
Speaker 4: said excuse me. He said to Kirk, you are professor,
Speaker 4: And Kirk said, yeah, yeah, I'm a teacher. And he said, ah,
Speaker 4: he said, because he said, every week I come here
Speaker 4: when I know you're going to be here, he said,
Speaker 4: I used to bring a book, but now I just
Speaker 4: listened to you.
Speaker 3: And that was Kirk.
Speaker 1: That was Kirk you were talking about. You were cooking
Speaker 1: in New York in this one room. You were involved
Speaker 1: in the Institute of Fine Arts with the Kirk. You're
Speaker 1: starting to write for the New Yorker. And were you
Speaker 1: just engulfed in the restaurant scene as well in New
Speaker 1: York or was it mostly just cooking.
Speaker 3: Well, at the beginning, it was me attempting to cook
Speaker 3: like my mom. For Martha. We had one.
Speaker 4: You know, I think it's true that all you remember
Speaker 4: Tolstoy says about happy and unhappy families. And my theory
Speaker 4: is that all bad marriages have a new fight. Every day,
Speaker 4: they find something new to fight about. Good marriages had
Speaker 4: the same fight over and over and over and over.
Speaker 4: So Martha and I have been having the same fight
Speaker 4: for forty plus years now. And it's that I like
Speaker 4: things done rare. That was part of the culinary esthetic
Speaker 4: of my family, and Martha comes from a well done family.
Speaker 4: And this is a greater abyss than if she were
Speaker 4: Protestant and I were Catholic. But the great thing is
Speaker 4: if you go out to eat, you find that medium
Speaker 4: is a perfect word of tender resolution, right because I
Speaker 4: can say medium rare and Martha says medium.
Speaker 1: Well, I shock everybody here now, I think because I think,
Speaker 1: actually an Italian cooking, you don't eat rare meat.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 1: Richard's mother was an Italian cook from Trieste. Really didn't
Speaker 1: like anything rare. And I think if you kind of
Speaker 1: then take that a bit further, you really enjoy I
Speaker 1: wouldn't say a well done, dry piece of meat, but
Speaker 1: you do like a piece of meat falling off the bone.
Speaker 2: It breathed for hours.
Speaker 3: You should.
Speaker 4: Everything is braising everything, So I do you know, I
Speaker 4: do becoming a vegetarian braised beef and you know seven
Speaker 4: hour lamb in the French ware. You know you slow
Speaker 4: cook a lamb, and I much prefer that it's like
Speaker 4: this the stink.
Speaker 1: If you like listening to Ruthie's Table for would you
Speaker 1: please make sure to write and review the podcast on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, O, wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: If food is all that we've described, and you are
Speaker 1: also a very socially conscious, very political person and writer.
Speaker 1: Do you have thoughts about the politics of food.
Speaker 4: I have been lucky to have good professors on that cause, yourself,
Speaker 4: Alice Waters, Peter Hoffman, Dan Barber, who all feel passionately
Speaker 4: about those subjects and to the degree that I can
Speaker 4: honor it myself.
Speaker 3: But I go to the green market on Union Square
Speaker 3: and buy from farmers.
Speaker 4: I try not to be a puritan about it, because
Speaker 4: I recognize that the things that we believe in can
Speaker 4: often be unobtainable and hard to do, so I try
Speaker 4: to recognize that.
Speaker 3: But you know, my basic view of food is.
Speaker 4: You know, it's the most beautifully universal thing that human
Speaker 4: beings do every stage of our lives. And if you
Speaker 4: think about it, there's almost a universal grammar of food.
Speaker 3: Right. We all like a neutral starch and a pungent protein.
Speaker 4: Right, whether it's paper deli with mulnaises sauce, or it's
Speaker 4: a cassavo root with a pungent African chili, or it's
Speaker 4: curry over rice. That's kind of the universal human meal
Speaker 4: everyone today, billion people are going to sit down and
Speaker 4: have a neutral starch and a pungent protein, a pizza
Speaker 4: is that's what a pizza is. The beauty of that
Speaker 4: universality never ceases to astonish me. And the degree to
Speaker 4: which our humanity is prisoned, if you like, filtered through
Speaker 4: the meals we eat, I think, is a powerful thing.
Speaker 4: And I deeply believe Ruthy that there's a direct connection
Speaker 4: between the pleasures we enjoy and the politics we want.
Speaker 4: Because if there's one thing that I've spent the last
Speaker 4: fifteen years writing about, liberal democracy apparently with absolutely no
Speaker 4: success at all in altering anybody's view, because it remains
Speaker 4: more in danger today as we sit together than at
Speaker 4: any time in my lifetime, certainly, But the core principle
Speaker 4: of healthy liberal democracy is pluralism. There are many menus
Speaker 4: in a liberal democracy. We believe in many menus. We'd
Speaker 4: love to go out for Indian food. We welcome immigrants
Speaker 4: because they bring with them, whether they're Italians or bangladesh Is,
Speaker 4: they bring with them flavors and tastes we haven't had before.
Speaker 4: That's part of the the meaning and the magic of
Speaker 4: a pluralistic democracy. So the pleasure we take in our
Speaker 4: everyday food, the pleasure we take and the.
Speaker 3: Ability to have it, and the ability to have it
Speaker 3: and we're you.
Speaker 1: Know, I just somebody told me the other day that
Speaker 1: the military, a huge percentage of people in the Army,
Speaker 1: of the American Army, Navy, Air Force are in food stamps.
Speaker 1: These people are fighting supposedly for us, and they're not
Speaker 1: being able to eat food.
Speaker 3: You know, this is the prison at the same time.
Speaker 4: One of the great and you know, one of my
Speaker 4: favorite books about food is Elizabeth Leeward's Sacred Food I
Speaker 4: think it's called, And one of the points she makes
Speaker 4: is the peasant cultures around the world have usually been
Speaker 4: among the most creative and productive, and we get beautiful,
Speaker 4: universal things like rice puddings.
Speaker 3: That we share.
Speaker 4: So I really believe that there's no that Not only
Speaker 4: is there no distance between the pleasures of the table
Speaker 4: and the necessities politics, there's a direct connection. We want
Speaker 4: to assert universality. Everyone should eat well, and we want
Speaker 4: to assert pluralism. Everybody should be free to eat the
Speaker 4: menu that they desire. And that isn't just true about
Speaker 4: the things we have at dinner. It's true about the
Speaker 4: things we do in bed, the people we choose to love,
Speaker 4: the way we choose to identify pluralism is a sign
Speaker 4: of a healthy polity.
Speaker 1: We often eat food for comfort, and we have a
Speaker 1: question that we do ask everyone at the end, which
Speaker 1: is to say, if food is sharing, and food is
Speaker 1: remembering your parents, going to Paris, or cooking in a
Speaker 1: one room apartment, it's also comfort. Is there something that
Speaker 1: you would go for particularly?
Speaker 4: Yes, I am, and absolutely I have one comfort menu
Speaker 4: and it came about in a nice way. When we
Speaker 4: were living in Paris, Luca got terribly sick with salmonella poisoning.
Speaker 4: We didn't know what it was, and I ended up
Speaker 4: at ten o'clock a night, having literally have them in
Speaker 4: my arms, running to the children's hospital in the seventh
Speaker 4: thro on dismall and they identified what it was and
Speaker 4: they got him on the right antibiotics. So about midnight
Speaker 4: we finally got him home, and you know, we had
Speaker 4: been in a state of absolute anxiety, and we hadn't eaten,
Speaker 4: and now we took a deep breath and I looked
Speaker 4: around what was there? And all I had was in
Speaker 4: the cupboard was rice and some canned beans, and I
Speaker 4: had some apples i'd gotten, and I made Mark the
Speaker 4: dinner of spicy rice and beans, with the rice treated
Speaker 4: with some turmeric. So go orange, spicy rice and beans
Speaker 4: with a little Rugeli mixed in that I had in
Speaker 4: the fridge, and then a baked apple with red wine
Speaker 4: and noir and walnuts, and it was the single best
Speaker 4: meal we'd ever had because it was the worst day
Speaker 4: of our life that was now ending decently, and from
Speaker 4: that day to this, whenever we have a crisis or
Speaker 4: difficulty of sun kind, and said, I'm going to let's
Speaker 4: just have spicy rice and beans and a baked apple,
Speaker 4: and I.
Speaker 3: Know that that will be restored.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, Adam.
Speaker 3: Pleasure.
Speaker 2: I think
Speaker 1: H