Speaker 1: Welcome to Ruthie's Table for a production of iHeartRadio and
Speaker 1: Adamized Studios.
Speaker 2: Last night, I was with my good friends Josh Berger
Speaker 2: and Alexander Krapenzano. I said I needed to go and
Speaker 2: write the introduction for Simon Sharma, today's guest, knowing he
Speaker 2: had taught them both at Harvard twenty years ago. As
Speaker 2: good friends do, they did my work for me.
Speaker 1: Simon Shama I never missed his class, and the other
Speaker 1: thing that I would never want to miss was I
Speaker 1: wanted to see what waistcoat and what glasses he would wear,
Speaker 1: because he was not only brilliant and articulate and taught
Speaker 1: me about architecture and about art and politics in Europe,
Speaker 1: but he also taught me how to look good.
Speaker 3: I would simply say that Simon was and is an
Speaker 3: extraordinary storyteller. So we would all sit in his class,
Speaker 3: and I took British Empire with him, and we would
Speaker 3: be riveted the way that we would be riveted watching
Speaker 3: a thriller a suspense movie, because we would just be
Speaker 3: hanging on every word.
Speaker 1: Art and politics in Europe. From sixteen sixty to eighteen twenty,
Speaker 1: he was the best professor at Harvard, and I was
Speaker 1: gutted when he went to Columbia.
Speaker 2: Simon is our most renowned historian. His books on the
Speaker 2: French Revolution, the Dutch Masters, or most recently, Foreign Bodies,
Speaker 2: an Exploration of Pandemics, and the Health of Nations have
Speaker 2: changed the way we think. His television series Civilization, The
Speaker 2: Story of the Jews, and the Power of Art have
Speaker 2: reached millions. I know all this about Simon, but I
Speaker 2: know something else. He is a fantastic cook. There is
Speaker 2: much to admire and respect and being off of Simon,
Speaker 2: all of which I do. But quite simply, he's my
Speaker 2: great friend.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Ruthie Well. I film my work on this
Speaker 4: Earth is done?
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I were there. I guess when was that?
Speaker 2: Was it twenty years ago? I think Joshua was longer
Speaker 2: than that because I've been at the Union.
Speaker 4: I think it more like probably more like thirty, because
Speaker 4: I moved from Harvard to Columbia in ninety three. But
Speaker 4: they're very kind, and I don't.
Speaker 2: Think they're kind because it's something I've heard over and
Speaker 2: over again. Okay, praise is embarrassing you, So why don't
Speaker 2: we go straight to the food and talk about your cooking?
Speaker 2: You just made a recipe in the kitchen of the
Speaker 2: River Cafe, or you helped watched. I'm not sure which
Speaker 2: verb would you like to read the recipe for?
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is Taliarini with broad beans and pancetta, and
Speaker 4: you chose to. I think principally because of the broad beans.
Speaker 4: One of my nicknames, one of my two nicknames at
Speaker 4: school when I was about twelve, was Beanie. And because
Speaker 4: I was, I was obsessively. I was obsessively enjoyed all
Speaker 4: forms of beans. I really really still do, but I
Speaker 4: think I enjoyed broad beans the most.
Speaker 2: I love the way they have and I love the
Speaker 2: way the color is different, that you get that pale
Speaker 2: green color and then you.
Speaker 5: And it's a tope color.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, Okay, so read your read this recipe.
Speaker 4: Here's here's the recipe. Should I read the ingredients first
Speaker 4: as well?
Speaker 5: Okay?
Speaker 4: So fifty grams butter, four tbs tablespoons olive oil, one
Speaker 4: small trapea onion, finely sliced, two garlic cloves, finally sliced,
Speaker 4: one hundred grams of pancetta match stick cut into match sticks.
Speaker 4: Four hundred grams very healthy of broad beans, one hundred
Speaker 4: milli liters of dry white wine, two hundred and fifty
Speaker 4: grams of fine pasta taliarini, a small bunch of mint
Speaker 4: and a small bunch of basil, both torn I think,
Speaker 4: and fifty grams of peccorino. And yes, what was going
Speaker 4: on in the kitchen, very beautiful light. It helped a
Speaker 4: bit with you just do a very simple, lovely braik
Speaker 4: is of the onion and the garlic. For about fighting
Speaker 4: the butter and oil together, which is never be afraid
Speaker 4: of doing that until soft, and then the panchetta matchsticks
Speaker 4: go in, so everything is braizening together. You don't want
Speaker 4: and I was talking to jess whom I was cooking,
Speaker 4: you don't This is not a recipe where you want
Speaker 4: the panchetta to crisp up. So you you really wanted
Speaker 4: gentle braize.
Speaker 2: Hi.
Speaker 6: I'm Jessica Philbey, and I work at the River Cafe
Speaker 6: and we're here today making broadbean and panchetta sauce with
Speaker 6: Simon Sharman. He started with a little bit of choppia
Speaker 6: onion in the base, which I just kind of melted down,
Speaker 6: and then I put the panchetter.
Speaker 4: In until that already an idiot, I haven't had my coffee.
Speaker 4: It's so it's a tiny bit of good panta and then.
Speaker 7: A little bit of garlic.
Speaker 4: Okay, we never used too much garlic.
Speaker 6: Okay, we don't have to overpower anything.
Speaker 5: Right, everything is brazing exactly.
Speaker 4: So you're not fantastic, so you're not wanting the pants
Speaker 4: to eat Crispye, I get it, I get it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I get it.
Speaker 6: And I'm going to add a little at the.
Speaker 2: End, and.
Speaker 4: Okay, okay, and then comes the magic moment of adding
Speaker 4: the broad beans in their skins and stir to coat
Speaker 4: you fling the wine in, and then the gentle brazing
Speaker 4: heat goes down even lower and everything marries together. You're
Speaker 4: you're non stop stirring, but but only for about five
Speaker 4: minutes or so, again making sure the beans don't just
Speaker 4: completely mush up. And then you can actually be used
Speaker 4: a free standing mixer. Processor recipe here says of course
Speaker 4: pure but actually what we did was sort of bash
Speaker 4: the beans really going to wait, yeah, oh yeah, so
Speaker 4: right a stands next, right, And then we were just
Speaker 4: making the sauce. So the talierini has to obviously talierini,
Speaker 4: like all very fine pasta. You're cooking it and then
Speaker 4: almost I don't know, what do you think? You know,
Speaker 4: a minute, two minutes you're really basically chanking out almost
Speaker 4: as soon as the water has come to a boil.
Speaker 4: Make sure you keep a little half a cup of
Speaker 4: the pasta water. It's going to carry on cooking when
Speaker 4: you're adding it to the sauce. Okay, yes, you add
Speaker 4: the pasta to the source, not.
Speaker 5: The way around. Always it's supposed to cook in this
Speaker 5: source exactly.
Speaker 2: People to do that, because then that whole idea. Also also,
Speaker 2: I don't drain pasta. I always you have if you
Speaker 2: have a colander next to you and you just lift,
Speaker 2: especially if you just lift it out over the pot,
Speaker 2: put it into the colender with a pair of tongs,
Speaker 2: and then put it into the sauce next to it.
Speaker 2: You don't have to do that thing of carrying it
Speaker 2: over to the sink, draining the pasta, putting it back
Speaker 2: in the pan. But you're just and also then you
Speaker 2: get a bit of the water from the pasta into
Speaker 2: the sauce, which kind of you know, which I always said,
Speaker 2: I always loved the Marcella Hazan when she says toss, toss, toss,
Speaker 2: and then toss again. And I think that also is
Speaker 2: that kind of you know that you can't almost you
Speaker 2: can't toss pasta enough.
Speaker 5: No, absolutely right.
Speaker 2: I'm interested that you chose a recipe, that the recipe
Speaker 2: has pancetta in it, and that brings us to our
Speaker 2: next kind of starting at the very beginning of the
Speaker 2: Shama household. So because you did grow up in a
Speaker 2: kosher home and so was panchetta. But we did an
Speaker 2: interview with Otto Lenki the other day and he was
Speaker 2: telling us that in Tel Aviv there was a man
Speaker 2: who sold pork under the counter like and prohibition.
Speaker 4: But did you have it's called it's called bassar la
Speaker 4: vonne in which means literally white flesh. Actually that's the
Speaker 4: Hebrew for white flesh. So it's no longer very secretive. No,
Speaker 4: it was very kosher, strictly kosher.
Speaker 2: Tell me about your family, Well.
Speaker 4: They were both great storytellers, my mother and father. I
Speaker 4: had a sister who was She died hence I was
Speaker 4: about twelve years ago now thirteen years older than me,
Speaker 4: and I wasn't meant to happen. Particularly my mother started
Speaker 4: she had a job as secretary to have an aircraft
Speaker 4: corporation executives during the war, and then she was so brilliant,
Speaker 4: ferociously organizationally brilliant, she became PA personal assistant, as a basil,
Speaker 4: you know, the head of the whole thing, within about
Speaker 4: six months.
Speaker 5: So come the end of the war.
Speaker 4: I was born in early nineteen forty five, the war
Speaker 4: was going on. I was a massive inconvenience and would
Speaker 4: not have happened, I think, had it not been for
Speaker 4: the fact that when my parents were living, which was
Speaker 4: near to the Haveland HQ in Nebworth, and Havlan was
Speaker 4: in Welling Garden City in Hertfordshire, and their next door
Speaker 4: neighbor was an obstetrician, a rather fancy society obstetrician. I
Speaker 4: only know this to be true because he confirmed it
Speaker 4: wrote me a lovely letter when I became a young
Speaker 4: don at Cambridge, saying, well, you not only would not
Speaker 4: have been a dom, but you wouldn't have been any
Speaker 4: You wouldn't have been around at all had it not
Speaker 4: for my persuading your mother that was a good idea
Speaker 4: have this baby. So he told her, he said, well,
Speaker 4: if you decide you should have this baby, and you
Speaker 4: can have this baby in Morova. In my very fancy
Speaker 4: clinic in Maryland and Wilbury Street, And what he did
Speaker 4: not realize was that Wilburg Street would be the receiver
Speaker 4: of one of the last V two rocket raids. But
Speaker 4: it didn't hit the clinic. It missed me and the clinic,
Speaker 4: so I was not supposed to happen. Courtesy of both
Speaker 4: my mother and Adolf Hitler, you know, nonetheless, actually I
Speaker 4: made it through.
Speaker 5: No, not together.
Speaker 4: They weren't in cahoots, so we were fairly stric My
Speaker 4: father was what did he do well? He wanted to
Speaker 4: be in the theater. He was a very theatrical personality.
Speaker 4: He'll be shocked to discover, yes, but it was very
Speaker 4: sad he left school at fourteen. Like a lot of
Speaker 4: Hackney grammar and a lot of those kids. He was
Speaker 4: largely but magnificently self educated. I mean we had not all.
Speaker 4: It's a mistake. Actually, I'm going to be really disloyal now.
Speaker 4: But if you're part of the German Jewish community that
Speaker 4: had come around time with the Nuremberg Laws or later,
Speaker 4: your house was full of books. If you're part of
Speaker 4: an older ashkar Nazi community, not quite so much. My
Speaker 4: father was very unusual in having not only all of Dickens,
Speaker 4: all of Shakespeare, all of George Eliot. But he had
Speaker 4: things like you know, Manzoni's in translation The Betrothed. He
Speaker 4: had all of Honorary Balzac's comedy men. So and he
Speaker 4: would read out loud on Sunday afternoons. So he wanted
Speaker 4: to be in the.
Speaker 2: Theater generation and came from another well.
Speaker 4: My father was born in nineteen hundred and one. His
Speaker 4: father was born in Botshan in Romania, and my father's
Speaker 4: grandfather was born in Ismea in Ottoman, Turkey. So my father, however,
Speaker 4: his you know, we went to the theater a lot.
Speaker 4: He produced charity shows which ranged because he had lots
Speaker 4: of lots of Thespian friends, actors and producers, Ralph Richardson,
Speaker 4: for example, to her own Guthrie. And he produced from
Speaker 4: you know, productions of Macbeth to Oklahoma at the Golden
Speaker 4: Green Hypotome.
Speaker 5: So yeah, he did.
Speaker 4: He did so when I was about eight or nine,
Speaker 4: I think, So that was really lovely.
Speaker 2: Did he cook?
Speaker 5: No, my mother was an arduous.
Speaker 4: I feel guilty as all Jurwish sons do about slagging
Speaker 4: off my mom as a cook. She was an enthusiast,
Speaker 4: and there was something she could do. She was from
Speaker 4: a different Jewish tradition. She was from Lithuania, pure Ashkenazi,
Speaker 4: so they were soups she was good at. There was
Speaker 4: one called Garden of Eden soup, which was based on
Speaker 4: lambstock and lambones and ballei, which was a kind of
Speaker 4: deep classic Lithuania, which was actually very good in the
Speaker 4: middle of winter, and sometimes white beans as well, butter
Speaker 4: beans or small white beans. She went into the kitchen
Speaker 4: because she actually what happened to her after the war,
Speaker 4: she had to abandon her job. I was there now,
Speaker 4: and she did not really want to be back as
Speaker 4: what was then called housewife. Really, one scary moment I
Speaker 4: will never forget is when my mother she had these
Speaker 4: old mincers, you know that you attached you still some
Speaker 4: restaurants still have them, actually, so you clamped them onto
Speaker 4: a table, right exactly, so you've got a coarse mince.
Speaker 4: And when she was mincing up some beef, she managed
Speaker 4: to mince the end of one of her fingers, and
Speaker 4: so she bled a bit into it. I looked at
Speaker 4: this with I must have been like nine or something,
Speaker 4: with horror, and I remember her poking around with the
Speaker 4: thought trying to find She did wrap her finger in
Speaker 4: a bandage, but carried on cooking, and she never really
Speaker 4: found a better finger, and she did produce these clops,
Speaker 4: you know, the equivalent to a kind of kosher hamburger.
Speaker 4: And I looked on with absolute horror. And my mother
Speaker 4: said she was good when she made jokes, which wasn't
Speaker 4: that often. They were very funny, and she said, don't
Speaker 4: tell your father, after all, it's perfectly kosher.
Speaker 5: So I was looking see if.
Speaker 4: My dad suddenly, you know, was chewing suspiciously.
Speaker 2: Really, it's quite interesting that women who don't have an
Speaker 2: interest in cooking, you know, that they don't have to,
Speaker 2: you know that Actually, if there was so many other things,
Speaker 2: she might have been interested that in perhaps. But what's interesting,
Speaker 2: I suppose, is but what did you actually then eat?
Speaker 2: The meal? Times and pleasure for someone who loves food
Speaker 2: so much, right, did you sit down to dinner and
Speaker 2: just wish that it tasted better? Or did you not?
Speaker 4: Yeah, my mother, there was what my sister and I
Speaker 4: called a Friday night Memorial chicken, which was inevitably over roasted,
Speaker 4: and in deference to my father's love affair with garlic,
Speaker 4: which my mother did not share. There'd be one lonely
Speaker 4: clove rattling around there somewhere, so it was always dried
Speaker 4: out that we really wished. Chicken suit made from scratch
Speaker 4: was actually okay.
Speaker 2: You sit down to dinner every night as a family.
Speaker 2: You did, And so she would prepare dinner, your father
Speaker 2: would come home, and you and your sister, when she
Speaker 2: was well, love.
Speaker 4: To contract the one thing I went to before we
Speaker 4: leave the family kitchen.
Speaker 2: Now let's not the family kitch. We can say the
Speaker 2: one thing.
Speaker 4: My mother did very well, which was and it's interesting
Speaker 4: in English cooking because famously fried, not poached, gefilterfish, that's
Speaker 4: a rather horrible graying thing, kosher form of keneld brochet.
Speaker 5: Here.
Speaker 4: The first time that Jewish cooking appears that I know
Speaker 4: of in print is Eliza Acton's book Cookery Book, which
Speaker 4: is I think is eighteen forty five, and there's a
Speaker 4: little add on chapter in the second edition on Jewish cooking,
Speaker 4: which is then slightly fancy Safardi, Balkan and Turkish cooking
Speaker 4: kind of fried fish patties instead as we'd say codcakes
Speaker 4: or something like that, which she describes as being eaten
Speaker 4: cold sometimes in the morning, even for breakfast, which we did.
Speaker 4: My mother did that very very well. Actually, did they
Speaker 4: going to take you to restaurants? Yes, this is the
Speaker 4: arbitrary in us of being kosher. If you're really strictly,
Speaker 4: strictly super cooked, you would never go to anything except
Speaker 4: coacial restaurants that my parents had redefined the torah and
Speaker 4: the rules of casual would say, it's fine, providing you
Speaker 4: don't have bacon or don't have meat, which is absurd,
Speaker 4: of course. So we went to places like in again
Speaker 4: the fifties, the Trocadero, which was so grand and then
Speaker 4: owned by our mutual wonderful friend Nigella's family. The Salmon's
Speaker 4: and that was magnificent. I remember seeing and not quite
Speaker 4: believing the miracle of peanuts sitting in what I thought
Speaker 4: was the silver bowl. It was a really stainless steel
Speaker 4: and then you went down The Savoy Grille was another place.
Speaker 2: But these for special occasions.
Speaker 4: We're going, yes, yes, yes, the latter we certainly would
Speaker 4: go special occasions, Scott's and Simpsons, I think, you know.
Speaker 4: And the place was sort of just steaming, though quite grand.
Speaker 5: Yes, when my dad was travagunts in that way. If you.
Speaker 4: He was very much like Max Biali Stock and the
Speaker 4: producers flaunted baby so yes so clash and turines and
Speaker 4: the ceremoniousness of eating fish particularly. We were a great
Speaker 4: dover sole family fish.
Speaker 2: So eating out and eating at home and eating well
Speaker 2: it was a priority. Yeah kind of idea that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yes, the family was food. There's no doubt. Whatever
Speaker 4: one thought of the food, it was crucial. And we've
Speaker 4: my wife and I have always I mean not I
Speaker 4: don't want to pat ourselves on the back ingrediously, but
Speaker 4: we we we taught our children how to cook from
Speaker 4: the time they were quite young, the very good cooks,
Speaker 4: both of them, and it was all There were no
Speaker 4: TV dinners. I mean, we sat I sound so snobby
Speaker 4: and grand here, and of course they'd go off, you know,
Speaker 4: if they had an extra late class at school, they
Speaker 4: would go off and have a pizza, a hamburg or something.
Speaker 4: But overwhelmingly, really that family dinner was crucial because you talked.
Speaker 4: And you know, even when they were tight lipped teenagers,
Speaker 4: still your talk.
Speaker 2: So when you left this home of you know, a food,
Speaker 2: of sitting down at the table of your mother cooking,
Speaker 2: your father with this great character, and you went. Did
Speaker 2: you go straight to university when you went?
Speaker 4: Well, I had the second gap year, I had most
Speaker 4: of a gap year, and I was actually briefly on
Speaker 4: a kind of slightly broken down cruise ship that went
Speaker 4: from Marseille to either Alexandria and Haifa, and I would
Speaker 4: poke around the kitchens there and sometimes actually even yeah exactly,
Speaker 4: and just was, you know, massively in awe of these
Speaker 4: gigantic tururines, some stuff that would be served out to
Speaker 4: all classes of passengers.
Speaker 5: And then working on Kibootz, you were.
Speaker 4: Very close to too close sometimes too you know, the
Speaker 4: way the way food happened. I worked in the chicken
Speaker 4: shed on Kibbutz, the so called lull, which was they
Speaker 4: weren't bastery chickens, but they were they were sure not
Speaker 4: free rereach inside, and my job was to load them
Speaker 4: onto the trucks going to the slaughter house, which was
Speaker 4: not fun. In case you didn't know, and I expect
Speaker 4: you did, the way to stop a chicken panicking is
Speaker 4: to turn it upside down. Yeah, exactly, hold it with
Speaker 4: the legs. Say that wasn't great.
Speaker 2: Did you seek out when you were in that year
Speaker 2: abroad and apart from me on the kobbootz. Would you
Speaker 2: seek out the food of wherever you were, something that
Speaker 2: was food.
Speaker 5: I loved Arab food.
Speaker 4: Actually, I had a distant relative was a mining engineer
Speaker 4: in the Negev Desert, and he rattled around in an
Speaker 4: old jeep. He was an incredibly romantic, rather raffish Bohemian figure.
Speaker 4: Well Bohemian isn't quite right, but certainly he belonged to
Speaker 4: a colorful generation. So he was a very romagic ficure
Speaker 4: of me. And he was he spoke Arabic very well.
Speaker 4: And we ate a lot of Arab mets actually in Wonderful.
Speaker 4: And the year then was ninety sixty two sixty three,
Speaker 4: so that was actually, you know, I don't know, maybe
Speaker 4: it's you know, the tragic and poisonous enmity that now exists.
Speaker 4: We didn't necessarily, I mean, maybe we're kidding ourselves, but
Speaker 4: we didn't feel I mean, there were so many, so
Speaker 4: many Arab prints of it, so many Bedwin friends actually,
Speaker 4: so that was something so long before Wonderful, your Tam
Speaker 4: came along and all our friends. Now you know, I
Speaker 4: knew that what was called Israeli food was basically Arab mostly,
Speaker 4: or you were stuck with my mother's kitchen, you know.
Speaker 5: So that's the way.
Speaker 2: It's a revelation, isn't it now that you know people
Speaker 2: talk about you know, because I grew up Jewish in
Speaker 2: Upstate New York and my parents' family were Ellis Island
Speaker 2: immigrants who came and brought the food that they had eaten,
Speaker 2: and food was very basic. I'd say. My grandmother actually
Speaker 2: was like a Hungarian pastry maker. She rolled out the dough,
Speaker 2: she traveled with her rolling pin. But I always tell
Speaker 2: the story, but she came to see her first grandson
Speaker 2: in Woodstock, where we lived on the countryside, and my
Speaker 2: mother said, do you want to see your first grandchild?
Speaker 2: And she said, no, let's eat first, you know. And
Speaker 2: that was that was the kind of the view of
Speaker 2: food in our family. But when you went but also
Speaker 2: Britain was coming around.
Speaker 4: You know, all of the famous story and all of
Speaker 4: Jewish history can be wrapped into three short sentences. They
Speaker 4: tried to kill us, they failed, Let's eat.
Speaker 2: We are now in Cambridge, right? Is that was a Cambridge?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: That was that really hardcore? Was that sixty?
Speaker 5: Well? I was still Yeah.
Speaker 4: I arrived at christ Culture camebish in ninety sixty three,
Speaker 4: and I was still Kosher, and it was really bizarre
Speaker 4: because I'd stopped.
Speaker 5: Believing in God.
Speaker 4: Really basically, I was certainly at least an agnostic, but
Speaker 4: somehow I didn't want to. My mother would send food,
Speaker 4: including cold chickens sometimes, and I didn't want to offend us.
Speaker 4: That was totally irrational. And I had a great professor
Speaker 4: who we used to have a kind of a supper seminar,
Speaker 4: and who had produced gorgeous, kind of oozy grouse and
Speaker 4: things that everybody else and I would get a kind
Speaker 4: of bouncy rubber cheese from the college. And finally one
Speaker 4: of these terrible omelets actually broke me. And famously, I've
Speaker 4: told this story a lot, but it is true. In
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty five, I went to see The Hipcress File
Speaker 4: Len Dayton, and I just did you have.
Speaker 5: A know, lond Dayton. I love.
Speaker 4: We did actually exchange letters, okay, so Michael, of course, yes,
Speaker 4: I wrote a piece of the garden called Michael Kaine
Speaker 4: taught me to cook. And I not only did he
Speaker 4: write spy novels, one of which became the Criss File film,
Speaker 4: but he wrote so called cook strips, which were cartoons
Speaker 4: for men beginning to cook. You know what is parsley
Speaker 4: and how to dice an onion or minced parsley the
Speaker 4: proper way.
Speaker 5: And these were fantastic.
Speaker 4: And it was when there was a scene where Michael
Speaker 4: Kaine says to his fellow spy Courtney, I'm going to
Speaker 4: cook you the best meal you've ever had, and it
Speaker 4: cuts to her saying, palm that that was the best
Speaker 4: meal I've ever had. Do you always wear your glasses?
Speaker 4: And he said, yes, Courtney, except in bed, and she
Speaker 4: takes the glass up. I thought, okay, I've got a cook,
Speaker 4: and I went out and bought my first little battery
Speaker 4: to cuisine. There was one gas ring at the end
Speaker 4: of the corridor in the student building. Cry So I
Speaker 4: made friends with John Bolton, the college cook, and you
Speaker 4: lent me the oven, and I made myself an omelet
Speaker 4: hot butter, you know, and I instantly knew and it was,
Speaker 4: you know, baba was kind of creamy.
Speaker 5: Inside.
Speaker 4: I thought, boy, you are hopeless with almost anything at
Speaker 4: your hands, but this you instinctively understand and know how
Speaker 4: to do. You understand timing and heat so and then
Speaker 4: you can make people happy by doing it. And then
Speaker 4: I was just absolutely often running.
Speaker 2: And that continued throughout.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I only really got for myself all right out in
Speaker 4: Cambridge and then yeah, and then in tiny spaces when
Speaker 4: I became a baby dn I mean you had just
Speaker 4: a kitchen the size of a toilet, really had minute things,
Speaker 4: but I was just in love. I bought my first
Speaker 4: cookery book other than it was actually Dayton's book of
Speaker 4: these cookstrips.
Speaker 5: I'm not kidding. It was called Uel.
Speaker 4: Garlicaric and you can still find it. But the first
Speaker 4: thing about was Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking. The first
Speaker 4: serious thing I made with John Bolton's College album was
Speaker 4: the Alsatian onion Tart. So Elizabeth David course was wonderful
Speaker 4: to read and also incredibly forgiving, or you could say,
Speaker 4: irresponsible about quantities. And then it was also the period
Speaker 4: of Robert Carrier's cards, which were great if you were
Speaker 4: a baby cook. Basically they were wonderful. So there were
Speaker 4: all sorts of a Jane Grigson, Alan Davidson.
Speaker 2: Everybody first slok.
Speaker 4: Yeah exactly, yes, exactly, Oh first, like Arabella boxing, Yes,
Speaker 4: I absolutely had that, and it sort of slightly aggravates
Speaker 4: me because then the good Food Guy was in its prime.
Speaker 4: I was one of those who would be one of
Speaker 4: those anonymous inspectors the Good Food Guide. And when people say,
Speaker 4: oh British Foobish until the nineteen eighties or something, the
Speaker 4: sixties and seventies were amazingly brave and adventurous and exhilarating.
Speaker 2: As a historian, how do you teach history? How do
Speaker 2: you look at history? How much do you look at
Speaker 2: history and food? You know, when I go to a city,
Speaker 2: the first thing I hit is the market, because not
Speaker 2: because I want to buy something, but because it tells
Speaker 2: you how do they sell the food, how do they
Speaker 2: grow it? What's a market like? Have people dressed a
Speaker 2: certain way? And if we read your books and we
Speaker 2: listen to your lectures, are we learning about are you
Speaker 2: thinking about it? Hotes?
Speaker 4: So? I think I think very often it can be
Speaker 4: quite dramatic. For example, one thing that happened a regime
Speaker 4: pre revolutionary France actually and post revolution France too, but
Speaker 4: particularly in eighteenth Central where they were looking at it
Speaker 4: divided into a wheat culture and a rye culture.
Speaker 2: What you mean.
Speaker 4: Wheat wheat flower was only for the aristocracy and the
Speaker 4: oat burgeoisie. So people tended to eat rye we think
Speaker 4: of as wonderful now, it wasn't so wonderful. And there
Speaker 4: were certain amounts of wet France where the rye was
Speaker 4: very susceptible to a kind of rot which actually produced ergotism,
Speaker 4: which is a hallucinogenic state that in an extreme form, yeah,
Speaker 4: would not only give you trips you didn't want, but
Speaker 4: also would actually numb your circulation and cause gangreine. And
Speaker 4: there were lots of incredibly serious reports about how terrifying
Speaker 4: that was. It was anar called the Solonia Sologne where
Speaker 4: this was thought to be a terrible proper of the population.
Speaker 4: At the other end, of course, you cannot do Dutch
Speaker 4: history without food, not only because there are paintings, of course,
Speaker 4: but because this extraordinary kind of compressed population has actually
Speaker 4: physically literally engineered a landscape both for horticulture and for
Speaker 4: fishing and for pasture. And amazingly, this is the best
Speaker 4: fed population possibly in the world, but certainly in Europe.
Speaker 4: And poems are written to strawberries, and only the naturally
Speaker 4: think of having a painter got Andrea and Kuto, who
Speaker 4: specializes in asparagus, paints asparagus, so it's a kind of
Speaker 4: festival of the stomach, really, and that's fair. That's I
Speaker 4: have a whole chapter actually on food and.
Speaker 2: I think that could be part two of our series.
Speaker 2: I think we should do another one because I think
Speaker 2: a friend a funny story is a friend of mine
Speaker 2: his father married a woman who was a vegan. I
Speaker 2: mean she was just and also this is years ago,
Speaker 2: and he went into the hospital and well, while he
Speaker 2: was in the hospital, he had a painting. You can
Speaker 2: only imagine what the painting was like because it had
Speaker 2: a lobster in it. But she had the lobster painted
Speaker 2: out of the painting he was in the hospital. I
Speaker 2: mean I thought probably any piece of art that actually
Speaker 2: had a lobster and it might be something that you
Speaker 2: wanted to pay out anyway.
Speaker 7: No, no, for a great love, tell me one, Willem
Speaker 7: culf has I will show you one on my phone.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, we have the phone that doesn't care, that doesn't.
Speaker 5: I will take you to lobster art.
Speaker 2: That's your food and art. Yeah, the asparagus because oh yeah.
Speaker 4: At the Rex Museum is the famous Andre and Curta,
Speaker 4: which is incredibly beautiful painting. Yeah, and then a lot
Speaker 4: of the language about you know, for example, in the
Speaker 4: sixteen twenties, this was a tough time. They darts wroup
Speaker 4: against it militarily. It was a very hard economic time.
Speaker 4: And not only do the paintings become rather monochrome, but
Speaker 4: also what actually gets shown in still life paintings are
Speaker 4: the what's thought of was the food of our fathers,
Speaker 4: in other words, herrying and cheese and bread. And then
Speaker 4: when they become a little richer, the country is more
Speaker 4: at peace and richer. Then everything glitters with abundant, far
Speaker 4: more kind of cherries and berries and sides of beef
Speaker 4: and so on.
Speaker 2: And then you see today Edwards having a painting saying
Speaker 2: pot vegetables. Have you seen that? Yeah? And then of
Speaker 2: course all the cakes.
Speaker 5: You know, wonderful pain wonderful painting.
Speaker 4: People either like or don't like my writing, but they
Speaker 4: will all say it is full of texture, really of sensuousness,
Speaker 4: I think. And for example, this last you know, this
Speaker 4: last book I've written, which is about some of yes
Speaker 4: vaccines and so on. Much of it is set in India,
Speaker 4: so it was actually very interested in the hero who's
Speaker 4: kind of traveling vaccinato called Vladimahafk and who comes out
Speaker 4: of the Ukraine. He travels thousands of miles around India,
Speaker 4: and he becomes quite a religious Jew. He's not particularly
Speaker 4: religious Jew when he starts his career. But I went
Speaker 4: to his account books, which simply have very detailed the
Speaker 4: archives in Jerusalem about what he's paying for what, And
Speaker 4: sure enough he lists a craving for walnuts and chocolate.
Speaker 4: He lists actually some of the food that he's eaten.
Speaker 4: He eats Brahmin.
Speaker 5: Food, tirelie.
Speaker 4: So that was which I don't write about. I do
Speaker 4: mention in the chocolate walnuts where he's surrounded by bibonic
Speaker 4: plague and cholera and so on. But I suppose actually,
Speaker 4: in some sense the kind of world I live in
Speaker 4: as a writer. It's not an extension of cooking or
Speaker 4: cooking extentsion of that, but they do. They are complementary
Speaker 4: for me, I think, and more important really, I make
Speaker 4: friends with shopkeepers in America. It's very important. Not the
Speaker 4: man who brings fish to the farmer's market. A guy
Speaker 4: called Ryan Gool teacher in the week and a fishmonger
Speaker 4: on the weekends. And he's very clever and brilliant, and
Speaker 4: we lock around together and he will phone me up
Speaker 4: and tell me what's really been landed that morning from
Speaker 4: Long Island Sound. But I also known the Italian butcher
Speaker 4: Vinni for many, many years, and so you know, I
Speaker 4: just go to I mean the best of the family.
Speaker 4: I go to supermarkets for paper towels and loo rolls,
Speaker 4: and I mean I couldn't do without them. But but
Speaker 4: essentially the shopping party is fine for me. So early
Speaker 4: in the morning, I mean, I won't say like you, darling,
Speaker 4: but you know, I am thinking about what.
Speaker 5: Well I'm going to actually be cooking In the.
Speaker 2: Yah drive in to work, I think what would I
Speaker 2: want to eat for the cafe? We change the menu
Speaker 2: for every single meal. But a question also I wanted
Speaker 2: to ask.
Speaker 4: You and Staples as well. When the family is growing up,
Speaker 4: actually well one of them is, and they still my
Speaker 4: daughter and son who was a vegetarian now a lapse vegetarian.
Speaker 4: Palpatino is sort of Italian meatloaf, incredibly simple, but you
Speaker 4: have to do everybody out there cooking a casserole not you
Speaker 4: don't want to put it on a sheet pan.
Speaker 5: You want to put it in a cast.
Speaker 4: Role with a little wine or you've known the mooth
Speaker 4: so it kind of the actual meat loaf is actually
Speaker 4: brazing with a little old sprig of time and sage.
Speaker 2: I think you should write a cookbook.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the family We've said this, and the family says,
Speaker 4: this is ridiculous.
Speaker 5: We all have our recipes. You have most of them. Dad,
Speaker 5: We have to do that. You and I did do recipes.
Speaker 4: I was food writer partic you for a few years,
Speaker 4: so then I was doing recipes.
Speaker 2: There should you Yeah, I think you should. I think
Speaker 2: I definitely think we're looking for this. Do One I
Speaker 2: wanted to ask is that when you are writing, what
Speaker 2: is your what is your eating? Do you eat before
Speaker 2: you when you're writing? Do you sit down and eat
Speaker 2: a meal then go and write.
Speaker 4: I I'm a morning writer, so I have a very
Speaker 4: minimal breakfast nearly always Sheep's yogurt these days, which I
Speaker 4: love can be quite voluptuous, but it's not a big breakfast, right.
Speaker 5: I'm a morning writer. Didn't used to be.
Speaker 4: I used to be more of an evening late evening.
Speaker 4: But I think having kids and lunch is also. But
Speaker 4: sometimes you just especially on weekends. Really, but I'm probably
Speaker 4: not a weekend writer anymore, and once was. But if
Speaker 4: you have a big lunch. You're screwed, basically.
Speaker 5: Well your imagination.
Speaker 4: There's a funny thing, you know, this about writing is
Speaker 4: that you write the way you want to write, and
Speaker 4: then some fairy dust, if you're lucky, suddenly lands on
Speaker 4: your brain and the writing does itself. That magic moment
Speaker 4: when a sentence lies down on the page and the
Speaker 4: sentence is just right, or at least on second and
Speaker 4: third go it's just right. That seldom happens after lunch.
Speaker 4: Revision happens after lunch, and I never write during the evening.
Speaker 2: We do want to end. First of all, I want
Speaker 2: to say thank you for coming this morning. We love
Speaker 2: having you here. If food is art, if you're going
Speaker 2: to convince me that food is art, if you're going
Speaker 2: to convince me that you can have a lobster in
Speaker 2: a painting, or that you can eat when you want
Speaker 2: to share with your children, when you want to, you know,
Speaker 2: express time, have time with your mother or your father,
Speaker 2: or when you're on a trip or you're in a
Speaker 2: kabbutz or wherever you are that you want to eat.
Speaker 2: You also eat sometimes just for comfort. You just need
Speaker 2: food for comfort. And I just as I asked everyone,
Speaker 2: as I asked you, Sir Simon Sharma, who's here with
Speaker 2: me today, lucky me? What would be your I hope
Speaker 2: you don't need comfort very much. But if you do
Speaker 2: need comfort, anyone to find it in food. What would
Speaker 2: you each for?
Speaker 4: I do love this little pasta sauce which I make.
Speaker 4: It's so simple. It's tuna and black olives and anchovies,
Speaker 4: and sometimes I am half little cherry tomatoes, but sometimes
Speaker 4: I just use tomato paste and then the spaghetti or
Speaker 4: the fatsuccini kind of cooks in that, so it's very quick.
Speaker 4: Your children always loved it.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 4: My baby time was by the sea, really, so I
Speaker 4: think there is a there is a deep fishy and
Speaker 4: I'm an aquarius, you know, a watery person. Say that always?
Speaker 4: Oh in a little lemon zest actually at the last minute,
Speaker 4: and that's fantastically comforting.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you, Simon, it was a great morning.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 1: The River Cafe Look Book is now available in bookshops
Speaker 1: and online. It has over one hundred recipes, beautifully illustrated
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
Speaker 1: for new cooks. The River Cafe Look Book Recipes for
Speaker 1: Cooks of all ages. Ruthie's Table four is a production
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