S10, Ep8: Mariella Frostrup, journalist

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Hi there, listener. Grace here. Before we get started, we wanted to give you a heads up that this episode contains some themes which aren't appropriate for little ears. I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian. a podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life because even as a restaurant critic I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled upon the sofa each week I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed dongle.

0:55Hello friends. Now you find me cleaning my blinds as I wait for my next guest. It's the journalist, the broadcaster, the grand dame of media. It's Mariella Frostrop. Now these blinds are those shuttered ones which I find myself staring through an awful lot these days. I don't like a dusty nose when I'm spying on my neighbours. I've got to that point in my life where I don't need to start a neighbourhood watch because I am the neighbourhood watch. I know I might seem like a little bit of an old bag for doing this but I've got a life lesson for you lot. All of us have a life cycle and at one point you're in a pair of Jane Norman low-rise trousers coming home in a milk float having lost your keys and then the next minute you're the person logging the comings and goings of the flat share at number nine because they're playing their orbital cd a little loudly i am totally at ease with this shift embrace it now mariella frostrup is someone who i know has also embraced her midlife status with grand aplomb she is an irish norwegian journalist and presenter and one of the uk's most loved and respected broadcasters Her combination of heart-hitting journalism, unparalleled charm and an award-winning gravelly voice has put her at the forefront of British culture for four decades.

2:24She has presented shows on Channel 4, Sky and the BBC and written for the Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Mail on Sunday, Harper's and Queen and The New Statesman. She was the Observer's agony aunt for 20 years. She's been on the judging panels for the Book Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Evening Standard British Film Awards. She's also ambassador for menopause employment for the UK government. I am itching to know what a woman who can present a Sky Show, be the nation's agony aunt, and by the way, allegedly date George Clooney back in the day, eats when she's finally relaxing back at home.

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4:19Mariella Frostrup, welcome to Comfort Eating. Thank you very much. Very excited to be here. Now, you are known for many clever and erudite things, but you are also known for your chocolatey, syrupy voice. You even once voted sexiest female voice in television. Now, I think we've all got two voices, the normal one and then the one for when we need something. So when was the last time you used that full on sexy voice? So normally when I'm doing a voiceover and they ask me to make it smooth, and I think my kids would probably say that I do have, you're absolutely right, two voices. And one is, I cannot believe that you've stolen my moisturizer again.

5:09And the other is the kind of, you know, fever tree cocktail voice. That's it. That's the one. Fever tree cocktail. When you're at the cinema, suddenly you're there in stereo. Yeah, I mean, you know, a voice I think must be a bit like, though I wouldn't have any idea, having like Elle Macpherson's body in that you can't take any credit for it at all. It's just there. If you ever feel it going, do you ever just go and have like 10 Regal Kingsides? The odd fag, just to keep myself on form. That would be telling. Mariella, it is time for some food. Now, I ask every celebrity guest who makes their way over here to East London to bring me their comfort food.

5:54Now, this can be the snack that you eat when you're exhausted from hanging out backstage with rock stars, from speed reading 20 hardbacks for the Booker Prize committee, or just arguing with teenagers. Mariella, please reveal your snack. Do I just reveal it? Just whip it off. Whip it off. There you go. Sorry, I mean, it's very pretty, but it's not that pretty, if you know what I mean. I love it when a celeb begins to make excuses immediately about their food. I'm not making excuses, it's my favourite thing. The whiff of garlic. Now, it smells amazing. Please explain to people that can't see it what it is, why you eat it, what's the important bits when you're cooking it.

6:33Tell me everything. This is a classic aglio olio, as the Italians say it much better than me. and it is definitely the thing that I used to rustle up very often with my best friend who's half Italian when we got back at four o 'clock in the morning but that was back in the heady past and then I discovered a better variant of it which is that you get a cauliflower, you break it into tiny little florets, you still cook it in oil and garlic and a little bit of chili and you caramelize it. it takes far longer than you think it would. And you have to use a lot of olive oil. So it's probably not the healthiest thing on earth.

7:18But once it's caramelized, you just mix it in with your spaghetti, a bit of fresh parsley and loads of parmesan. I love that you said, I used to eat this when I got in. What year is this? Who have you been to see? Where have you been hanging out? It's back in my 20s, I suppose. And my best friend, as I say, Natalie, lives in Italy. She got married while I was, you know, single. She had two kids. She did all the things I didn't do. And so she was like my refuge. I mean, still is in terms of friendship. But back then, like quite literally, I would, you know, anything bad happened, I'd get on a plane and just offload weep a little bit eat some good pasta and at the time I mean before she got married we used to go to an island that's now very she she but back then wasn't called Capri and we would go out to this nightclub called number two and we would dance till four o 'clock in the morning we'd pretend we liked boys who wanted to dance with us and then we'd turn away and move on we were really badly behaved and we would get home at three four in the morning and make pasta and chat about our evening and then conk out and wake up at lunchtime and start all over again.

8:44You are a very well-respected voice in British culture. You judged film and book awards. You've hosted numerous review shows on TV and radio. You've been on more panels than you can count. Do you ever stop and think, when did I become the one that people ask for opinions? No, I don't think that because contrary to a popular myth, you know, I didn't sort of stroll into London super privileged and just kind of step into the media and, you know, seamlessly glide my way to, you know, the middle. And so I think the one thing I've never felt shy about being forthcoming with, much to other people's distress, often has been my opinion about whatever.

9:35And I guess, you know, I feel like I did my innings in the film world, you know, with two, three different programs about film and then 20 years doing a book program for Radio 4. So I guess I'd probably feel really insulted if nobody did want my opinion. That would probably be a far worse fate. So when you're lying around reading or needing to get through the next 500 words for a deadline, what are you eating to keep yourself going? Do you have a go-to snack? I'm not a snacker. You're just an angel, aren't you? No, no, I'm not. I mean, I love food more than probably anyone you've had on this podcast.

10:19Yeah. And I know that's a high bar. Yeah. But I really do. I love it so much that it's lucky that I'm not a snacker as well. Because if you saw me go through a meal, you would probably be quite horrified at the amount I can get down me. Well, in this modern age, you're not allowed to comment on each other's bodies. But you are a little slight thing. Well, only really since I had my kids in my early 40s. Before then, my weight used to go up and down like a yo-yo. I could go from eight stone to ten stone in a matter of weeks easily. but I've never been much of a snacker you know my husband he can't go to bed at night without having three chocolate digestive biscuits you know it's like a ritual you know what I might have if I feel like it's sort of it's getting late and I'm quite hungry because I hate to go to bed I know it's supposed to be the healthy thing but I hate to go to bed on an empty stomach so I might have a bowl of cornflakes delicious how did you feel when you heard Liz Hurley basically say that she's gone to bed hungry I think every night for about 20 years well I didn't hear her say it but I feel sorry for her and and then what was it Kate Moss said that nothing tastes as good as thin feels or skinny feels or something like that and I thought honestly I mean she's iconic and I think she's amazing but I totally disagree about that I mean everything tastes better she's clearly never eaten like a KFC zinger has she because I was like that is really delicious

11:50Look, we're going to talk about the food that made you. And at Comfort Eating Towers, we are huge fans of fusion food here. But I am quite flummoxed. What is a Scottish woman who moves to Norway, marries a Norwegian, and then relocates to Ireland? What is she cooking for her family? Yes, we're talking about your mother. Was the 1970s. So she brought, thankfully, some kind of cooking habits from Norway with her. You know, we had quite a bit of fresh fish and stuff like that. And she used to make these things called milkeringe, which are, I think it's basically like what is called kefir now. It's basically fermented.

12:33And she would leave these little bowls. She had a little stand that was made to hold the little bowls that would be left then fermenting in the kitchen window overnight. Were they smelly? And it was like strong yogurt. Did it attract flies? No. What's it called? Milkeringer. Milkeringer. Yeah, I mean, I don't speak Norwegian. It's one of about five words that I have. Did just that. You know, the herrings. And we would get sort of care packs occasionally from Norway that would have this cheese that's called jaitost, which is, well, it's an acquired taste and it's very polarizing. It's a bit like Marmite.

13:11To me, it tastes like heaven on earth. And it's like a sort of cross between caramel and cheese. And you use one of those cheese things to slice it really thinly and you have it on a rye veta. And it's delicious. But lots of people don't like it. It's basically brown cheese. It's the color of, remember that mulberry bag that was so fashionable called the Bayswater? Yes. It's that color. And then was this one of the things, someone sent it to your mom? Yeah. I mean it lasts forever So God only knows what's in it Comes tight packed in plastic What else was she cooking? What else she was cooking Was sort of 70s food We had a big smash Angel delight phase I mean she was a painter She wasn't that mad about cooking But she made brilliant gingerbread She made spag bol Which was absolutely You know exotic In Ireland at the time Was it quite basic food?

14:10Yeah, she made lub scouse, which is a Norwegian stew, which is also very basic. It's just small pieces of beef and potatoes just cooked slowly, slowly, like over about five hours until it's edible. Your mum's a painter. So is there much money about in your house? No, there's no money, really. My mother's a painter. My father's an alcoholic. and there was one time in particular my brother and I I think remember because he was always really sweet my younger brother and he would always try and make everything okay and there was no food in the house at all there was a half packet of spaghetti and there was a tin of golden syrup and he thought what could be bad so he mixed the golden syrup with the spaghetti He heated it first, which I thought was very creative of him, because otherwise it really would have been appalling.

15:06But it's not a good mixture, I would say. And another period which put me off muscles for a really long time when we were in the west coast of Ireland. And we literally, again, had no money. And we would have potatoes that the local family would give us from their father meager potato patch and mussels from the rocks that we gather. It was great for about the first week. Not so great like three weeks later. Probably the reason that I love food so much. And I'm the eldest of six. You knew hunger. Yeah, not hunger. I mean, there was always something. But, you know, smash or the potatoes from the next door neighbors.

15:50You know, food was something you just put in you. It wasn't something. I mean, now, you know, you sort of, I remember in fact, when I first came to London and started moving in slightly elevated circles and the sort of ting of nice glasses and all this extraordinary food. And I just couldn't understand it. It was an alien culture to me completely. But I've made up for lost time.

16:22You lived in County Wicklow from the age of six to 16. And in the grand scheme of things, you know, 10 years, it isn't that long, but they're really influential years. These days, how Irish do you feel? Very. I feel familiar when I land in Norway still. And food actually is my biggest connection still to Norway. You know, I have my pickled herrings and I think, oh, yeah, I'm home. But Ireland just in every way makes me feel good. You know, I think there's something about the Irish spirit. There's something about the way that, you know, education is something that's really valued and everyone gets.

17:06And there's something about the way you can sit down. I mean, if you sit down in the pub and you're famous, but you sit next to someone who tells really good stories, you're toast. Yeah. And I love all of those things. And there's part of me that would just like to go back there. I just went for a week and it's just so wild and empty. And I was on this beach that I'm not even going to say the name of because I don't want people to start going to it. But it was like half a mile of horseshoe white sand. And the sun happened to be shining that day and the water was the color of the Caribbean. And yet there was nobody and there was not even a surf stand or a deck chair.

17:46I mean, there was nothing. I love that. When you talk about Ireland, it wouldn't be surprising if you had bad memories of that, because, you know, your Norwegian dad, you know, you said he was an alcoholic. This was a hard time for you. He was also a diehard liberal foreign editor of a paper. You say he wore clogs and flared corduroys and green parkas and drove a Renault 4. What was he like as a dad? He was, I mean, I don't know. Okay. I think he and my mum were probably really brilliant in my early years because I think that must be what gave me a degree of resilience and confidence in myself that certainly wasn't borne out during the kind of early adolescent years.

18:37He was really interesting. A hero worshipped him. I thought he was the most intelligent, impressive man. I didn't even realize he was an alcoholic, to be honest, until in my early teens I was living with him and things really started to fall apart. That's quite something that he managed to hide it. He managed to get away with that. But he wasn't a staggering drunk. He was a low-level, morose, day-would-build bottle of Suave on the table by 11 o 'clock. But I didn't know that wasn't a thing. All adults didn't do. And I don't think I ever saw him drunk. You know, I saw him sad far more than I saw him drunk.

19:21But did your mum eventually left? They split up when I was eight. Yeah. And he went on to live with a really wonderful woman called Irwin, who sadly died a couple of years ago, with whom he had two more children. And she was kind of an amazing, I think she was like a sort of lesson in step parenting because she was my friend, but she didn't get emotionally involved. So she didn't try and mother me, but she was there. She cooked pizzas. And she also, I mean, I'm surrounded by fermentation because she used to make yogurt. You know, the way where you take a spoon of yogurt, you put it in with milk, and then you put it in the drying cupboard overnight.

20:09And in the morning, you've made another pint of yogurt. So every cupboard you opened in the house I lived in with my father and her was just full of fermentation. I'm interested in this resilience. Your dad died when you were 15? Yeah. Of alcoholism? Yeah, he had a heart attack in the end. But I mean, he chain smoked and he drank. And what I found out quite recently was that his father also died. He died, he was 46. My grandfather, my paternal grandfather died at 44. And I just presumed that it was something that ran in the male line of the family. And then when I was 50, I decided to do one of those head-to-toe health checks, you know, because I thought I'd as well check out how long I've got and discovered that I have it too.

21:01But I'm lucky, you know, because I can take all the medicine that exists now and sort of keep it at bay. But so he died really of a genetic heart condition, I would say, exacerbated immensely by his lifestyle. But you're 15. I mean, what happens then? Well, I'd already kind of slightly taken charge of my own life. I had a terrible relationship with my stepfather. So going back to my mum's was just really not an option. And so I'd been living with him, but my stepmother had left him. And so it was just the two of us and it was bad. And so I'd kind of, you know, I was getting myself to school and I was, you know, had a weekend job at a restaurant called The Blackboard.

21:48and then I'd actually moved out from him because we we'd ended up in this rented house this is also morose we ended up in this rented house in north Dublin and it was just full of like dirty dishes and sadness seeping through it and by that point he wasn't really working functionally at his job anymore and things and I just thought I can't I can't stay here so this really sweet lesbian couple that I worked with at the restaurant they gave me a room in their house and I'd moved out to there and I can't remember I'd gone away for a weekend or something and I'd come back and my mum was standing at the door and said my father had died I mean it was shocking you know I mean obviously it was devastating it took me about a week to be devastated because then there was the funeral and everything.

22:41And then I just cried for weeks, really. But this is a point in your life where that could have been almost the end of your opportunities. And you do start skipping school, but you set your sights on the music business. I didn't set my sights on the music business. I set my sights on earning money. And, you know, I've always been opportunistic like that. And I had a friend who had just started a tiny recording studio in the centre of Dublin called Keystone. And he said I could come and work there. So I would go to school during the day and then I would go and work there in the evenings. And it really, that was how I ended up working in the music business for the amount of time I did, because I started there, made some contacts.

23:25Who's the most interesting contact you made there? Oh, you too? They recorded their demos there. And, you know, Bono, I still consider a good friend. Well, I mean, all of them, but I mean, he's like the one who's my good friend. But I mean, I thought they were dreadful. I mean, really, you know, I was like, guys, if this is your only option, I'm not sure if you should take this path. So, Hongan, you're about how old? 15. And how old's Bono? Is he? He's 18, 19. Yeah, he's, no, he's probably 17. Yeah. Yeah, I think he was 17. We were all really young, but, you know, it was a brilliant time as well to be young.

24:11And, you know, going back to what you said about Ireland, it was a very difficult time in my life, that period of my childhood. but I think Ireland saved me as well because some of my worst memories are from then but also some of my happiest and I think you know the spirit of the Irish the fact that there was no such thing as a class system the fact that actually you know far more than America it was kind of a place where everyone felt like that there was an opportunity if you could just you know find it Do you have memories of eating then? You're working in this little recording studio. I can imagine it's all men living on ciggies.

24:52Yeah, we were all living on ciggies, basically. Not many memories of food then, but I used to get quite a few of my meals at the restaurant that I worked at. And they were doing, you know, classics like chili con carne and shepherd's pie. Yeah. And Peter and Melvin, they were called, that's a gay couple that were just fantastic to me, actually.

25:25You left Ireland for the big smoke, aged 16. My dad had, in the latter days before he died, had been offered this job at the Sunday Times, where it was about two years before he died. And I, as a child, had seen it as this golden opportunity that I instinctively felt would save him and would be a sort of catalyst for change. But he didn't take the job. And I think from that moment on, the idea of kind of London and change sort of fermented, go back to the fermenting word, in my head. And so after he died, Dublin suddenly felt very small and claustrophobic. and I just needed to get out, to get away from my family, from everything.

26:21But you're 16, I mean, how do you exist? But don't you think it was slightly different then? It was punk. Yes, yes, I do think this, but I'm in the minority. I think this. It was different, you know. Yeah. The world was changing really rapidly, you know, and there was revolution going on around you, youth revolution. And there was a sense that you weren't afraid of anything. And I think one of the good things about being that age was just you don't understand all the things that you should be afraid of. Where did you live? When I first got to London, I came with my friend Maraid, who was the mature one because she was 17 and a half when we got on the ferry.

27:01And she had contacts with these Irish friends of hers who were living in a squat on Stoneleigh Street in West London. and they said we could come and, you know, put a mattress down somewhere in the house until we, you know, found our feet. Did it have a kitchen? Not a kitchen you'd really want to spend time in at all. Did it have electricity? It had electricity. Did it have a running toilet? It had a running toilet and an overgrown back garden with a kind of old toilet in there as well. I mean, you know, now it would sell for millions of pounds, that house. But back then, it definitely needed a little bit of, yeah, fixing up.

27:48But this was the late 70s, the 80s. The music industry is booming at this point. Money everywhere. The riders are generous. Tour managers have no limit credit cards. And you're now beginning to find yourself at the centre of this. You're working in music PR, working with people like Dire Straits, UB40, Bananarama, Simple Minds. Is this as glamorous as it sounds? Well, at the time, it wasn't really that glamorous. I think how you perceive things depend on what you want from them. What I wanted was to find a steady job so I could buy a flat, so I could have a home, because I hadn't had one for a very long time.

28:31And that was all I was interested in. So if I had to go to Rockfield in Wales and sit in some old farmhouse with Simple Minds and the Rolling Stones mobile studio and put up with them very good naturedly, making my life a misery, then I was going to do it because I was being paid to do it. Yeah. And that sort of, you know, that then led into me getting a job at a record company. And that for me was the sort of transformative thing because it was, you know, five days a week, proper salary. I didn't have to do three other jobs. Did you go on tour with Dire Straits? Oh, yeah, I did. That was probably my favorite.

29:15There was a lot of food there, wasn't there? There was a lot of food because they did this brilliant thing. I mean, they were, you know, mature by then. They were in their early 30s. Their tour manager, who also loved food, Paul Cummins, he would book in every city the best restaurant in that city. It was so not rock and roll. But delicious. And we would go and have these amazing meals. Did you ever make a massive faux pas with food or were you people that didn't care? I once was at this dinner that Prince Charles was at and he was put next to me it was a private dinner it was this guy who had this house in in Gloucestershire and I pinged my peas and one of them landed on his plate and I said oh my god I'm so embarrassed I'm so sorry and he went don't worry about it at all he said it's normally me that does it I'm the clumsiest eater you'll ever come across.

30:11And he also said another thing that really endeared him to me, which was we were talking about flares because they'd come back into fashion at that point. It was in the early 80s, I think. And I said, come on, you must have worn flares in your time, you know. And he went, oh, no, no, no. He said, my father thought corduroy was racy. And I just thought, you poor man. You know, you just had this impression of this guy brought up with all of this kind of pressure on him from the minute he was born, including Corduroy being racy.