Bella Mackie

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0:34Welcome to Ruthie's Table 4, a production of iHeartRadio and Atomize Studios.

0:59like thinking about it. Bella, Mackie, and her family have been close friends for 30 or so years, and when you're close to a family, you're close to their food. We all spent summers, footsteps away from each other's homes in the Valdorce, swimming, walking, and attempting to read novels between long lunches, late dinners, Negronis in the Piazza in Pienza in Montepulcana. Bella was always present, frying zucchini flowers with me, purring the white peaches for sunset bellinis. There was one night when our children noticed that we had no tiramisu from the night before. When they heard it was in her family fridge, they climbed through the bushes and at midnight broke into their house and took it back.

1:40Bella is no longer just the daughter of our friends. She's my friend. When she and her husband Greg come to the River Cafe, they know the food they want to eat, the wine they wish to drink, and they always request a quiet table where they can just be together. Ask any young person working in the restaurant about Bella's books, and they'll tell you that jargon shaped their life in a crisis, or How to Kill Your Family was one of those books they could just not put down. Today in the River Cafe, Bella and I will talk about running families, Tuscan holidays, and facing everything else. Welcome, Bella.

2:14Hi, it's so nice to be here. What have you been doing? You've been in the kitchen making... Ritorelli!

2:24The Ricciarelli, we started doing biscuits. We didn't used to do biscuits. We kind of did them in lockdown when we started the shop because people wanted to buy cookies, basically. And then the Ricciarelli are so interesting because you and I both lived so close to Siena, and there's always that trip to Siena that we would take in the summer. And I think that Ricciarelli are like their hometown biscuit. You go to every bar in Siena, and it's so local, Italy, that if you probably went to a bar 20 miles away, they wouldn't have them but every single bar in sienna has ritirelli hi i'm polly i am a chef here at the river cafe pastry kitchen and i'm here with the lovely bella mackie teaching her how to make ritirelli see they look amazing i've made them a few times before but mine didn't look like that okay so i would say it's probably when an issue of packing it with icing sugar yeah so it It would need to be like eight times more icing sugar than you think.

3:22Yeah, way more. And then you almost kind of like put a little hat on it. Well, I don't know if you have to do that. Yeah, show me how to do a little hat. That sounds good. When I say you give it a little hat, you kind of tuck it under the icing sugar. Oh, I see. And give it a little dome. It's like a tree covered in snow. That is it. Exactly. And I think classically it is a Christmas biscuit as well. So very good. Very apt. What will happen to the icing sugar on the top, like the hat, when it goes into the oven? Will it fall down or will it fall? So as the biscuit kind of spreads out and cracks, as you can see with the ones that we've got done, that icing sugar kind of seeps into it and dries that crust out.

4:04Right. And that's where you're getting the cracking. It's where you're getting the nice little bit of tan colour, like under the actual icing sugar. This is amazing. Two bits you can go wrong with Ritorelli is not making sure that the meringue's been taken far enough. so it needs to really be like a stiff peak because it can be quite like slack and that makes it extra soggy or you get that thing where you think the top of your meringue is perfect and you look underneath and there's like water still almost yeah it's so sad um yeah so make sure i'd always take it a couple of extra minutes and you think a meringue and then the second bit is making sure it's compacted and covered enough with the icing sugar and your golden one of the things that i've learned is that baking is your passion.

4:44Because I think it's very interesting. Why does Polly become a pastry chef instead of a cook where she could make veal shins and everything? There's a love of baking and pastry. What is yours? I think it's pastry and baking because I find it so intricate and I feel like the intricacy of it, the kind of layers and the steps and the fiddliness of it really takes me out of my brain for a while. So if I feel anxious or overwhelmed, I'll always go into the kitchen. I find myself looking through recipe books and finding something complicated. So let's go back to growing up with food. And so I know, you know, both your parents worked, both your parents were, they loved to eat.

5:22There was you and your sister. So tell me what was sort of growing up in your household, food-wise, would you say? What are your memories? So what I can remember from early childhood is my grandpa was a farmer on my mum's side. So we were up in Scotland quite a lot on the farm and it was very meaty and it was very traditional. You know, everything. What kind of meat? Like, mainly pork and beef. But he didn't think that a meal was a meal without meat. So meat for breakfast, meat for lunch, meat for dinner. Breakfast? Yeah. He had a breakfast. So like sausages and bacon. Yeah, sausages, bacon. You know, I mean, he used to have a buffet tray where there was, you know, every type of meat.

6:03There were eggs. I mean, he was a big eater. So it was, you know, it was a big tray. Assumably you had somebody cook that or did he cook it? My grandma, my mom, like everyone would muck in and cook. And then it would be presented to all the cousins. It was a big family. So we would eat. There would be a lot of food and very big on potatoes, Scotland, because he was a potato farmer. Are we still at breakfast? Yeah, we're still at breakfast. Yeah, yeah. Fried potatoes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So neeps and tatties. And then, you know, again, lunch was meat. Dinner was meat. So that was kind of the traditional food that I ate kind of with my enlarged family.

6:38Did you live to an old age? Yeah, he was 97. Well, there you go. And drank a lot of whiskey, ate a lot of meat, and was kind of an enormous horse of a man. Wow. And yeah, why not? I mean, it's not a coincidence that I would say 90 % of his descendants are vegetarians. Oh, really? Yeah. Really? All your cousins? Yeah, all my cousins, two of my aunts, my mom. Your mom? Yeah. And actually, I became a vegetarian because we were staying on a farm for his 90th birthday, and I looked into the eyes of a cow and I thought, oh, I can't do that anymore. Was it that moment? Yeah, and I never told him. How old were you?

7:1625? Okay. Never told him because I thought he would hate that more than, you know. Yeah, it's real betrayal. Yeah, exactly. And then at home, yeah, they both worked. And I think we ate quite a lot of kind of, you know, macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, you know. But again, the only thing I can really remember from when I was really young is just desperately trying to buy sweets all the time. and I was a really fussy kid and I mainly only liked white food so I really liked chips, bread, pasta and I was kind of really fussy right up into my 20s. I was a kind of really limited eater and if you'd kind of offered me I don't know you know hummus I would have said no.

7:57Yeah. I had such a bland, boring diet of kind of junk food, bread, carby, starchy things. And I was incredibly unadventurous. And yeah, and that took me really into my 20s, which is kind of pathetic. I have a great story about your mother, which I just remembered, which was that she told me that she once came home and your nanny, you had a young nanny, and you or your sister wanted a biscuit. and your nanny said, if you eat this biscuit, it'll make you fat. And she fired her. Oh, really? Yeah. And I thought that was so cool because I thought, you know, she's just like, do not ever say that to my children.

8:37Because I was quite a fat kid, though. Were you a fat kid? Yeah, I was a fat kid. And I remember actually a woman in a hardware shop that we were in, the owner came up to me and poked me in the stomach and said, you, you eat too much. People are crazy. Yeah, I think I was nine or ten. So I was kind of a fat kid and I did eat, you know, an enormous amount of crap basically you know if it was kind of if it had e-numbers in it or came in a package my mom would always try and make you know food from scratch every night and yet i really just wanted kind of chicken drumsticks from a packet you know i really yeah did she make them did she let you have them occasionally but you know i think i think she was sort of in despair really like how little i wanted to eat and how limited i was and once i found something i liked that would kind of be it for six months.

9:20You know, that kind of slightly obsessive way of eating. You know, I'd find something I liked and that would be what I would eat for the next six months. And what about your sister? No, she would eat anything. Yeah, yeah. So you would sit down. What would dinners like? Would you all have dinner together? Yeah, we would all have dinner together. Yeah, we would all have dinner together, the four of us. You know, and he'd come back late. So I'm used to eating late, I think, from my childhood. You know, I now kind of think, I think nine o 'clock is the perfect time to have dinner. Yeah. Very Italian, very Spanish.

9:44I love it. You know, when someone says she'll eat at seven, and my heart sinks and I think, oh, please don't make me have the kind of early bird special. So I'm used to eating late at night. And yeah, we would have dinner together. And the only dinners I really remember from that kind of period were on Friday nights in the 90s, we would go to Pizza Express. And that felt so glamorous and, you know, continental. And, you know, it was the first time I had kind of pizza that wasn't from a packet. Which one did you go to? Islington. So yeah, so yeah, it wasn't for a long time. And, you know, in my teens and 20s, I just ate.

10:18I can't tell you. You'd be so disappointed if you saw my diet back then. It was kind of buckets of ice cream, grab bags of crisps. I used to make myself like bowls of pasta that are kind of, you know, laden down with pasta. But that's what you like. Yeah, it was comfort food. All of it was comfort food because I was quite unhappy. And so I would eat kind of bland, warm, soft food that could kind of fill me up. You're going to have a really hard time getting me to judge your eating habits. But I think that it is interesting when you talk to people about babies. Sometimes they have their first baby and they go, oh, they just try everything and they eat everything.

10:56And this is all to do with parenting and how you expose them to food. And then cut to the second baby who doesn't like, maybe he doesn't want to eat this or doesn't want to eat that. And then they realize maybe you're just born that way. Even as a little baby, the things you don't want to eat. or, you know, a lot of children don't eat fish and then they discover it when they're older. I think it's sad. My stepson didn't eat a piece of fish until he was about 40. And then loved it. And then loved it. Yeah. So you're right, like we didn't go out to eat a lot. It was Pizza Express, often for like birthdays or, you know, like a special occasion.

11:27And then it was quite often the pub. Oh, the pub. The pub food. Let's talk about pub food. What was that like? Well, that was pre-GastroPub. I guess it was kind of on the cusp. I remember the first GastroPub opening up and people being really excited about it. But before that, it was kind of, you know, bangers and mash, fish and chips. Yeah. And I was... What are those eggs? Oh, pickled eggs or scotch eggs. You never had a scotch egg? I did. I mean, sometimes you can't find... Come on, the pickled eggs, they had a bit of a problem. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. That might have been a step too far for an American girl.

12:00Yeah. I wanted to take pictures of people eating Mermaid and give that to... I wanted to do a photographic essay because I was in art school of getting Americans and getting them to taste toast with Marmite and seeing the expression on their face. Is there not an American equivalent in a way that they're kind of a vegemite? No, I'd never seen that. But back then there was nothing like that. Not in my lifetime. And do you like Marmite? You'd love it probably. I didn't try it until I was 35 and Greg made me try it. And now I love it. But the idea of it back then made me want to hurl. But actually, yeah, I can see by your face that you still think it's an abomination.

12:34Richard loved it. Richard, like, marmite on toast and, like, in bed at night. And that would be like, oh, no. In bed at night? Yeah, Richard ate everything in bed. He would always have a toast and marmite. You know Richard, he broke all the rules, you know. That's brilliant. But this is very sweet. But you described living at home and being a fussy eater. But was the baking interesting to you then? Did you want to cook as well as eat? I always baked from, like, as a very small child. we had cookbooks that were deliberately for children to learn how to bake you know it was always desserts they never said you know you can make pasta spaghetti vangoli it was always like you know and I remember we had a Roald Dahl's disgusting cookbook which was all the recipes that they make in his books so it was like Bruce Bogtrotter's disgusting chocolate cake or whatever it was called so I used to make a lot of those so I've always baked throughout my life I've always loved it and I didn't have any interest really in cooking so yeah I think my 20s were a bit I was sad.

13:30I was a very sad 20-something-year-old. So you left school. Did you leave home or did you live at home when you went to art school? I did not leave home. I was just too unhappy. Couldn't leave home. Having panic attacks all the time. Couldn't really do very much. But you went to art school? I went to art school in London. Which one did you? St. Martin's. Yeah. But I wasn't very good and I was also very sad. So the two things combined did not do very well for me. So yeah, I lived at home until I was 26, 27. My mum always says that's like the perfect Jewish mother thing of like have your kids live at home and I'm like you're not Jewish and she's like yes but Scottish as well and I'm like I don't I don't think that's true so would you still sit down to meals with your parents most nights I think I think there's that funny thing with mental illness not mental health but mental illness where your appetite is completely affected by it one way or another you know so quite often people ovary if they're feeling sad or anxious or stressed and and the same is true the under eat and so food either becomes something that you cling to and rely on so quite often I would really ovary and kind of gorge on things you know I remember driving to this new donut shop and having I think I ate 12 donuts in the space of two hours because I felt sad why not you know I felt sad and then but then there would be other times when I would just food just kind of lost all you just can't stomach it and and that's so common.

14:51So I think most of my 20s food was slightly dictated to me by how I was feeling at the time. So it wasn't really until I hit my 30s and I sort of started looking outwards towards new cuisines, new experiences, you know, the idea that food didn't have to be stodgy or bland. And now my palate is, I would say, like, if you'd asked 17 year old me, whether 39 year old me would be eating the things that I ate, she'd have been horrified. But my food, my diet is completely different. I'm really interested in what happened to get you out of that cycle. You know, the girl who was in her 20s living at home till she was 26.

15:33And then I was just so scared of everything. And I think that partly meant I was unadventurous around things like food, which is, you know, maybe the smallest part of that. But you know, I didn't fly for five years, I didn't get the train, the tube for a decade was uninterested trying new things and then I realized that I was very anxious and I needed to do something about that I did lots of things you know I started running I went to a good therapist I did all these brilliant things but but I also part of trying to break free from anxiety is always trying to push back against the anxiety and doing new things doing things that scare you all of those things and so yeah it's not that food scared me but it I knew that I had to start in every element of my life in every aspect trying to break out of patterns that I'd sort of locked myself into yeah so that just meant I had to try if I didn't want to try food I had to try it so that was my rule that was your rule to yourself yeah limited obviously by the fact that I'm a vegetarian so someone handed me you know sirloin yeah yeah but everything else I just said if I don't want to try it that means I have to try it that's kind of the mantra if you don't want to do something then you have to do it so from that I tried everything under the sun that wasn't full of meat and surprise surprise that's the thing you learn right is that you're gonna like 90 % of it yeah you know there's very few things that I tried that I thought in fact I can't think of anything that I've tried in the last 10 years that I haven't thought oh yeah this is great why didn't I try earlier I feel so angry with myself sometimes I wasted so much of my life not eating the most brilliant array of things that now I get to eat and I think oh my god you know my palate was so bored it was must have been so bored you know and so yeah so now I eat everything and like I say, 16 year old me would just be like, I don't understand.

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19:03How much do we love your novel? Thank you very much. It's a beautiful, great book. I say how everybody in the River Cafe, when I told them you were coming, has read your book. It's that weird at all. But it is weird to me because, you know, I still think, in my mind sometimes I still think it hasn't even, you know, it's come out and I've read it, but it's still really weird to think about other people reading it and you putting something out into the world and then it's not really yours anymore because it's, you know, people that love it or people that hate it or people that think you're terrible or, so it's everyone else's reactions to it after a while.

19:35So yeah, it's a very strange phenomenon. Do you have a routine for eating when you're writing a novel? You have that blank sheet of paper, which is now on your laptop screen, but how do you start the day when you're writing? So I get up, I have Diet Coke, which is really bad, but that is my favourite. For breakfast? Yep, for breakfast, that's my, it's not a diet thing, it's just that I love Diet Coke. Is it President Trump? Did he say, I've never seen a skinny person drink Diet Coke? But then apparently he had a Diet Coke butler at the White House. So you start your day with a Diet Coke? I start my day with a Diet Coke because I've been a...

20:08Nancy Pelosi starts hers with a chocolate ice cream. Oh my God, that's living. Are you kidding? Every day she has chocolate ice cream for breakfast. Yeah, that's her thing. Oh, I mean, I aspire to that level of kind of being a grown-up and just deciding that you don't have to live by the rules. Yeah, yeah. So you have a Diet Coke. I love it so much. I love it so much. I've got to give up because it's going to, I'm sure it's like burning. Somebody say Coke Zero is better for you. I'm sure it's burning my insides. Yeah, maybe Coke Zero. I don't know the difference. They'll autopsy and they'll be like just acid.

20:39Yeah, so I have that. Then I have, normally I have yogurt and granola just because it's easy. And then for lunch I will have salads, like big salads full of like. So you're home most all the day. Most of the day. That's the worst thing is that I'm writing from home. So what I started doing is going out for lunch on my own. That's good. So I run, I have lunch somewhere, you know, like nothing fancy, but I love the Italian delis around Clark and Well. There used to be loads more, but growing up, those were where we would get kind of, you know, our treats, you know, fresh pasta, that was the only place that did fresh pasta, or, you know, amaretti biscuits or, you know, all of that stuff.

21:12So if I can, I'll run somewhere and go and eat for lunch, because otherwise I am literally on my own all day. And then, yeah, and then I graze all day. So it's like, you know, those Spanish crisps, the kind of olive oil crisps. You know, I'm constantly eating those and I'm eating salted almonds and chocolate. I'm always eating chocolate. So all day long or popcorn, like there's always like sort of, it's like party food, but it's just for me while I'm writing because I sort of think, do another 500 words and then break and have chocolate. And then whatever I'm eating in the evening, I will always have ice cream afterwards every single night.

21:43So what about alcohol? Do you drink? I love wine. You love wine? I love wine. And again, I'm very controlled about it because I think that's my personality. And with anxiety, you know, that's just how I, you feel like you have to try and control uncertainty. So I'm never drunk. Like I'm never drunk drunk. And I don't get hangovers because I know my limits. But I would always have a glass of wine with dinner. Always red wine. Really? Every night? Yeah. I think the most joyful thing in the world is probably a bowl of pasta and a glass of red wine. That's red wine. Yeah. So what happened then going back is the, you know, you figured out that you're going to taste food that you had never tasted before and start cooking and trying and experimenting.

22:22And then how did that coincide with getting better? It was funny because weirdly it coincided with a period where I started running and I was still feeling kind of unhappy because, you know, I'd just been dumped basically. And I was feeling kind of crap about that. and so I started thinking I remember thinking at the time I'm just going to lose weight because then I won't what he'll he'll want me still or he'll realize he made a mistake or something so it was at the same time when I was I was trying to lose weight and I so I was on these three paths one was enjoying food one was losing weight and one was running all the time and I remember there was a point about a year afterwards where I ended up in hospital with consolitis and the nurse weighed me and I was quite clearly very underway for my height my age all of those things and I realized oh my god I've fallen into this pattern of restricting I was eating different food but I was restricting food and I was running kind of you know eight kilometers a day and somehow I'd fallen into this kind of disordered eating pattern without even realizing it which again it's about control about being anxious you know all of those things but that felt really sad to me at the time because I remember thinking the joy of my 20s and teens was I never got sucked into that diet culture.

23:32You didn't have friends who were... I did have friends like that, yeah, but me never. I never weighed myself. I never counted calories. I never did any of that stuff. And I thought, oh, I'm past 30. I must be past that. You know, I've escaped that one thing that, you know, so many women fall kind of victim to. And then it sort of hit me at about 32 and I thought, oh, it did get me. You know, it's so easy. You know, the moment you start looking at food as calorie containers rather than as kind of delicious or whatever then the way you eat changes so so for a long time I was sort of restricting the good stuff like you know olive oil or cheese or you know all those delicious things and I was viewing them more as kind of a treat a treat rather than a you know just a kind of way of life or just something you might want to eat so that was kind of difficult for a couple of years where I thought I suddenly realized that I was sort of seeing food not as an enemy but as a sort of something I had to again kind of control or you know manage.

24:29Did you go on different kinds of diets? Just honestly just kind of. Did you go on like all protein? No I was just really cognizant of how many calories were in things. You know I just and once you know that it's really hard to get out of your head because if you know what a chocolate bar is you kind of it doesn't you can't forget that you know. so it's kind of once it gets into your head it's quite difficult to get out of your head it also affects you socially I mean the times that I've gone you know say I'm not going to eat today or tomorrow and then you go to a dinner party you kind of sit a little bit back don't you you're not leaning in you know you're thinking about when you found out was that the turning point when the nurse told you you were so underweight did that make you no I think at the time I thought woohoo you know look at me and it's I think I just think at the time you can't when you're in it you're in it and you can't sort of see that that's not okay really but I remember being kind of surprised but no I think it was kind of meeting Greg and being happy again and not just because I met a guy but you know I'd sorted out a lot of stuff kind of mentally and and yeah so food became fun again because we were living in East London and there were just so many brilliant restaurants everywhere and we fell in love over food you know yeah so what was that like tell me about falling in love over food it just there's something so amazing about sitting with just one other person over dinner, you know, be at the bar or in a booth, and there's nowhere to go, and it's just the perfect atmosphere.

25:51You know, and our first date was a, he'd booked dinner after we went to see a comedy show, which I just found extraordinary because I'd never been on a date with someone who'd taken me for dinner before. And I said, should we go to the pub? And he said, no, I've booked dinner. And I thought, wow, you know, this is incredibly grown up of you. So I think it kicked off from that. We just had, you know, four hours in a restaurant that night and fell in love, and he stayed over and we never left. and so restaurants were kind of our thing and then obviously he then got this job where he's he's on the breakfast show and he gets up at 5 30 in the morning so he goes to bed at nine you know so it kind of it's a bit like to sit down to dinner yeah that's when I want to go out for dinner and obviously by then he's kind of in bed so it's a bit of a killer and so we still try and go out like Thursdays Fridays you know Saturdays if we can and then obviously for special occasions like we come here or so we do still try and go to restaurants but it's the way we bond if we fall out we go out for dinner you know restaurant is a public space but you see quite a lot of people crying not so much in the river cafe but our waiters will tell us that they've experienced people crying over dinner people get fired in restaurants people get proposed to in restaurants and people as you say is very often people go to make up you know you want to just we're being taken care of.

27:07We don't have to get up and down. We can just be served. And I think that's, waiters, you know, are very sensitive to that. And that's a skill in itself, isn't it? You know, to know kind of, to be able to intuit what sort of mood people are in. But I think, yeah, there's something, especially after COVID where we were all stuck indoors and everything, you know, if you were with someone, you were sort of lashed to them, you know, and there was sort of no mystique and no separation. You know, sometimes you have to go away from someone to miss them or, you know, or go out of the house so you know in a way it's now more important that we get to spend time away from our house because we've been in it we were in it for such a long time and so it does act like that reset where you kind of go i'm it's like we're dating yeah we're on a date here and it feels really special so we still do that and greg is a massive foodie so so we do yeah he really is like he and he's one of those guys he'll eat anything and he can kind of be in raptures about you know what he ate for dinner the night before and talk about it and remember it i'm amazed at people's food memories.

28:03You're talking about your first date, you know, that people can remember what they cooked to seduce a girlfriend, you know, or what they cooked when they were told somebody had died or what they had told that they can. It's a bit like music. If I listen to a song, you can sort of remember where you were when you heard that piece of music. Yeah, and there are things that you... You can remember the mood you were feeling, and food is like that, I think. Yeah, there are things that, you know, sometimes if you were heartbroken and you'd eaten a lot of something, you can't eat it ever again. or you were falling in love and you remember something.