Bonus: Laurene Powell Jobs In Conversation With Ruthie Rogers & Ed Ruscha

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1:11Our latest book, Squeeze Me, with artwork by Ed Ruscha, Recipes from the River Cafe, Words by Heather Ive and Designed by Johnny Ive and Love From, was published in October. Ed and I met in Los Angeles on the stage of the Gloria Kaufman Performing Arts Center and were interviewed by Lorene Powell Jobs. Ed and I spoke about the creation of the images, what he thought about lemons, and how we chose the 50 lemon recipes from the River Cafe. In this bonus episode, you'll hear our stories and how we collaborated, four close friends, to create this book.

1:52We're honored to have two extraordinary icons with us, artist Ed Ruscha and chef Ruthie Rogers. Although these two amazing creators come from different worlds, both have shaped culture through a deep attention to the everyday and their commitment to craft and lifelong devotion to beauty. Ruthie Rogers is the co-founder and chef of London's beloved River Cafe, where she's defined Italian cooking with elegance and soul. For over three decades, she's nurtured a generation of chefs and has shaped global food culture. Her work reminds us that food is more than sustenance. It's expression, generosity, and of course, love.

2:41For over 60 years, LA's own Ed Ruscha has shaped the way we see the American landscape through painting, photography, drawing, and printmaking. His work captures the humor, grit, and poetry of everyday life. Ed is an artist of precision and wit, revealing what is often overlooked. So this afternoon, our conversation will cover creativity, materiality, humor, and the ways that art and food help us to understand our lives. Ruthie and Ed, welcome. So the two of you, plus Heather and Ive and Johnny Ive, what a dream team. The four of you together, how did this happen? How did this come together? How did you all decide that this is what you were going to do a book project together?

3:41First of all, thank you, Laureen. Thank you all for coming. It's half coming home, half coming to a new place. It's here to talk about on a Sunday afternoon, lemons, friendship, and a book. And thank you for being here, Laureen. We, how does a book begin? My books were cookbooks. We thought they would be books about, in the very beginning, how we started the River Cafe, handbooks. A book is, I would say, a recipe is part poetry and part science and part, of course, communication, telling people how to do something to make something. This book was different. This book was really born out of huge admiration for Ed Ruscha as an artist and a huge love for him as a friend.

4:26And I've been asking Ed every time I saw him, it was like, Ed, could we do a book? because I think a book for Ed is part of his art. It's not an artist who does books. It's an artist, is that right, who does books with his art, which is very combined. And so he kept saying, I'm doing a show in New York. Oh, Ruthie, I'm doing a retrospective at the Museum of Art. But finally, he said, yeah, we'll think about it. I think he said on two conditions. One is that it's one ingredient. I think you were at my studio where I have a lime and a lemon tree and other trees, and I think you got smitten with the lemons.

5:10I did. And that started it off. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess that was a little trigger for this book you had. I think going to Ed's studio in Culver City, which is not a place you'd expect maybe to see a garden grove of lemon trees. We went outside and we said lemons, you know, so that's how it started. And you like lemons, don't you, Ed? I guess I don't have a special attachment to them, but... You have one in your coffee. Yes, I do. You gave me one, yeah. We wanted to all be armed today. Yeah. And I think you were there. Were you there when this little girl, Frankie Copelson, was there? Yeah. No, I wasn't, but you tell the story.

5:55She was there with her father, Will Kopelman, and we were out in the garden, and I turned around and looked, and she had a giant lemon in her hand, and she had eaten half of it. And with rind and seeds and all, and I said, whoa, boy, you really like lemons, don't you? And she said, don't you? And I said, yeah, I like lemonade. And we even made that part of this book. we thought that'd be a little... And then you roped in Johnny and Heather. And so I'm just really curious, though, how decisions got made for this book. Was there, between the four of you, one decision maker, did you share images, or did you just trust each of you that you would deliver on the words from Heather and the imagery and the art from Ed and the recipes from you, and then it got assembled?

6:52How did this happen? I've done quite a few books, and so have you. They're fun to make. They're so good, aren't they? What do you love about making a book? Oh, I probably won't be doing another one on lemons now, but I hope we nailed it down with this one. My cookbooks, when we do books, are really collaborative, so we always have a photographer, we have the designer, We have the chef's and we start thinking about it very early on. We don't just bring in a designer at the end. We make the recipe, we write down what we just cooked and then we photographed it with very little styling or lighting or we just show the food.

7:34As I said, it's almost a textbook. And what you want to inspire as well in the book, you want people to read it and want to cook it. This book was different because we started out with the idea of doing the art in Ed's and we started in the River Cafe kitchen thinking of all the recipes that we'd done with lemons. And that was pretty, it was pretty easy, because when Italian cooking, a lemon is crucial. It's always, whether it's a squeeze at the end or the beginning of a sauce, or we put it in pastas. We use, in the River Cafe, I think we use, I think we use 300 lemons a day. And we're not a very big restaurant.

8:13I read that. Is that an enormous amount? It sounds like an enormous amount. Yeah, well, I think that we probably have 300 people more sometimes coming a day. So a lemonade. Everybody gets half a lemon, and we put lemon in the drinks and in the martinis and lemonade. It's always, yeah. So, yeah, I think it seems normal, I guess, to us, 300 lemons. And it depends on the season as well, how you eat a lemon. So I'm getting the recipes for this. And then Ed wanted words. You wrote to me and you said, okay, Ruthie, I have words that I want to use. and some Eds are the funny ones in the quote, are Eds.

8:50I thought there must be some great things said in the world about lemons and I was actually wrong. And I thought maybe I'll start first, this is obvious, I'll start first with the ancients, with philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, Socrates and all that. They'll have great things to say about lemons. No, they didn't. They didn't even have lemons. They didn't know about them. They had this one little plant called a citron, which was an ornamental tree that rich people had in their gardens. But they never even thought about using the fruit to cook with. So they didn't really cook with lemons for another 400 or 500 years.

9:33And we had to scrape around to find statements to work with the pictures. and I have a fondness for people like W.C. Fields who he said in here, when life gives you lemons, make whiskey sours. So Ruthie here made a recipe for whiskey sours and then as we get toward the end of the book, I thought I like W.C. Fields so well that I'm going to slip one in and not let Ruthie know about it and it's where he said it was a woman who drove me to drink and I didn't have the decency to write her and thank her for it and then I missed the deadline so I didn't get that one in there I'm sorry I was gonna say I didn't let's just pretend it's in there it's a really good one and then Heather Ive who is a poet wrote a lot of these as well lemon is not a fruit It's a mood.

10:31So the idea of this book was that you could read it for the humor. You could look at it. And also you might be inspired then to say that you wanted to cook something as well. Is this the first cookbook that you've made that doesn't have any images of the finished product? Yeah. I should think so. There are very, our books especially, there are books that are just tight, that tell stories. Alice Walters, the first Japanese cookbook, didn't have photographs. And we always have, and our books really made a big deal, the finished dish. But this one, one of the things I think that Johnny did and loved from and Chris Wilson did, was to do, the recipes are almost captions to the art.

11:18Would you take this book into the kitchen? Yes. Would you leave it on the table in your living room? Yes. Would you put it next to your bed? Yes. So I think it is a book that is all of that without the finished product. If you read it anyway, you can make it. The recipes are quite simple. really. And given that you go through 400 lemons a day, you had to parse through a lot of recipes that you left behind. So how did you choose the ones other than to fit a caption that you have? And do you have specific favorites out of the book that you made sure were there? Yeah, definitely. As I said, in Italian food, the lemon is crucial.

12:00It is in many cuisines. In Morocco, they preserve lemons. In France, they make beaux blancs with lemon. It's the acid of a lemon, the sweetness of a lemon. And for us, finding recipes that had lemons in them was pretty simple. But then we chose ones that we really thought were representative of the way we cook. And we also used recipes where, you know, the interest about a lemon is that used, unlike an apple or a pear or many other fruits or vegetables, you use the whole, you can use every bit of a lemon that be used. You can grate the skin, you peel the skin. There are recipes for the pith. There are cheddar lemons, which have a very thick pith, and you could just make a salad out of that.

12:41And again, in this book, in most cookbooks, you would have antipasti, pasta, main courses, desserts. This one, you can have a lemon ice cream in the beginning next to a chili and lemon sauce because it's short. So there was no point in having three recipes, each section of four or five. And in a way, that was very liberating to be able to choose which recipe you wanted next to which image or how the tone went. So we did it randomly. And spaghetti and lemon, I imagine, made it to the book. Yeah, we did that recipe. I think one of the fears of cooking with lemon is that if you add it to a sauce, especially to milk or cream, it purdles.

13:22So you spend your whole time making sure that it doesn't purdle. And there's a recipe in here, I don't know if it's very LA, which is to have pork cooked in milk, which is a very Italian, Northern Italian recipe. And the actual lemon juice you squeeze into the milk, you want it to curdle. So it becomes almost a nutty brown. And when you cook it with the meat, the juices of the meat, and you can do it with chicken, you can do it with veal, you can do it with other meats. and my mother-in-law who's as I said from Trieste always squeezed a lemon into whatever dish she was making at the end and a bit of milk to make it greater so I like that recipe and yeah there's lots yeah so I'd like to talk to both of you about your creative practice just how you come up with ideas and how you set the conditions in London or in LA wherever you're doing the work so that you do your best work.

14:20So I wonder if you can talk, each of you, about any rituals or routines that you have in the studio or in the kitchen that allow for the type of creativity that you're both known for. I just have a regular routine that is no different than almost anyone else's. You just jump from one subject to the other and try to tackle it and make it fun for yourself. Maybe it's automatic. Maybe you have to invent it. But that's the way things work. What about the other food you did, the chocolate room? That's something else. That was a walk-in experience where I printed on sheets of paper chocolate. And they were hung like shingles on all four walls of the room that you walk into.

15:16So that's just like a one-off idea of mine. You used a lot of other food items like egg yolk and blueberry or hot sauce, rhubarb. Yeah, I got a little limited by the conventional art materials. So I thought, what about things that make stains and can they be used to make art? I've always felt like they could. When we think about your idea, your question about how you progress, I would say that it has nothing for me, and I think actually Richard used to say this about architecture, it has very little to do with ideas. We don't ever come in and say, I have an idea for a recipe. It sort of doesn't work that way.

16:03How does it work for you? It works from one day we might do an almond tart with pears, and then we'll think it's should we just put that almond tart away? But next, we could try it with strawberries. And if we do it with strawberries, then we might wanna put sugar in the strawberries and marinate them first, or you might want to, it's the same thing with cooking a vegetable, that you're thinking about how you can take an artichoke and cut it, maybe you would cut it differently. So I think for us, it's much more about thinking about the ingredient, thinking what you did last time, and then building on that.

16:39But you also work in a team, undoubtedly, so you have a lot of collaborators. Do you each build on each other's ideas? Very slowly, really slowly. It doesn't change much. If you look at the menus, I think, that we did years ago, some of the same things that we've done and then some other changes slightly. And when new chefs come in, we just work with them. We all work. Yeah, we've worked together. But I always think that art, the art that you do, lasts forever, and the art that I do gets eaten up. So I think that made a really good cake, and now it's gone. But I guess we just work in that mix.

17:21You're the mix master. No, you're the mix mistress. Oh. What does that mean? What do you mean? You know how to mix things up. Do you? I guess I do in my own way, but it's nothing like cuisine. I can't really cook that well. That's pan cook. So, Ed, I do a podcast or a quadcast, and when I interviewed Ed, he came with his own recipe. You're supposed to read a recipe from one of my books. He said, I want to read my own recipe. What was it? It was a, what was it? Was that a cactus omelet? Yeah. Or, yeah. Not an ingredient you find very often in London, but that's okay. No. All right, where were we?

18:05I think we were talking about, obviously, how you use ingredients as collaborators. But as you were talking about your menu, I was thinking how beautifully handwritten your menus are. And part of that is the experience of eating in the River Cafe as well. And for both of you, obviously, it's shown in the book, the importance of language. And of course, Ed also uses words and language as he distills a piece down to a word. And you find the visual of it and the meaning of it to be shifted as a result when you distill like that. So I just wanted to hear from both of you how you think about words and language in your art.

18:52We use words in our art to just communicate. We think a lot about the way you read it. And when you sit down for a meal and you're starving and you want to eat, do you really want to read where that piece of jacoria came from? Or do you want to just know how it's cooked? Or how much explanation do you put on a menu? How long do you make it? How do you word it? How do you describe something that you're about to experience? And so we always do that. In the River Cafe, we work on the basis of writing a menu for every meal. So the chef comes in at 9 in the morning or 8.30, sees what's in the fridge, sees what's been delivered, and sees what's left over, and then creates a menu, which is always in the language of what food is.

19:39It's not a new surprise based on what you do. But that time to actually use words and to write down what you're going to cook takes some time in the morning. Then again, we do it in the afternoon. So creating the menu is very important to us as a part of the experience of eating in the River Cafe. Can you write out a recipe and then follow that recipe and make the food, or do you make the food? And then reverse it. Yeah, that we developed. You learn how to write a recipe. And so we would basically, I think we would cook it and then write it down. Yeah, we would make something and then write the recipe, unless you're stealing somebody else's.

20:18and then you just read their recipe and then you make it and then you change it. It's a whole process. But yeah, I think that for us, certainly with the other books, we would make something and then have a pen and paper there and write it and then make it again and then make it again. But I think the first books, it was a learning curve to see how you communicate. Yeah. And now that you've been doing it for 30 years or so, So how have things changed? Do you do things differently? Are you still finding that freshness every single day of trying something brand new? Yeah, we don't try and invent things every day, but we're led by the ingredients and the seasonality.

21:04Sometimes you're riding to work and you think, what would I want to eat? What would I want for lunch? Is it raining? Am I tired? Am I feeling good? We look at the team of people who are going to cook, who's working for you that day, what they can do. So I think it changes, probably. And what's remained unchanged in the love of the work? What's remained unchanged? I think the way we work with the people we work with. I think that's the value that we've had since the first day, that most people in the River Cafe, we all participate. participate. So the kitchen porter who's washing the dishes cleans the scallops and the waiters all prep the parsley or chop the chilies or peel the garlic.

21:49And everybody's involved in that sense, maybe less so, nevertheless, because our numbers are greater. And then we don't let people work crazy hours. We have two days off a week. We teach people. We take time for the people. Those values, I think, have kept with us. I hope so. And then the way we cook, yeah, cooking food has changed. I think as people travel more, they experience food from other countries and they've been to Italy, so they know what to order. They're more demanding, they're more knowledgeable, which is exciting. And then suppliers are much more in contact with us. We phone the fish, people on, we phone the boats every night.

22:29Not that we often phone people on the boats. Oh, wow. We once had a call from a fisherman who said, I have a huge turbot here, and if you don't want it, I'm throwing it back in the sea. So there is that contact, which is very important to us. Do you ever teach people? No, people from outside classes? No, not really. We have an open kitchen, so people sometimes come up and say, we teach the people who work with us, and the people who work with us teach us. There's a lot of people come in your studio. Yeah, I invite people over, sure. But I don't lecture or teach people anything. Have you ever taught?

23:12I did one year at UCLA, and I regretted the time I had to stay out of my own studio. Yeah. Didn't like it. And all the students that were skeptical of what I had to say were all the ones making the good art. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know why that was. Good. And when you're in your studio lately, what are you finding fascinating? What are you thinking about? Sometimes I'm not even fascinated, but I just jump from one thing to another, and I don't know where it's going to take me. And I think it's the best kind of plateau to be on is to not really know what you're doing. that sounds counterintuitive or sounds kind of lame but it's not it's good to approach things with an open mind and not think that you're the total master of everything that's facing you i asked ed when we were signing books in london i said ed what about doing another book anyway not really ruthie but what do you think and i said we could do basil we could do chilies we could do I named about four different ingredients I thought would be a bestseller.

24:31And then we just kept signing books and there was silence. And then he just yelled across the room, Ruthie said, yes, he said, water. That's an artist. That's right, yeah. Yeah, it's critical how much water you have to add to each recipe. Yeah. There's a lot of water in cooking. Yeah. I could do that. Talk to us about how you end your podcast. You always ask people what's your favorite comfort food. The question that I'm always asked is what would be your last meal? And I hate that question. I changed it to comfort. And it's really interesting to hear people's reaction to what is comfort. Very often it's a memory from their childhood.

25:15It's a memory of somebody, a recipe somebody gave them before they died, a recipe that they had in a very happy moment. So it's what comfort is. Mine would definitely be something with tomato sauce, probably pasta. What's that? Pasta with tomato. What's yours? If I, it's hard to say anything other than pasta with tomato sauce now that you're talking about it. Yeah, it is probably a lot of things, yeah. It's exactly that steaming bowl in front of you. It's the most comforting. What about you, Ed? Tomato soup and crackers. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. Crackers. You mean like those sultene things?

25:56Sultene crackers, yes. The little holes in them. Yeah, those are good, aren't they? Yeah, with tomato soup. Some audience questions. Leslie asks, I'd like for Ed and Ruthie to ponder the word beautiful and beauty for a moment. What comes to mind, Ed, when you think of beauty and a work of art? Oh, I want to run from it. We're all in search for it, but we can't grab it. It's very elusive. It's like mercury. So what it is, it's very hard to describe and even harder to achieve it. Carlos asks, I find baking is very much like the symphony. It's very precise and specific, and other cooking is more like jazz, where you can ad-lib your way through the kitchen.

26:50I'd like to hear what music influences both of you. Well, music, I sometimes listen to music, sometimes I love total silence. That's hard to beat, but music I do, and I'm attached to music I grew up with, which was from the 1950s, and doo-wop music and jazz. And I even shook off country and western music for a while. Sylvia asks, lemon versus Meyer lemons. I'd say Meyer lemons are very local to California. And I loved the first recipe, and the recipe that's still on the River Cafe every day is a lemon tart, which came from Alice Walters. It's called the Meyer lemon tart. And I think Meyer lemons are sweeter, aren't they?

27:38They have a sort of more sweeter, they have very thin skin. Yeah, they're vibrant. We have them in our ingredients. We use the lemons from Sicily and from Naples. All our lemons come from only Italy. And again, they have a very, they're winter fruit, really. Lemons have a season. And when we get the Sicilian lemons with the big, the Chedro lemons, then we really go to town. Another question for Ruthie from Kevin. he asks, are there any two ingredients or foods that just should not go together? I think of hummus and pumpkin spice, which some retailers force upon us. That's a hard question. Myself, I don't use a lot of fruit when I'm cooking meat or fish.

28:21And the only thing that I don't eat and I wouldn't eat, I don't think anybody should eat, is truffle oil because it's horrible. It just is. It's totally artificial. and so when I go to a restaurant and they ask if I have an allergy, I always say truffle oil. Another question for Ruthie. What is the purpose of acids in a recipe? To take the richness out of a dish and add that. That's why we use 300 lemons a day. We always squeeze a bit of acid into almost whatever we're making, whether it's vegetables or fish or meat or panna cotta. We make a very creamy panna cotta, but we always put a peel of a lemon in the bottom.

29:04I think it just gives you that extra flavor, makes something much less rich. Sharon asks, I love food, I love great restaurants, and I have a fabulous kitchen, but I just don't have the confidence to cook. Any advice? For me, I started with a book called Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and it was by Julia Child and Simone Beck, we were told. And what that book gave me was confidence because she was so precise. You had a quarter of a gram of sugar into a bowl that was a certain size, exactly how deep and what width. And if you followed those recipes, and they didn't say take the juiciest tomato and squeeze it.