Bonus: Lemons

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0:31Listen to Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Radhi Dvlukia, and I am the host of A Really Good Cry podcast. This week, I am joined by Anna Runkle, also known as the Crappy Childhood Fairy, a creator, teacher, and guide helping people heal from the lasting emotional wounds of unsafe or chaotic childhoods. Talking about trauma isn't always great for people. It's not always the best thing. About a third of people who are traumatized as kids feel worse when they talk about it, get very dysregulated. Listen to A Really Good Cry on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:10Today we're here to celebrate our new cookbook, which is called Squeeze Me, Lemon Recipes and Art, by Ruthie Rogers and Ed Ruscha, published by Rizzoli. I'm here with Sean Owen Owen and Joseph Trevelli, the executive chefs of the River Cafe, to discuss their favorite recipes, their memories of the recipes, and cooking with lemons every day. Squeeze Me really happened because Ed Ruscha is an old friend. I think he's, you know, if I could say, America's greatest artist, or maybe the greatest artist working today, and someone that I've always admired. He did a menu for us when we were doing the River Cafe 30 book, which was a happy birthday book.

1:57we asked our favorite artists to do something on each menu. And Ed did his word, which is called Yum. And I always thought, let's do a book together, because a lot of his work involves books. He's done books as a young artist and continue to do so. And he said, okay, I'll do a book with you, Ruthie, if it has only 50 recipes, it's short, and it has one ingredient. end. So it was on a visit to his studio in LA, which is actually quite an industrial area. And we walked into the back of this kind of almost like a warehouse, almost a factory. And there were, you know, 30 or 40 lemon trees. And so we hit on the idea of doing a book with recipes from the River Cafe about lemons.

2:47He said he would do the art, which he uses words, as we know, so he would do the words and Heather Ive, who's a poet helped him with that and then the office of love from Johnny Ive's office to the graphic design I think it's a book that is kind of funny, you know if you read it, there are quotes from W.C. Fields, Groucho Marx, and from Heather Ive it has no pictures of food, but it has our recipes in it and so I thought today instead of me telling you about the book it would be good to have Sean and Joseph talk about the recipes about the visuals about the joy and about lemons so who wants to go it's exciting to use yellow as well because normally the river cafe is so pink and blue we kind of use a lot of luminous pink and a lot of bright blue and so the yellow is fun for us all it feels like a break yeah break from the pink we're really embracing yellow I'm going to embrace the yellow.

3:49So what do you feel? What would you like to say about the book? I was thinking as you were talking, my first reaction about the lemon, as you were just describing, using one ingredient, was that it's just one of the few ingredients that you can use in its all broken down parts and, you know, use the whole lemon. So you can use the pith. You can use the skin, the pith, the juice, the flesh. And then at the end, you can plant the pip. What can you do with the pips? You can plant it. and plant another lemon tree. Granted, okay. You can use a whole lemon and it's not like a, I mean, you could use a whole tomato, but somehow when you're left with just the pips, yeah, you can use it in different ways, can't you?

4:29Each part has its own purpose almost. And what I think is cool about your book is that it's got lemons used in ways that aren't just conventional lemon ways. And that's what I think is quite fun about it. It's really nice the way it's kind of just arrived in the restaurant. It's arrived in the restaurant rather like a box of lemons. You know, like, of all the things that come, you know, because lemons don't grow very well at all around here. If you don't have a walled garden or, actually, there is one outside the front of my house that I stole from a party here. Yeah, someone bought, like, 20 lemon trees.

5:01Do you remember? I had to send mine down to Juman and Wes Anderson because they have a conservatory because it didn't last in my terrace. Well, somehow it's out the front of my front garden. It's sort of all right. It's like we've got six lemons on it today. I counted on my way here. But, I don't know. That's amazing. Yeah. so that's the you know you've heard of Amalfi lemons and now you can have hammer-slip lemons. But they don't grow easy around here so when you're these boxes of lemons and we obviously buy really nice lemons that come you know with even the stickers on the lemons are beautiful the leaves and in this box is really I was gonna say otherworld it's not otherworld but it's another place do you know what I mean?

5:38And it's always that transports you there and I feel like the books have arrived in the restaurant rather in the same way like you said it was they're from the sort of Los Angeles and California and just kind of, you know. And lemons in the River Cafe right now, as in today, we're waiting for the new seasons, lemons to arrive. So we're in a bit of a slightly depressing zone of... Well, I don't mind the green lemons, actually. Yeah, but they're not... But they're not, yeah, it's early. Yeah, so we're waiting for them to be fully yellow and come... And the lemon season is actually, I'd say, what, December, January, February, from in europe isn't it so you kind of think oh surely lemons are a summer fruit but actually no they're actually a winter you do get lemons in the summer though i think they're one of the only plants that fruits flowers and germinates all at the same time so you have like everything so you get a few obviously the bulk of the crop is in the winter but you do they do the the plants do also make something in it.

6:36Is that what you've got in Hammersmith? Actually, yeah. Is it? Wow. Teeny, teeny, teeny little toy lemon. Wow. We'll go back to lemons, but I thought it's really interesting what you said, because we've all done all our books together, and I think that it's such an early process, isn't it? We sit down, we think about the book, we get in the photographer, we have the designer, we sit there with the first page, we talk to the publisher and this had to be this is a river cafe book the recipe is a river cafe but it was kind of friendship book you know it was a sort of a friend of mine who was an artist and three two friends but I think that it's um it's the same for me you know being handed this book from California yeah what do you feel about a recipe that you when you look through the book that you like one of the recipes I think is quite cool and quite unusual and I I'd never even considered it until I started working at the river cafe is potatoes with lemon because you think great potatoes and lemon like how is that going to work it doesn't sound to the first instance to be the most delicious thing well tell us how to make the potato and lemon recipe so you cut the potatoes and you cut the lemons into similar shape pieces and then you mix it with um garlic pieces small pieces not not too bit not whole cloves chopped up slightly uh salt pepper um herbs i don't exactly know what it says in the book but you can use marjoram oregano thyme sage maybe rosemary but i don't feel like it doesn't suits a small southern hemisphere herb or southern european herb don't you think and then um mix it together with olive oil um steam it in the oven so that it all goes really soft together and then uncover it and it kind of browns and the lemon the lemon to be browned yeah i think you need that contrast between the potato and it's so good you have it so good fish but if you exit you didn't know what is the flavor you wouldn't pick the lemon necessarily it's funny it has a really different and it's a great actually it's a it's the best example i can think of but something that uses a you know an unusual recipe uses a whole lemon because the pith is definitely part of that isn't it you know as well as the zest and that you know always I sometimes put olives in it because it's something about when you have an olive it's quite nice to have lemon it's quite nice for the potato and somehow the kind of combination.

9:03What do you feel about your favourite recipe in the book? Or not favourite but what I'm used for. There are so many things but I like Fried martini? Yeah, actually That's in the book. Yeah, that's it. I mean, sorry, that's the best recipe. That's a given. But I really like it when you use the peel in a savoury way. You know, so I really like when we make pork and milk with the lemon peel. And actually, you don't put any lemon juice in at all. You know, in the same way when you make a, when we make panna cottas, you just put the peel in, the cream, and you reduce it. And it has, it's a very, very Italian flavour, actually, I think that kind of lemon peel and dairy and I'm a big big fan of that.

9:51When you were growing up, your parents lived in Italy, did you have had lemon trees where you are? My father is from the south of Italy but we're inland. So if you go to Naples, obviously that is the place where the lemon crops are. But where we are in the mountains. People definitely have lemon trees and I've got friends with lemon trees but it wasn't like, it's not a crop in that way. Yeah, so I really like things with the lemon peel that's cooked for a long time, and that flavor really comes out. I always think that the pork cooked in milk is so fabulous because it's kind of chemistry, isn't it?

10:25You think, at what point did they realize that you could curdle milk and it would be delicious? Because usually if something curdles, even the word curdles means uh-uh, you know, don't do it. But when you have it, you just put that lemon with the milk, and you could do it in pork. I do it in chicken. I'm sure we all do it and other things. And that magic that it creates that kind of almost nutty flavour. You know, when you do pork in milk, you want to cook it so that you, when you put the lemon in the milk, that it goes brown. You know, for me, it's always that kind of dark flavours from the bottom of the pan.

11:00And then, you know. I don't think you can overdo the lemon in it. No, I agree. No, it's much milder, isn't it, like that? Yeah, because when you say you have a whole pork shoulder, say we're doing a whole pork shoulder that feeds about 20 people maybe 15 at the rubber cafe you probably would use a handful of garlic cloves and probably the zest of maybe four or five lemons and then you agree but not the pith no pith just the zest you know and then then when you pour that in with the milk yeah you see well how the heck it is going to work and then four hours later you lift the lid off and you're like bingo.

11:38The milk's got kind of ricotta around the edges. Yeah. It's kind of good. And also it's completely different if you think the other thing that is really nice with the lemon peel is what we make often and very Italian is gremolata. You know when you chop the lemon zest up you know with the parsley and again I know Sharlene and I because I hear her talking to the chefs like a lot of lemon zest in gremolata and that is to cut through the fat typically of like ossobuca or some really fatty pork but it's like you know it's the same thing but it's not cooked it's completely different all of a sudden it's like sharp you know whereas in the in the other in the other dish it's so soft the other thing is that again richard's mother never made any roasted meat maybe not peat but chicken and pork and veal without just roasting it but then taking the um roasting tin out take removing the meat and then pouring just milk into the juices of the pan, removing the fat.

12:34And that's how I do. I mean, that's how I cook. I don't know how to make gravy. And I guess it is how you make gravy. But if you have the roasting tin, which is quite flat, as long as you don't burn the bits of the meat, then you pour milk over it and then you scrape it and you boil it down. It is really a delicious and very simple sauce for gravy, for the chicken or the veal or whatever you're doing. and I think, again, back to the magic of how somehow the lemon and the milk work I think for me, a lemon on anything a piece of grilled fish or a piece of grilled meat in France you could have a Bernays sauce, I'm sure in other countries there's always a sauce you can make even like salsa verde, but if you squeeze lemon over the fish or over the meat that's been cooked, there's your sauce.

13:29It's just the sauce of the juices with the lemon makes the sauce. And so a lemon is pretty impressive as an ingredient, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're really lucky that Edouard Che chose lemons because actually you can do, imagine if he said melons. It would have been much harder. We were just talking about the next book about what to do. And I won't tell you because we don't want everybody to hear. What was it? It was quite, quite fun. Is it? but I think also well tell me more about what you think about well I always think what about fritto misto because sometimes we do fritto misto in the restaurant uh in the book I can see it's the vegetable and lemon fritto misto so you can do zucchini artichokes at the moment we're doing a radicchio because it's autumn and not zucchini but you know substituting in vegetables and then you can do a thin slice of a circle of lemon um and then fry that with um milk and flour or batter and then when you eat a fried lemon that's like mind-blowing because you don't you think well i know what a fried zucchini tastes like i know what a fried you know piece of fredicchio tastes like the lemon is suddenly like it's so fun because it's in a batter which makes it almost feel healthy inside there it's like double don't you think that's why i love it i have to make you go healthy well no inside it you think well this is actually yeah but it's really um it's really like fun what about lemon lemon desserts because we do use lemon a lot we do use lemon in our sorbets and we do lemon tarts we do lemon cakes well i think one of us should talk about lemon tart because I think that was on the menu the first day 38 years ago and it's been the same but you know it is a river cafe classic so what proper classic you made one yesterday for the I did a photo shoot yesterday well I took film and made the lemon tart in the classic river cafe old school method which was do you remember how you bring the lemon juice and the butter and the zest and the sugar to the boil then take it off the heat and then you stir in the whole eggs and the egg yolks then you put it back in the pan cook it out um on the heat until it just starts to bubble around the edges but you remember that if it if it starts to boil it's split done yeah and i was thinking and the camera was on me and i was thinking hold your nerve don't worry you've got this you do this all the time when i last make a lemon tart at the River Cafe like 15 years ago maybe and so I just managed to do that I had some nice equipment to use very photogenic then poured it into the tart shell and then the moment of truth I was like I'm going to do the real flash version which is to brown it in the wood oven because it's really showy it looks like not just a grill I'm going to do this in a wood oven so I had the flames going and then I was thinking this is a moment of truth because if it if you haven't made it correctly it won't brown so if you do what i say then you put it under a hot grill it will work but if you've gone too far cooking it it will just split more and more and it's so worth it to take that list because the difference between a kind of anemic looking lemon tart and this tart that we had you know and so i definitely yeah so i put it in the hot oven and then i was watching it thinking act cool just act relaxed and then and then i noticed a big welts of brown starting to grow on it and then it was just bubbling away and then it and i turned it and it was it was so good i was like high-fiving myself but the funny thing is it's um we used to when the chef started at the river cafe we used to do all do desserts and pastry that was part of our training whereas now we have a pastry kitchen and so we we don't the young chefs don't learn pastry in the same way that we learned pastry so I guess we're nostalgic for it because we used to do it and it's such a every people someone sent me a text the other day saying lemon tart is my absolute weakness at the river cafe because it's so yeah definitely yeah yeah yeah it's a nice the um visuals of the book of eds are you know it is it's quite fun it is quite joy I keep using joy when I see this book, you know.

17:52How did you come up with the title? So that was Heather Ive. Oh, right. Yeah, that was Heather Ive. And we thought, what should we call the book? And she called it Squeeze Me. And this is a quote by Groucho Marx. Our brother thinks he's a lemon tree, but we won't talk him out of it because we need the lemons. And that was great. And that's very Groucho Marx. And some of them were from lines, from songs, from poems. There's one by Pablo Neruda. What I like about this book is the recipes are almost the size of captions. So there's a lot of white around the page so that the images can shine. And if you have trouble reading it, then you can get it from one of our other cookbooks.

18:43But it's a book that you might want to take in the kitchen. Somebody told me last night they'd made a recipe from it. You might want to put it on your living room table, or you might just want to put it next to your bed when you're feeling in these grey winter nights quite happy by seeing lemon. I mean, I love the fact it doesn't have pictures of food in it, but I know that is a bit controversial, seemingly. It's funny that it's been taken out so much, because if you think of the Chez Panisse cookbook, there were no photographs of plates. if you think about, I think Alice B. Tull, because I think there are cookbooks without, they're more like maybe memoirs or they're more stories, but with illustrations, line illustrations.

19:28So maybe they are, you know, people are missing because our books have always been so photographic. But it gives it to the imagination. There's some fun recipes. The spaghetti with parmesan is also absolutely delicious. I made that yesterday for the film as well. I didn't feel so nervous making it. But also you wouldn't think spaghetti with parmesan and lemon juice. Someone who was here today talked about in Milan, and when I saw the photograph, it was rather like a zucchini one. There was definitely parmesan in it. It was quite cheesy. Yeah, yum. Yesterday when I was doing it for the film, they kept making me squeeze more and more lemon in it for visuals.

20:05And I was a bit like, you might want to be careful eating that because that's going to be super acidic. You don't need much. You don't need much. I'd never had lemon pasta until I came in. It's really nice. and people really, really enjoy it. Yeah, in the summer particularly. One of those things I fancy once a year, the recipe in the book, is limoncello. Yeah. You know, I know it's a very sweet, kind of slightly naff thing, but I think it's a good homemade limoncello. I really enjoy it. Apparently it's a really competitive thing, Puglia, to make your own limoncello. I remember reading that. Oh, OK, yeah.

20:41Families want to know. They'd say, oh, how is your lemon cello, and that's mine, and how many lemons. So here we are, Squeeze Me, a book by Ed Ruscha, Recipes from the River Cafe, and out now, published by Rizzoli. Thank you.

21:03Ruthie's Table 4 was produced by Alex Bell and Zad Rogers, with Susanna Hislop, Andrew Sang, and Bella Salini. This has been an Atomize production for iHeart Media.

21:18Hi, I'm Dani Shapiro. We were in the car, like a rolling stone came on, and he said, there's a line in there about your mother. And I said, what? What I would do if I didn't feel like I was being accepted is choose an identity that other people can't have. I knew something had happened to me in the middle of the night, but I couldn't hold on to what had happened. These are just a few of the moving and important stories on my 13th season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Radhi Dvlukia, and I am the host of A Really Good Cry podcast.

21:54This week, I am joined by Anna Runkle, also known as the Crappy Childhood Fairy, a creator, teacher, and guide helping people heal from the lasting emotional wounds of unsafe or chaotic childhoods. that talking about trauma isn't always great for people. It's not always the best thing. About a third of people who were traumatized as kids feel worse when they talk about it, get very dysregulated. Listen to A Really Good Cry on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.