Emily Maitlis & Jon Sopel

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0:54Food is key to life, and today more than ever, journalism is also key to life. Our guests, Emily Maitlis and John Sopel, are two brilliant, inspiring journalists who bring us news, analyze news, present news, helping us determine our lives and the choices we make. They're smart, they're warm, they're funny, and they tell me they are always hungry.

1:23Emily was lead anchor for the BBC, presenter of Newsnight, and now produces documentaries. John spent four decades at the BBC as chief political correspondent and its North American editor. A year ago, they launched The News Agents, which is definitely my favorite podcast. Well, may be my second favorite. These two journalists crave food. This chef craves journalism. They've just come from the River Cafe Pastry Kitchen, having made a prune and almond tart. And now we're going to sit down, talk about food, memories, and more. Thank you. So lovely.

2:08My name's Bella Tubbs. I'm the head pastry chef at the River Cafe, and I'm here with Emily Maitlis and John Sopolk. Okay, so we're going to make a pruning almond tart. It's a bit of a how-to Blue Peter. That's so cool. That's a really useful, hugely fabulous thing to do. It's all right. It's a pleasure. A pruning almond tart, which I think... Which I had last Friday here, and it was sensational. I mean, normally pear on the rare occasions I ever come here, but it was incredible. Thank you. I normally pair on the rare occasions. I think you've already given yourself away. Well done, John Sofort.

2:45So you've just made a prune and almond tart. But before we talk about that experience and what you did, would you like to read the recipe for it? Prune and almond tart. Serves 14. 16 prunes stoned. 300 grams almonds finely ground. One Earl Grey teabag. 100 mils of brandy. 300 grams of unsalted butter. 300 grams caster sugar. Three large eggs. One preheated sweet pastry start shell. Preheat the oven to 150 degrees. Pour enough boiling water over the prunes to cover, then add the tea bag. Leave for one hour, remove the prunes from the tea, pour the brandy over them. Using an electric mixer, beat the butter and sugar together until pale and light.

3:30Add the ground almonds, then add the eggs one by one. Finally, add 100 ml of the brandy prune juices. Pour this mixture into the tart shell. Push the prunes into the mixture. Bake in the preheated oven for 40 minutes. Cool and remove from the tin. Brilliant. Thank you. How about that's a little duet? So tell me about making it. What was it like in the pastry kitchen? It was spotlessly clean. It was brilliantly well organised. and the smell when you walk in of the baking, of the breads, of crostini, of everything else that's going on in there is just fabulous. And of course the almonds, which just smell so rich and sweet.

4:11I was shown a magic trick. It actually blew my mind, which was instead of pushing the pastry into the tin, you grate it on a normal sort of grater and you take all the tiny bits and then push them sort of gradually around the back, which apparently makes it finer and shorter and more delicate. And so I'm going to take that away and say, this is what I learned at the River Cafe. As well as it being spotlessly clean, I have never seen a grater looking so totally knackered as the one you've got up here because it has been through so much. And it looks absolutely, oh, my God, you wouldn't get a penny for that in a jumble sale.

4:50But it's obviously still doing its job. Times are hard at the River Cafe. We're saving up for greater. But actually you do get a kind of sentimental attachment to certain things that you use in the kitchen. I don't know if you do. I'm a spatula girl. And if somebody gives me the wrong kind of spatula, like I have favorites in my spatula. My favorite is the purple spatula. Tell us about the purple spatula. It just fits your hand, right? That's the point. There's nothing special about it. It's not unique. It's just that it's become part. I feel like Edward Scissorhands, but with spatula. It's the extension of my arm now.

5:27Do you have kitchen equipment that you've inherited from your family? There was a kitchen knife that has been so sharpened that it bows because there's so little of it left. And that was my mother's favourite kitchen knife. And she had it since she was a girl. And, I mean, unfortunately, it's kind of, it met its end. Well, there was just nothing left of it. because it had been sharpened so many times over the years that it had been filed down to next to nothing. Have you got it above the fireplace now? Coat of arms. In a frame, exactly. Do you have one that was handed down? Not really, no. I think it's more the practices of my...

6:06My mum was my big, is my big inspiration, actually, in terms of cooking. And it's more the way she does things and the way she talks to herself as she cooks that I do now. and I think I pass on to my children. Did you cook with her? Always, yeah, yeah, yeah. And did she work or did she come home and cook? She worked a lot at home. So she did a lot of her work at home and I remember the rituals actually of her cooking. And just how, I mean, she was very funny. She was always ahead of the curve. I say she was, she's very much alive and we'll be listening to this. But I think she was quite ahead of the curve in the kind of ingredients that she used and the kind of things that she made.

6:48And occasionally she'd go into obsessions. So she had an obsession about an Indian dessert called Gulab Jaman. And she decided she had to perfect it. And instead of making it once, she made it like every day for about six weeks until we were just begging her to stop. But she also taught me my sort of, yeah, the recipes that I've passed down now, that I've sort of taken on. Did she write, do you have them in her writing? Did she write them? She has all her recipes still. And funny you say that, but I've just done a cookbook for my son. He went off to university last year. And I did that really embarrassing mother thing where I took pictures of all the dishes that I thought he'd miss.

7:27And I wrote all the recipes out and I put it all together for him. And then I saw his room. And, of course, there's like one burner and a mini fridge. And he just looked at me and was like, I'm never, ever going to cook any of that stuff in here. You know that, don't you? Yeah, but you know he will. But one day he will. A lot of grandmothers' cookbooks were grandmothers' recipes. A lot of people do. It was always a Rolodex, a little, that's what my mum keeps in the garden. Every recipe is like a, do you know what I mean? Like a little square thing and it's all in her handwriting. What about yours?

7:57Yeah, a very similar story. My mother worked and she'd had polio as a child and so was left pretty badly disabled by it. And I used to go and meet her from the tube station to carry the shopping home because she would bring the shopping home and then she would cook the dinner. And I think probably like Emily's mum, you know, presentation of it was kind of really important. She loved food to look appetising as well as to taste appetising. So it was fun just doing the pastry where I was having to put the prunes on the tart and to make it look neat. And that was the sort of thing that I did at home.

8:30And also my mother loved cooking and loved handing the recipes down. And funnily enough, she died about 15 years ago. my second cousin sent me on WhatsApp a photo of a recipe that my mother had written out for her for Passover, for Herosia. And there it was, you know, my mum's handwriting, and I suddenly got this WhatsApp message. And all those things bring back such memories of childhood and growing up. Yeah. I found that the other thing that's interesting is how many people talk almost more, maybe not the two of you, but more about their grandmother's cooking than their mother's. My grandmother was, she had certain key recipes that she would repeat.

9:11One was loction pudding. I haven't met anyone since then that does loction pudding, which is literally, it's like noodles. It's a pasta dessert. And it's kind of pasta and cream and raisins and more cream. I think it's probably the heaviest thing in the entire world. And it's got a crispy top. I've literally never seen it on a menu. But it must just be the most comforting comfort. It's a heart attack waiting to happen. So my mother was, I mean, my mother had an extraordinary life story. She was an illegitimate child, born in the Northeast to a Russian Jewish family, and had to escape because of the shame that had been brought to the family.

9:49And she ends up in a farming community in East Anglia, which was Protestant. And so she kind of grew up making suet pudding and Yorkshire puddings and all the rest of the kind of English cookbook, if you like. When I was growing up, until I was a sort of teenager, you had to be home Friday evening. Friday night, supper, yeah, Shabbat. The shabbat, the candles, the bread, the wine, all the rest of it. And then we'd eat non-kosher food. And we just thought that was perfectly normal. I mean, my mother would not dream of cooking pork, but we'd have plenty of parma ham. Yeah. She couldn't bear the idea of an English roast pork wouldn't be anywhere near the table.

10:24I don't remember her ever doing that. But if it was parma ham or prawns, that would be fine. Food and tradition and memories and family and the Friday nights. Did you reject having to stay home on a Friday night when you could be out partying? I think by the time I got to 16, it got a bit kind of, I'm sorry, I'm going out, I'm going to the pub. Yeah. So I started to rebel at that stage. But I love the idea of at least one night a week, the family coming together and everyone sitting around the table, maybe not always getting on brilliantly. But there is a kind of sense that this is what we do as a family.

10:55But you do it now with your generation. Do you do it with your kids? Do you do it with yours? I mean, mine have grown up, but when we can, yes, we do. I mean, normally Sunday evenings, actually, because everyone's got, it's either a school day or a work day the next. And you just kind of, you know, that's the time. I like a Sunday night. What about you? Do you do it with your kids? We do Friday night. We light the candles. We say a prayer if the kids are together, you know. And normally it involves me being about to cook and somebody going, oh, it's Friday. Oh, quick, it's Friday. Get the candles.

11:24So we do that, not in a big demonstrative way, but just in a kind of recognition. It's a few moments at the beginning of the evening. Growing up, did you always sit around the table? Yes, we did. I mean, that was very much, it was no one had TV dinners. No grazing. No grazing. It was kind of, you'd sit down at the table together, the four of you. And yeah, that was kind of pretty much on school nights every night. Yeah. And to the point where we all, everyone had a set place. I mean, that's how the pecking order is established. Completely. You know, I was the youngest of three sisters. I had the least comfortable chair.

11:59sort of squashed into the corner where you had to get between the sort of dresser and the edge of the table. And I sort of think of it like that was how you knew your place, literally knowing your place, right? Did you get an easier time than your older sisters had? Oh, almost certainly. And they were resentful because they thought, Emily's come along and we have to do this, but she doesn't. No, my sisters worked out very early that they could make me run errands for them if they offered to time me doing something. So it'd be like, can you post this letter? I'll time you. And I would run all the way down the bottom of the road, run all the way back.

12:36My sister would have gone off and done something completely different. She'd suddenly look at her, watch and go, oh, amazing, 45. And I'd be like, wow, was that better than last time? So that was how I, but the seating was very much. And then Sunday was a big deal because we had it in the dining room and there was a bottle of Coca-Cola. on the table and it was the only time of the week we got fizzy drinks and it was it was you know the the real iconic coca-cola bottle and that was how you knew it was a special other times you ate in the kitchen i was wondering if the dining room is a lost do you have a dining room in your house we do have one do you have one we have a dining room that comes from the kitchen yeah so i don't know that i like the idea of a separate yeah i don't want a bright red dining room that's kind of like right now have a row about something i i like the sense of food and continuity otherwise you can also be like regulated to the kitchen you know and so everybody's becomes much more of a performance what did you have yeah we had in the kitchen there was a little table but friday nights it was around the dining room table it was the you know because that was the posh dinner and we also i remember as a kid the corona man and corona used to come around with bottles of fizzy drinks it was like a milk delivery and the corona man would do deliveries and you could have cherry aid or lemonade or soda water and i just loved the days when we could have some cherry aid because that seemed such an exotic thing where was this house well i grew up in london but i mean my parents were residential social workers so we lived in this huge commune kind of type place in the east end but where my mother grew up was in essex and we had the house there and we used to go there at weekends and the corona man would come to this house in east anglia and the colchester and uh deliver kind of off the back of the lorry these different bottles of corona fizzy drinks wow yeah i wonder if that still happens i bet it doesn't we have one of my grandsons had this great idea we when we were in a hotel in france he said i'd like to do like the cheese trolley but ride it around highbury and it's linkedin and just knock on people's and they can say i'll have a bit of camembert i'll have a bit of this every night it's sort of six o 'clock that was quite an entrepreneurial idea this is taking meals on wheels to a very very sophisticated level i tell you where i think there's a huge change i mean my both my parents have died now but you know so there was these silver tea sets which were seen i think in the 1950s must have looked so impressive and proper on the table that you who has a solid silver teapot or a solid silver for the hot water.

15:14And there's all of that sort of stuff and the kind of very formal cutlery. I think it's harder even than just that. The formality I kind of can't live with. And if you're not careful, you inherit rather big, heavy sort of service. I mean, nobody ever calls it a dinner service anymore. No, exactly. You just want plates that make you happy. My plates make me so happy. Right? And I don't think I want something. And the food looks good on. You know, I got mine from this amazing potter in France. And it's just bright, beautiful colours. And it just makes me happy to look at it. But I don't want anything that is like gold leaf or edging.

15:55I don't want to intimidate myself or guests. I'd be terrified if you break one. We did one with Nancy Pelosi. And guess what? She never has had a meal without a tablecloth. No. Yes, her father was the mayor of Baltimore. They had a huge family, but she said they always had a tablecloth. And I was just thinking about that, about the laundry, the ironing, all that goes into having a tablecloth. It is nice to have a tablecloth. Well, we had napkins growing up. But we just kind of throw things out. You know, which nobody, you know, we all had an actual napkin and a napkin ring. A ring? Yes, yes, with your initials or whatever.

16:30Mine was the little brown one. But guess what? In Italy, they like, in hotels where we used to go, You had the dirty napkin. They didn't wash them. I don't think we wash them every night, right? You put them back in the drawer. And then you'd have your ring. We did exactly the same. That's the point of the ring, right? It's like a hanky that you don't change every day. I mean, I sort of get that. My act of rebelliousness when I was a kid growing up, because I knew it would upset my mother, was to put a milk bottle on the table. Completely. Because you can't... Yes, milk's got to be served from a jug.

17:01Oh, goodness sake. Sorry. And even now, when I put a milk bottle on the table, I think you're breaking so many rules. And what about restaurants? So now in the River Cafe, we see kids all the time. We see kids at Friday night dinners or Saturday lunches or Sunday lunches. We see people bring their children. And when I was a kid, we went out for a special occasion. You know, we went out for the birthdays or the anniversaries, and we were told to look at the right-hand side of the menu. And I don't know, it's obviously a socioeconomic thing. What was going to restaurants like in your family when you were growing up, Emily?

17:37Yeah, much more, much more seldom, actually. We grew up in Sheffield and there was an amazing restaurant called Fishers, which is on the edge of Bakewell. And it's beautiful. Everything about it is exquisite. You know, just the sense of arrival and destination and beautiful herbs in the garden. And I remember that was like very, very special occasions. You had to basically be getting engaged, married or giving birth to go and celebrate at Fishers. But it did have that sense of absolute occasion. An occasion, yeah. And do you go out now with your kids to restaurants or is it also that way? Funnily enough, we don't go out that often to restaurants with my kids because we do a lot of sort of cooking and just eating at home when they're home.

18:24And I feel like when your kids don't live at home, they're actually really, it's almost turned around, I think, now that my kids have to fend for themselves. They live, you know, one lives at university, one's away. They'll be doing a lot of kind of like cheap and cheerful takeaways or food, whatever. And so actually the treat now is to come home and to have home cooked food. It's sort of turned around, I think. We used to go out for special occasions and there would be about three or four restaurants in London that, you know, my parents loved. Do you remember them? Well, one of them, actually, I now live around the corner too.

18:58I mean, it became my mother's favourite restaurant, which was a Greek restaurant in Primrose Hill. And I now... Oh, was it Leon? Lamonia. Yeah, Lamonia. And so, you know, we used to go there and meet my mother there. But they were kind of, they weren't terribly grand. You know, there was nothing overly flash about them. They were just good places where good food was served. And as Emily was saying, you know, the kind of food that we ate at home that was, you know, was much more continental and so my mother would love there was a delicatessen in slington that she used to love going to on liverpool road which kind of was full of it seemed so exotic there italian delicatessen yeah yeah so this is exactly what my dad would come down to london for work and we lived in sheffield and he would visit berwick street yeah berwick street was the first fresh ravioli and amazing yeah it was a delicatessen and he would bring them back to Sheffield and it was like this oh my god what's dad got from London now it's a really big deal because both of you have talked a lot about your mothers did either of your fathers cook fun enough my dad so my dad was a lot older my dad was born in 1910 so my dad was a lot lot older than my mum had grown up in the east end of London and had never really left the east end of London and his there were two favorite dishes that he cooked and I found both of them absolutely inedible.

20:21He would make porridge for breakfast, but he would put salt in it. He didn't sweeten it. It was just kind of salt. And I just thought, this is really hard work. And he used to cook egg and onions. So he would make scrambled eggs with spring onions. For breakfast? For breakfast, yeah. And I just thought, whoa. So that didn't really do it. So my father's, the reason I've spoken about my mother's cooking more, hers was more delicious. did your dad cook he was a real foodie he didn't cook a lot but actually looking back he was a chemist right so he was very obsessed with the science of getting food right yeah getting cooking right and so he'd be the one who'd say never put meat onto a grill unless it's hotter than you dare you know useful he'd be the one who'd say never put the spaghetti in until and it's massively salted, massively boiling, and you never break it.

21:16And so I sort of think back, I was like, I listened to him very seriously and I don't think I've ever broken his rules, you know, but it was more as a scientist probably than as a cook. So it stays with you. Yeah. Yeah, you know, like you did for Milo. I mean, for my mother when I was 16 and I was going off, you know, I went off camping. right you're going to learn to cook on one pot and you know I learned how to make ratatouille and I learned how to make spiglia bolognese and learned how to do stews and you know stuff like that. She taught you before you went. Yeah she taught me and when lockdown came and the gasoliness of Covid my wife had moved back from America because she's got a very elderly mother I was in DC by myself and suddenly the restaurants are shut I am cooking every night.

22:01It was great because I found that I could still do it. Yeah and did you? Yeah of course I mean I cooked right through lockdown. I didn't really mind it. I was still working at Newsnight. My week was very much divided because I was out on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. It's not getting back till midnight, you know, one o 'clock in the morning. And so actually the rest of the week felt like I sort of earned my lockdown and earned my, you know, time to cook.

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24:05Toyota, let's go places. Leaving home, you know, this home with the food and the dining room and your mothers and gathering around the table, what happened? Did you go to university straight from home? I took a gap year and so I sort of travelled. I went to the great picking harvest in the Beaujolais region and then I travelled around Europe and I spent some time on a kibbutz in Israel. What was food like in that year? Did you discover French food? I loved French food. I absolutely grew to love. And I thought France then was the most sophisticated kind of, wow, this food is just amazing. Actually, I spent four years in Paris as the Paris correspondent for the BBC.

24:46And I kind of thought, actually, it's very conservative, a lot of the cooking. And some of it is really quite pedestrian. Whatever restaurant you went to, you got a version of the same menu every time. I just thought, you know, and everyone would say, oh, my God, I bet you ate fantastically. There were more interesting restaurants in London than there were in Paris. Really? I mean, I resist. So this was around 2000, that's when we were there. And London was just fantastic new, you know, Peruvian food, Argentinian food. You know, it was from all over the world. And you'd go, you can only eat French cheese because no other cheese exists in the world.

25:22And you can only drink French wine because no other wine exists in the world. And that was just, it was a chauvinism, I think, that I found in France then, that they wouldn't acknowledge that there was other ways of doing things. Completely. Do you agree? Did you ever live in Paris or France? I've lived in France and I love it as a sort of this is what we do and this is the way you do it. But God forbid you if you break any rules, actually. And I think Italy's the same. You know, a friend of mine who was the Rome correspondent was saying, you know, if you try and open a sort of Thai restaurant or a sort of different culture, there's actually quite a lot of pushback because it's not how, you know.

25:59So, c 'est un bien, c 'est pas how we do things here, you know. And so I think maybe because we were behind on our own cuisine, I do think Britain has been much more accepting and really good at accepting other cultures and other fusions and just a bit more adventurous, actually. I don't know anyone who says, I will not try, you know, that nationality's food. I will not eat that. Did you go straight to university? I went to university and then went off to Hong Kong and that just completely opened my mind to Southeast Asian food in a very different way. And I would say now, you know, anything that's got sort of prawns and lime and chilli.

26:44Lemongrass. Lemongrass, all that. I just love. I love Vietnamese flavours. I love coriander. I love mint. I love handfuls of herbs as almost salads. I am absolutely obsessed with herbs. Are you? I'm obsessed with her. You grow them. I grow so many. I've got a jungle. So yeah, it was a great time for me on Sunday nights on the beach in Sheko in Hong Kong. I say that when you go to a city and you go straight to the market, it tells you a lot about the city you're in, the culture you're in, whether there's a lot of greens, whether people are shouting, whether it's full, what's in season, don't you think?

27:20The journalistic lives that we've been lucky to lead have taken us all over the world. and so you suddenly immersed in afghanistan or somewhere like that tells you a lot oh yeah and and you and you have no option but to eat what the kind of international food happens to be and that that's just been joyous we were in bulgaria last year funnily enough and i was just took my son there for you know three days little break our little kind of rented place was right next to the market and i was i mean i sound sort of like shocking but i was so surprised by just how magnificent the sort of produce was and the fruit and the vegetable.