From the Archive: Emily Blunt

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1:00at washablesofas.com. Authors are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. You are listening to Ruthie's Table 4, in partnership with Montclair. This is River Cafe Table 4. With me, Ruthie Rogers.

1:19On River Cafe Table 4, I talk to friends who know the River Cafe well about food, the food they cook, the food they eat, the food of their memories.

1:33Penne with zucchini and lemon zest Serve six This week I have wonderful, beautiful, brilliant A few adjectives, Emily Blunt One kilo medium zucchini, yellow, green or ridged In each episode, my guest reads a recipe they have chosen from one of our cookbooks 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 250 grams unsalted butter 1 garlic clove peeled and thinly sliced 350 grams penne 1 bunch of fresh mint leaves roughly torn 2 lemons, preferably amalfi Wash and trim the zucchini and cut into small pieces and in a large saucepan heat the olive oil with 100 grams of the butter. Add the zucchini and stir. Season well adding the garlic.

2:37Cook gently stirring from time to time for 20 minutes. Bring a pot of salted water to the boil. Add the penne to the water and cook 10 minutes or until al dente. Drain and add the zucchini. Add the remaining butter and the mint leaves, mix thoroughly, great lemon zest on top. Thank you, Emily. Beautiful. Here we are in the River Cafe, late afternoon, looking at the restaurant, getting ready, actually, for the evening service. Can't wait. I was so happy that you chose this recipe because it is one of my favorites. Actually, I say that most times, that the recipe is my favorite, but this one is.

3:20and I was wondering why this recipe? Do you cook it? Honestly, it just has three of my favorite things in it. So any, I just wanted to pick one of your pasta dishes because it is my ultimate favorite thing and what I crave most. And did you grow up eating pasta? Yeah. The food of your childhood? But it was more like spaghetti, you know. Who cooked in your house? My mum. My mum did it. Tell me about her cooking. Well, God bless her. She had four kids and I'm sure we were all wanting different things and she just had so many kids and so little time that very often she'd be like, you know, you get what you get and you don't get upset.

3:53But I do have this lasting memory of her spaghetti bolognese and then always wanting just pasta with butter and cheese as well. So she would always let us have the pasta with the butter and cheese if we had the bolognese first. And I find myself doing it to my kids. I will bribe them. They've got to have the sauce pasta and then they can have just the butter and cheese. Butter and cheese. Butter and cheese. It's so true. That's it. When kids come to the River Cafe for lunch, families, you know, two pasta butter and cheese but in fact it is really delicious it's actually delicious no i have to be careful not to shovel it into my mouth as i'm serving it to them they love lasagna they love i mean i've always made them all kinds of pasta sauces and i'll sneak all kinds of things in there and try and get it past them my oldest one will try most things steak chicken neither of them want the fish apart from sushi i love sushi it's funny about yeah Yeah, my stepson said I didn't eat fish until he was about 30, I think.

4:48It's so weird. I don't know why. Maybe the way they look or maybe the bones. Maybe the way they look. To be honest, I think it is more the way they look. They kind of envision what they look at. And it kind of grosses them out. Yeah. We were once in Greece. He was about four. And he was fishing. He'd stand there all day. We made this little fishing rod in the harbor. And in the end, Richard, my husband, actually went to the market and bought a fish. and we all dove down and put the fish on the hook. And then I think he never ate a fish again for a long time. We had a fishing experience in Martha's Vineyard where we like to go every summer because John's from Boston and his whole family is sort of around there.

5:24And it's a magical place, Martha's Vineyard. It's beautiful. Absolutely love it. So bizarre and bohemian, special. But we took the kids fishing and Hazel pulled in a fish and it flopped around on the deck and she screamed. Never recovered. She was like, it's bleeding! Like, it was awful. It's very real. So do they cook with you? Do they come in the kitchen? They do. I make this chicken noodle soup that they really love. How do you make that? Well, I actually use ginger in it, and it has this kind of richness to it. Either I'll use leftover roast chicken or I'll sort of sear some chicken thighs.

5:59I usually like using chicken thighs, boneless skinless. They're like a dream, aren't they? You can kind of put them in anything. And it's got carrots and celery and onions and beautiful chicken stock wine and those egg noodles and they just love it. I always say you should always have chicken soup around. I always have a pot of chicken soup because there is something so sustaining about it. Yeah, it's very humorous. It was one of the first things I made for John, I think. Did you? You fell in love with your chicken soup. I think it's always interesting, the food we cook for an occasion. I was going to once do a book called What to Cook When.

6:31When you're depressed, when you're broke, when you want to seduce somebody, when you have somebody important coming to dinner. Did you think about that when you were cooking for him? Well, it's funny. I guess I just made something that I knew he would love. Like, I mean, a roast chicken. Who doesn't love roast chicken? And the roast chicken I love is Ina Garten's roast chicken. It's called her engagement chicken because I think when people make it for people, they get engaged or something. Lemon, garlic, onions up the chicken, thyme, salt and pepper, all that. And you scatter onions around the chicken, but you pack them in really tight into the tray and then you roast them really high about an hour and 20 minutes and they're done and they're perfect.

7:11And then when you take the chickens out you then kind of saute in some wine and some butter and into that oniony, garlicky mixture. Oh my God, it's divine. It's really sticky and yummy. And then they fell in love. That's it. That's it. That's all it took. Easy. But were you growing up, tell me more about your mother. Did your mother work? She had four kids, and so her cooking was... So she was an actress when Fee and I were very little, and then she just had too many kids. She had two more after me and Fee, and then I think, you know, really felt she needed to be home with us. I don't know if she loved cooking, because it was more of a chore for her, with kids being like, I don't like risotto.

7:51I don't, you know, I think it's probably a bit joyless at times. Did she teach you how to do her recipes? She did, but she sort of is a bit of a... Just bung it all in. You know, she doesn't really... So was it very British? Yeah, very British in general. And then definitely every Sunday was the religion of the Sunday roast. What was that? As an American, I'm really intrigued by that whole British Sunday lunch. Well, it's like Christmas dinner or Thanksgiving every Sunday. Every Sunday we would either have roast beef, roast lamb, roast chicken or roast pork. It was one of those. Always a roast.

8:23Always a roast. And then we would have roast potatoes. With the beef you'd have Yorkshire puddings. We'd have everything. We'd have the bread sauce. we'd have vegetables, we'd have gravy. I mean, I just have this lasting memory of my dad's plate just like swimming in gravy, swimming in it. Emily talked about Sunday roasts when she was a child. So when we're roasting meat here, we like to sear the meat and get a good colour on all sides. And then often we'll put it into the wood oven and get a dry heat into it to start the cooking process. and then maybe after 10 or 15 minutes we'd go in with hard herbs whether it's rosemary, sage, bay and if it wants a splash of wine or water now this is the same whether we're making slow roasted veal, spatchcock chickens, pot roasted beef fillet.

9:17This is the way that we like to do it.

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11:24So when you were growing up with this really important food tradition in your house of sitting down to dinner that your mother cooked, what age did you kind of leave? Did you go to university here and stay home or did you go abroad? So I am the only person in my family who didn't go to university because when I was about 17, I did this play with my school and an agent came to see the play and he said, I think you're really good. You should do this. And I really had a cavalier attitude towards it because I was like, oh, OK, I wasn't really thinking about being an actress. I was sort of wanting to go to university and do languages like I always loved Spanish and French.

12:02And my mom's an amazing linguist. Yeah, brilliant. Brilliant. She speaks like three languages. and so I was sort of inspired by that and wanted to do that and then he said well why don't you give it a go and I'd also seen from my mother how tough the industry was you know I didn't have a rose-tinted gaze towards it I'd seen how damaging it can be it's so personal you know so I was like okay well I'll give it a go but I don't really know if I want to do it I can't believe I was talking like that now because I truly am madly in love with it but anyway I tried it I auditioned I got my first job when I was 18, once I was out of school, which was a play with Dame Judi Dench.

12:43And she was just divine to me. And Sir Peter Hall directed it. I mean, it was just mad. I was just such a lucky. What was the play? The Royal Family. It's like 1920s. Yeah, yeah. It's based on the Barrymores. They're fictional families called, the Cavendishers. And yeah, so quite soon after that, around 18, 19, I got my own place. In London? And then just, yeah, I got my own place in Parsons Green. Yeah. And I was so green. I mean, I just like went and looked at it and I just liked the look of the colors on the walls. So I just went with it and my mom came over and she was like, is there any heating in here?

13:15And I realized there was no central heating in the apartment. And I was like, oh, I just got it because the walls were really cool. I think that's a good criteria. It was a happy place. It just was freezing. And that's very young, 18. Yeah, it was young. And then did you cook at all? Did you still want to eat and cook? Yeah. I mean I do remember before I did the play I mean you're going to be horrified to hear this because I haven't had one since I used to go every night to Burger King and get a double cheeseburger before I went on stage I don't know how I went on stage for two hours after that I was going to ask you because it is intriguing we all think about how we work and how we eat and when we eat and when we work and how we sort of fit all that in and so if you are in the theatre or you were in the theatre would you still do that now that you would eat before going on stage?

14:04I think I would. Like, I'm someone who needs to eat all day. I'm not someone who can have three meals a day. I feel like I'm usually hungry most of the time. And so I tried to do sort of four to five smaller meals throughout the day. But, yeah, I couldn't eat a double cheeseburger with fries now and not want to go and have a nap. Yeah, but you would eat. At the time, I was 18, so I was like, oh, it's fine. So I would get to the theater around, I don't know, I guess we would go on at 7.30, so I would eat at, like, 6.15. and just disgusting every night. Just eat, yeah. Every night I was obsessed with it.

14:36It was my favorite thing. I'd get the tube in, Piccadilly Circus, I'd go to Burger King, I'd go straight to the theater. I probably stank of burgers. Did Judi Dench notice that you were smelling of a Burger King hamburger? You know, she was so lovely to be in. Like every night after the show, she would bring me into her dressing room and there'd be so many like famous people in there. And I was like, wow, like I was a kid. I mean, it was amazing. and Peter Bowles was in it. Do you know him? Yeah, of course. I remember him. And he took me to the Ivy for the first time. Okay, yeah. Yeah. Do you remember that?

15:08I do. I remember it. I mean, I'd never been to a restaurant like that before. It was mad. Yeah. Did you go to restaurants with your parents? Oh, we did. I remember on a Friday night, we would go for a Chinese. It was this great little place in Roehampton and crispy duck pancakes. And so I remember just being obsessed with that kind of thing growing up. But I feel it's a more common thing for people to take their kids out to cafes and restaurants now. Yeah, and I think that, you know, as you say, it can be the penne butter and cheese, but sometimes, you know, I was once amazed we had an eight-year-old who ordered a grouse.

15:39No. They were Italian, but... Oh, see, that's incredible. That's incredible, because I know even for Stanley and Fee, like Stanley, who is, you know, Mr. Food, even his little kids, like, they have about five things that they really love, you know, and he's like, come on, you know. Like, I made a lasagna for my kids yesterday, and Hazel loves it and everything but Violet my little one who's four she was really like no I just want the plain lasagna I just want blanket pasta she calls it but I said come on you got to try it and then I'll give you the blanket pasta and then she looks at it she goes it looks like a cake I said there you go and then she loved it yeah what about when you leave them and you go to do a film well normally they're with me when I work but it's hard during school time and now they're both in school like when they were little I could kind of drag them around anywhere but now they kind of have to be a bit more stable.

16:30So they're going to stay in London at school. And I'm doing this six-part Western, which I'm completely thrilled by. It's a heart-racing piece. It's sort of as violent as it is witty. It's brill. And it's written by Hugo Blick. And it was brought to me about two years ago. We got delayed because of COVID. But I truly read the first page, and I was like, I'm going to be doing this. What was it about the first page? It's so dynamic and arresting and beautiful. You just know the writing. It's all about the writing for me now. I'm just realising you just cannot make a good movie out of a bad script.

17:05And there's conflict and intrigue and something different I'm in. Are there other women? There's a couple of other really cool female parts. There's a lot of boys. But it's partly because she is presented as this aristocratic woman as a real fish out of water in this rather brutal masculine world in 1890. Do you eat on the film set? They do good food or is it? It depends where you are. I've been someplace where it's not very good. But we're in Spain, so maybe it'll be great. They might, yeah, they might do that. Sometimes I just try and make my own thing and I'll bring my crock pot and whip something up during the day so I've got something waiting for me when I get home.

17:40But I think when I'm working, I don't tend to eat sort of pasta and bread because it just makes me so sluggish. So I'm obsessed with rice. Rice is one of my favorite things on planet Earth. and a risotto. Yeah, what do you love about rice? I love the taste of it. I love that you can put anything with it. I love all kinds of rice. I love that you can soak it in stuff. Like I have this miso-soaked black rice that this chef I know does for me. I understand that Emily loves rice. So here at the restaurant, we use two different risotto rices. One is carnaroli. The other is violona nano rice. The carnaroli we generally use with chicken stock and this can go with a variety of things, mushrooms, artichokes, greens, and then the smaller, fatter grain, which is the violano nano rice, we use with fish stocks.

18:37When I interviewed Michael Caine, he said that he'd never done a deal for a movie that was in any place other than a restaurant. Everything that was decided was decided. In his day, you went to the Ivy or to... Like with your agent? With your agent or with the producer, somebody's trying to convince you to be in a movie and it was done. And I always think it's interesting how people going back to restaurants, how people use restaurants. So some people use it to, you know, announce that they want a divorce or they want to fire someone. You can do a very private thing in a public space. Do you know, I do see what you're saying about that people do use restaurants.

19:14I think for me in Hollywood, like everyone meets in restaurants. Like I've met cast members for the first time in a restaurant. I've met producers, directors. That's normally how I've met people. It's only recently sort of over Zoom or a phone call. It's very new to me because I do need to sit with someone and get a sense of them, get a sense of the vibe and whether our energy is going to be good, whether it's going to be copacetic and a cool experience. And I'm always interested what people eat and what they order and what they drink, like if they'll have a glass of wine, if they won't. So if it's an evening sit-down, I'll definitely have a drink, if it's someone I've never met before.

19:53Because it's a bit nerve-wracking as well. But a restaurant, it is that safe, atmospheric, buzzy place where if there's a lull in conversation, it doesn't matter. There's always stuff around you that you can feed off. There was somebody I was talking to that said he absolutely did not like going into a quiet restaurant. No. That you need that safety. And I think that's why people do things. It might be like firing somebody or breaking up because you can't throw a frying pan at somebody in the middle of their sentence. You know, really, there is a kind of behavior. But then also I think that a lot of people do go for a first date in a restaurant because it does tell you something, doesn't it?

20:31They do. How the person eats, how they treat the waiter, whether they say thank you when they put something down. It's very true. It's very true. And I'm always aware of how people are with, because I feel sometimes everyone's nice to me. But I always watch how people are with the PAs on set. and how are you with people working in a restaurant? Like, I want to get a real sense of who people are, is how they are with everybody. Did you ever work in a restaurant? No, but I did work in a catering company. Did you? This amazing friend of my mother's, gorgeous catering company that she does, and she would hire Fee and I to be her waitresses.

21:03Oh, really? Yeah, it was fun, actually, because the food was so good, and she'd feed us, like, extraordinary food, and I have this lasting memory of a quail-legged canapé with hollandaise over it, and on this little crusty crostini, Fee and I used to just steal them. We used to like pop them like pills. I mean, we loved them. But I have that memory of the quail egg. It is interesting. You know, just this conversation is about memory. You know, you might not remember so many things about that experience, but the quail's egg comes right back. I do remember turning up one time and I was wearing these really ugly sandals and I had a chipped blue nail polish.

21:40I was like 16. And she thought I looked so unpresentable. I had to wash dishes all night. she was like the best place for you dear is i was like oh dear and what about the politics of food you think about sustainability or about giving your kids organic food or farms martha's vineyard has so many good farms gorgeous farms they have the most beautiful produce and eggs and cheese and in brooklyn it's harder i find the produce is so much better in the uk better here yes it's so real like the carrots are all wonky they taste right like the strawberries the berries everything is just doesn't taste manufactured and I think sometimes it's not the same being in the UK has been a bit of a wake-up call for me of how much better I feel the produce is here and I think again I think that seems to be something that we're all thinking about our kids aren't we definitely I think and I think that generation is really interested especially as they get older what they're eating.

22:40Yes. I mean, when I have dinner, when my grandchildren are older, one's a vegan, one's a vegetarian, one's gluten-free. It's like, you know, I think the politics of food are consistent with the politics of everything. Yes. Do you feel at the restaurant you have to adapt for people in that way? We're really lucky to be Italian because we are so focused on vegetables. Yes, yes. So a vegan can't have the egg, you know, taggatelli, but they can have a spaghetti with peas. Yes, yes. We do something called farinata. Have you ever had that? So good. You know, the chickpea flour. Yes, yes. And so they don't have to have gluten.

23:12And, you know, you can have a whole meal. And I get so excited to look at your menu and just see what's changed. And it changes all the time. It's just so exciting. So if you were thinking about comfort, do you have a comfort food that you would go to? You know. So this could be anything. It can be something that you reach for when you're feeling back to what to eat when, what to cook when. All right, I'll do two things. When you are and need comfort. Yeah. Like for me, one of my favorite things is a toasted bagel with tons of butter and marmite. Oh. It's my favorite thing. That's really combining two cultures.

23:46Oh, heaven. But I will say the other thing, if I were to, because it's pasta that I crave, is a caucho with pepe. Yeah.

24:04It's so simple and it's just one of my favorite things. And the first time I had it was in Rome. And I was shooting a TV series in Rome that was not a very good TV series. I don't think anyone's seen it. And I was living alone in Rome and I was like 20 years old, lived there for three months.