From the Archive: Mel Brooks

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1:12Mel Brooks makes the world laugh. Watch the producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein. Listen to the 2 ,000-year-old man, or read his autobiography, All About Me, and you are guaranteed to find yourself laughing out loud until it hurts. But for me, having known Mel for 25 years, funny is not the first word I would use to describe this amazing man. Hungry. Hungry. Fiercely proud. When I see you, I get hungry. Do you think that's your adjective? You get hungry when you see me. Yeah, when I see you, I get very hungry. Oh, I get hungry when I see you. And I miss the River Cafe so much. Well, we love you there.

1:51Fiercely proud of his children and his grandchildren, the first one to pick up a phone to a friend in trouble. refusing an award in opposition to the Iraq war and waiting to accept it from President Obama. Vulnerable after the loss of people he loved. To Mel, food and wine are crucial. Many of his life's happenings have occurred in restaurants. And as for wine, he will tell you himself. Spill it all over the table. Will you just take this seriously? I'm trying to take this seriously. Today it is home. We are together. Lucky me. We're going to talk about wine and family and friends. And be prepared to laugh because Mel Brooks is funny.

2:37So that was a serious introduction.

2:44I want to tell you that before we stop talking, before I forget, I would like to do my imitation of a cat. Because not a lot of people know that I do, I make the best cat sound in the world. Ready? All right. Just give me one second. I just need one second to really get myself into this cat. Okay, here's Mel Brooks doing the sound of a cat. Wow! That is a perfect sound. It's hard to do. Hard to do. I do it in Young Frankenstein. I think it's a dart-throwing contest, and one of the darts hits a cat and you hear, you know. Did you do the sound? I did. You get there every night and do the sound. I always do the sound, yeah.

3:30Can you do it again? That's good. So what's a technique? Technique is to squash some air between your cheek and the front of your mouth.

3:46As we're talking about cats and fish, maybe, you can think about fish. You know, cats like to eat fish. We could actually read the recipe. Oh, yeah. My favorite of all the things in the book, there's a good picture of it, too, in your cookbook. Yeah. River Cafe London. 30, because that was done for our 30th birthday. 30. 30 years. Wow. Do you remember you came to the party? I did. Oh, that was a great party. You and Richard sat there the whole night in the restaurant, and everybody just came to your table. Everyone. Everybody wanted to see you. It wasn't as important as the food on my plate, believe me.

4:26It's a lot of food. I paid attention to it. All the eats are supreme. Let me read the recipe. Do you want to read the recipe? Okay, we've got it there. Dover sole with marjoram. I don't know what marjoram is, but I love it. Okay. Whatever it is. Whatever it is. One bunch of fresh marjoram leaves. one whole Dover sole weighing 12 to 14 ounces 350 to 400 grams scaled and cleaned of course, of course I'm not going to eat it with the scales on and with the stuff inside no sir one lemon cut in half I have lemons Meyer lemons from my Meyer lemon tree just outside here and they are golden yellow and running with lemon juice that is superior to anything in the world so if i have a dover soul i'll bring my lemons okay well we get our lemons from amalfi so they're pretty good too okay here we go preheat the oven to 450 degrees fahrenheit that's pretty hot that's pretty hot Brush a large, flat baking sheet with extra virgin olive oil.

5:43Scatter half the marjoram leaves over the sheet, along with some sea salt and black pepper. Place the fish on top. Season with sea salt and black pepper. Then scatter the remaining marjoram. Drizzle generously with olive oil. Okay, that sounds great. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes. Test with the point of a sharp knife. Insert it into the center with the thickest part of the soul. Ah! If cooked, the flesh should come away from the bone. Okay. Squeeze the lemon, either from Amalfi or from Mel Brooks' Lemon Tree, over the fish and serve with any juices from the pan that are left. I like that. Let's begin at the beginning.

6:34Begin at the beginning. Earliest food memories. What do you remember from, you know, your early days? Did your mother cook? Yeah, my mother, okay. It was a standard Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Jewish tenement food. So breakfast in the winter was always a hot cereal, cream of wheat or Ralston, which was a kind of brown porridge. And then in the summer, Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies, or Wheaties. What year would that have been? How old would you have been? That would be 35. I'd be around nine. That's when I went. My Uncle Joe, shortest Jew on earth. How short? How short? He was a kid. He was about 4 '4".

7:21Okay. When a taxi, a big checkered taxi cab rolled down the streets of Brooklyn and there was no driver. that was Joe there was no driver he was so short he could just about peer over the you know anyway Joe took me because his friend Al was the doorman of the Alvin Theater on 52nd Street and running at that same theater was Cole Porter's Anything Goes I had never seen a Broadway show I was nine years old and Uncle Joe took me to see Anything Goes I was stunned I couldn't believe it even though we were in the second balcony as far away from the stage as you can get Ethel Merman was too loud no mics she was in Anything Goes?

8:15Anything Goes did she play the mother it's on a ship isn't it? it's on a ship very good and Victor Moore was the gangster Oh, the gang, yeah. It was so good. At the end, I nearly clapped my hands over. I just couldn't stop clapping and screaming and shouting. And then I got back in Uncle Joe's cab. I said to him, Uncle Joe, I'm not going in the garment center. Everybody at 365 South 3rd Street between on Hooper and Hughes, 365 South 3rd Street. Everybody in that building worked in the garment center. There were shipping clerks. There were cutters. There were designers. There were salesmen. Everybody, I think, on the street, 361, 363, 365, these tenements, everybody was in the garment center.

9:12And I screamed at my Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe, I'm not going into the garment center. I'm not. I'm going to go into show business. I loved it. And it changed what it did. And I did. And he did. And did he take you to food? Would he take you out to eat? Yeah, you know, once in a while. I always went to the theater as a kid, and then there was the meal afterwards or the lunch before it was a day out. Well, we had some favorites that Uncle Joe would take us to. Where? One was called Gallagher's Steakhouse. They had like half a cow in the window. They always had these half cows in the window. Just the raw meat.

9:52Raw meat. Yeah, hanging. Hanging Gallagher's. Yeah. And the steak was incredible. And sometimes you'd go to Jack Dempsey's restaurant. And what was that? And it was great, but, you know, it was all meat. There was never any fish in a restaurant. Yeah. And I never liked fish. I don't think I ever liked fish until I was 70 or 80 and I went to the River Cafe and had to eat myself. So really, you never ate fish? I hardly ever ate fish as a kid. But it's interesting to me that you describe a kind of modest, home life in terms of food. But you went out to restaurants. Yeah, once in a while. How did they afford restaurants?

10:31Was that a treat? A lot of Jewish restaurants were called dairy restaurants. And they served stuff like blintzes with sour cream and all dairy. You never mixed meat and dairy with some religious nonsense. Did your grandmother cook for you? My grandmother cooked. What did she cook? Which grandmother? Your mother's mother or your father? My mother's mother. I never knew my mother. You never knew your father's grandmother? No, no. My father's grandmother, I did know. She did Seder meals, Passover meals, in Bensonhurst, where they lived in a big one-family house. Did they come, were they first generation?

11:04Yeah, no, they were European. Yeah, born in Europe. Born in Europe. And so do you think your grandparents brought their food with them, the food of their culture? They all cooked the same stuff. What was it, Mel? Mostly it was chicken, chicken and chicken soup. and... Brisket? Yeah, they made brisket. Absolutely. They made brisket and brown potatoes. Do you know my grandparents came... They came from Hungary and Russia. And my father remembers my grandmother having in the Lower East Side a carp swimming in the bathtub that they would make a filter fish out of. So can you imagine having a... They would bring a live fish.

11:45Live fish. My mother would get a live fish. Oh, my gosh. My brother Bernie and I would usually, one, we loved and we called him Artie. And we fed him breadcrumbs and we chased him around the best of them. And then it was unspeakable. I can't even describe it. What killing of the first? My oldest brothers, Irving and Lenny, held us back. We were screaming, don't kill him. And my mother would say, we've got to eat. We've got to eat supper. And she'd kill Artie and serve him to us. and we would cry. But we ate them. And then would you get another carp and kill that carp? We got another carp. It's so interesting that they had live fish swimming in the bathtub.

12:26In the bathtub, it's true. It's amazing that you had the same. Yeah, my brother Michael, who you know, just found something my father had written about his memories of food and just living in the Lower East Side. But you weren't in the Lower East Side. No, no, we weren't. The Lower East Side, an extension of the Lower East Side was Williamsburg. That was probably one step up, was it? Well, it was one step up if you put it next to a section of Brooklyn called Bronzeville. What was Bronzeville? East New York. And that was really where they had coal stoves. They didn't even have gas. We had electricity and we had gas, so we were one step up above Bronzeville, equal to the Lower East Side.

13:10Yeah, interesting. And let me tell you, my mother used to make, every once in a while on a Sunday night, she would make spaghetti. She would buy a box of Mueller's noodles. They were flat. Flat noodles. And she'd cook them until they were dead. They'd be really soft. Oh, yeah, they were really soft. And then she'd put them in a baking pan, and she would empty a bottle of Heinz ketchup over them. This is spaghetti. And then she'd bake it for 30 or 40 minutes until the pan was dead, until everything was dead. And then she'd cut them into squares and served it to us, and she said, spaghetti. And I was from 8 years old to about 13 or 14, that was spaghetti, and it was okay.

14:01Yeah, it was okay? It was really okay. It was really okay. Then I had joined a club called the Balsa Bugs. We made model airplanes. I think we enjoyed smelling the glue more than we liked making the planes. But we made, so one of the Balsa Bugs, it was Bernie Steinberg, it was Flappy Rothman, and it was Tony Galliani. An Italian. An Italian. And Tony said, I'm going home, it was Sunday, and he said, I'm going home to have spaghetti. I said, we have spaghetti on Sunday. too. He said, well, try, you know, come on and have a bar of spaghetti. So I went home. I walked into his apartment, which was in Greenpoint, a little on the edge of Williamsburg.

14:49As I walked in, I was assaulted by these incredible smells, just the aromas of garlic. I mean, it was just incredible. Then I sat down. They served this warm, squiggly spaghetti, real spaghetti, squiggly, but not dead. Yeah. Al dente. Was it sort of al dente? It still fought back a little bit in your mouth, fought back. And sauce, this red, thick red, beautiful sauce with meatballs balls in it and sprinkled on top of it was this white stuff, snow. I think it was parmesan cheese. And I took one bite and I started to cry. Did you cry? I wept. I wept. And I said, Tony, this is spaghetti. Wow. This is spaghetti.

15:45How old were you? I was about 14. And I just wept and I went and when I came home I said, Mom, you're not making spaghetti. I don't know what that stuff is, that cardboard, but it's not spaghetti. You were starting to tell me about her mother's food. What was her mother's food like when you went to your grandmother's? When we went to the Seder was, I don't know, they made little dishes before to celebrate the Jews' freedom from slavery in Egypt. And they had something with apples and stuff that was supposed to mimic the mortar that the Jews carried up to make sure these big stones stayed together.

16:26And then some salt for the heart, for the suffering, for the tears. And it was a lot of those little things. And then she served this thing called gefilte fish with red horseradish. Horseradish, yeah. They called it crane, crane or crane. And it was just thrilling. I loved it. So you loved food. Food was important to you at a very early age. Well, when I tasted food, my mother wasn't making food. She was making something at Passover food. So do you think your mother was not? No. And the first time I had Chinese food. Where was that? In Williamsburg. At a restaurant. We never went to it. My mother said, we're going to go to a Chinese restaurant tonight.

17:09And each meal, the whole meal menu, 25 cents. 25 cents. In the Chinese restaurant. In the Chinese restaurant. and you got egg drop soup first. Then you got chow mein, always chow mein. And then you got a yellow ball with little pieces of ice in it, a round ball. That was the ice cream dessert. And then some fortune cookies with paper in it. I ate the paper. I ate everything. Everything was sweet.

17:52The River Cafe Cafe, our all-day space and just steps away from the restaurant, is now open. In the morning, an Italian breakfast with cornetti, ciambela, and crostata from our pastry kitchen. In the afternoon, ice cream coupes and River Cafe classic desserts. We have sharing plates, salumi misti, mozzarella, bruschetta, red and yellow peppers, vitello, tonado, and more. Come in the evening for cocktails with our resident pianist in the bar. No need to book. See you here.

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19:33Malcolm Gladwell here. I recently recorded the first episode of Smart Talks with IBM, where I learned how AI agents are joining AI assistants as a major productivity tool. Let's start with AI agents. AI agents can reason, plan, and collaborate with other AI tools to autonomously perform tasks for a user. Brian Bissell, an expert from IBM, gave me an example of how a college freshman might use an AI agent. As a new student, you may not know, how do I deal with my health and wellness issue? How many credits am I going to get for this given class? You could talk to someone and find out some of that, but maybe it's a little bit sensitive and you don't want to do that.

20:14Bissell told me, you could build an AI agent, a resource for new students that helps them navigate a new campus, register for classes, access the services they need, and even schedule appointments on their behalf, which in turn buys them more time to focus on their actual schoolwork. We can see patterns of how agents and assistants can help employees and customers and end users be more productive, automate workflows so they're not doing certain types of repetitive work over and over again, and streamlining their lives and making data more accessible to them 24 hours a day. To learn more about IBM's AI agents and how they can help your business, visit ibm.com slash agents.

21:02One of the most delicious things was very simple. We lived five stories up in this tenement, and I wasn't going to come up. They will get that. I was not going to come up for lunch. I was not. Why? Because it was five stories, and I didn't want to leave the game. Right. So we took a break in the game, and we all had lunch. They all brought bags and stuff with them, sat on the curb, my friends. and my mother would throw down in a brown paper bag a Kaiser roll smeared with a lot of butter, fresh butter, and almost a whole tomato, sliced and salted. And it was the most delicious thing. And you'd catch it.

21:51And I'd always catch it, but one time I missed it. I was going to say, five stories up is quite high. Five stories, but one time I missed it and splat. Splat. You heard the sound. And the bag was crammed with wet... So I very carefully peeled what used to be the bag away from the sandwich. And I began eating the sandwich, and I once again cried. It was so great. It was the closest thing to pizza. When did you have your first pizza? Oh, I had my first pizza when I was 16 or 17. Yeah. So as a teenager, you lived at home. And then when did you leave, when you left home, did you cook for yourself?

22:32Well, I didn't leave home. Oh, okay. I was sent to Virginia Military Institute. The Army, there was a guy that came to my high school. We were going to graduate. We were 17, we were going to be 18 and graduated from Eastern District High School. our claim to fame was a red hour back was a great incredible basketball coach and world famous and he he was on the team and he was a genius anyway i left because the guy said if you can pass a test you'll be in the army specialized training reserved program and it would stand you in good stead because later when you were drafted or taken into the regular army, you already had some background in military and you could maybe choose your branch of service.

23:35Great, okay, so I took the test, and the test was not hard. It was how much is two and two? I said, well, if you put them next to each other, you got 22. But it was easy, and they wanted you. So when I was 17, they sent me to VMI, Virginia Military Institute, the West Point of the South. Wow, yeah. And I'd go to restaurants in Lexington, Virginia, and when the waitress would take your order, she'd always answer back one thing. She'd say, you want grits with that? And we'd say, what? She said, do you want grits with that? We said, no. Grits are made with corn. You want grits with that? You want grits with that?

24:16He just couldn't understand it. Yeah, couldn't understand it. Later I had some grits. It wasn't so bad. Not so bad. Not so bad. It's kind of like polenta in a sort of funny way. Yeah, it's kind of like polenta. What was it like, the food in the military? Was that a harsh awakening? Yeah. I can be very honest with you and say some words that are off color. Yeah, this is a podcast. We can do it. Okay, it's a podcast. We can do it. I remember the only thing, the Army had a, I went into the mess hall at Fort Dix. And I was shocked by what I saw. On a great big griddle, maybe 12 feet by 12 feet, it was just enormous, I saw a thousand eggs sunny side up.

25:03And you'd pick, you'd say, give me two, give me three, give me four, and then that was eggs, and then there was like a trash barrel, or a clean one, of course, that had oatmeal in it. And then there was just that kind of, you know. So it wasn't so bad. Were you homesick? I was homesick. You can be so homesick. How old were you? Oh, well, I was nearly old enough to be in the regular Army, so I was 17 and a half. That's young, to take you out of Brooklyn, to take you out of your home, put you in a place. That was a strange place. But anyway, we were all together, and we held on to each other. Did you take anything away from that experience?

25:45Yeah, I did. They were unusually nice to us, these cadets, these southern cadets. And they taught us never to lie. Honor is the best thing. That stayed with you. That stayed with me. I hardly ever lie except in show business you're forced to lie. Say something to tell somebody their work is good. Do you do that? You always tell somebody. Allie, you look so great today. I said, a friend of mine once interviewed Isaiah Berlin, you know, the philosopher. Oh, yeah. He said, when you admire somebody's work, do you just say, I loved your work? And they said, no, no, no, that's for the work you didn't think so much of.

26:23If you really loved their work, I died. You know, I was on the floor. How do you give praise? That's so true. I love your work is for the people whose work you didn't like. You know, you say, that's fine. Yeah. But then what happened after the... Anyway, I went to the real army, and there I saw 1 ,000 eggs, sunny side. Oh, that was in the real army. In the real army, yeah. That was Fort Dix, New Jersey. What year would that have been, Mel? I'll tell you exactly. June 1944. I was transferred from VMI to Fort Dix. I was in the regular army. And then there was a thing on the table. It was a big round bowl with stuff in it.

27:09And it was not at the table. It was like where the cooks were, you know. And they had big spoons and they could slop it. They put it on some toast and, you know. And I never took a chance. But once I said, you know, I said, the guys next to me ate it. So I took a chance and I got it. And I said to them, what is that? What is this we're eating? And they said, shit on a shingle. I said, what? Shit on a shingle? It turned out to be creamed beef on toast. And it wasn't so bad. But the Army, you know. Did they send you abroad? Did you go to Europe? Yeah, eventually. But let me tell you, at breakfast, at all meals in the Army, there was no short-cutting.

27:57You got into a lot of trouble. If someone said, pass the butter or pass the jam or pass the whatever, you passed it. If you stopped and took some of it and put it on your plate, that was short-cutting, and you had to leave the table. In the middle of your meal, that's it. You're through. So you pass, and then you wait for somebody to pass it to you. You waited, you waited. I guess that's polite. And then when we were on bivouac, bivouac means when you're on a campsite, you pitch tents and you sleep on the ground, and then you go through a mess line with this stuff to eat with. It's all aluminum, and then there are indentations for food in it.