Linda Evangelista

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast.

0:04Parking shouldn't slow you down. ParkWiz gives every driver a shortcut. Book ahead, save up to 50%, and skip the hassle of circling the block. Park smarter, park faster. ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. Johnny Ive pulled me over at a dinner recently in London. Ruthie, come and meet my great friend, Linda Evangelista. Well, I thought there'd be lots of topics to discuss what it's like to be in her profession, what it's like to have worked with the world's greatest photographers, and to have done so much work in fashion. But Linda greeted me with so much enthusiasm.

0:45Ruthie Rogers, the River Cafe. Wow. All she really wanted to do was talk about food, where to eat, what she cooks for her son, how a restaurant kitchen works. Linda's the opposite of cool. She's warm. She's engaging. and curious. I realized we're pretty much the same. She loves being home. I love being home. She adores her son. I adore mine. I'm not a model. She's not a chef, but we shared an immediate intimacy. So we thought, let's continue this conversation on table four. And here we are today in New York with my newest and loveliest, warmest, most wonderful friend, Linda Evangelista. thank you so much so it is true that's how we met we met over food we then saw each other again over food and here we are on a podcast which is really talking about memories and how we cook and what we grew up with so we have heard one of the things we love to eat is gnocchi and so we have a recipe for you to read which is gnocchi with slow cooked tomato sauce do you would like to read the recipe?

1:57I would love to read the recipe. And when you read it, you can change it, you can question it, you can add to it or take away. But that's the recipe that was in our most recent cookbook. It's a book for children, so it's quite a kind of simplification of how to make gnocchi. But we can talk more about that after you read the recipe. Okay. It's great to see something in writing because I learned to make gnocchi with my grandmother. But it was never written down. And it was a little bit of this and this many eggs, depending how big they are, and some potatoes. Yeah, and some potatoes. That's how we learned to, I mean, that's a beautiful way to learn.

2:36Did she ever write anything down? She couldn't write. Yeah. She didn't know how to write. She didn't know how to write in English or didn't know how to write at all? She didn't know how to write at all. She was a peasant. She was born in Italy, as was my father and my mother and all my grandparents. And do you speak Italian? Very badly, I speak it. and my family speaks dialect. I know you're from... And proper Italian, but at home they speak dialect. My parents spoke English to us growing up, and only when they were arguing did they speak to each other in Italian. So I can tell you where to go in Italian, but I can't ask you, are you having a nice day?

3:17Or kind words. My husband, Richard, his dad's father, had Italian parents, And he had the same thing, that he heard Italian spoken. Again, a very similar story when there was an argument, I think. And then when he did learn Italian, a lot of it came back because he had kind of grown up for it. So this grandmother, she never did learn to speak English. And in our neighborhood, it was quite Polish, some Ukrainians and Italians. Where was it? Where was the neighborhood? In St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, across the lake from Toronto in Niagara region, right near the border. the United States. And my grandmother went to Italian mass, shopped at the Italian store, worked picking fruit on the farm with the Italian ladies.

4:04So she didn't really need to speak English. I remember how excited they all got that generation when Canada went metric. I was about 10 years old or so, approximately. And then they understood, oh, this is how many grams of meat I'm buying. And so they were very happy when that happened. When did they leave? The family comes from between Naples and Rome. Yes, it's a town called Piñataro in Taramna, which is near Casino and Monte Casino, where the big battle of World War II took place. And my father would have come over and he He was born in 1940, and I think he came over 1956. And my mother was born in 43, and she came over in 1950.

4:57And the grandmother that you were describing, was that your mother's mother? That was my father's mother, but my mother's mother was kind of the same. And they all came. They all came. Eventually, they were all. Yes, and they came with the few belongings that they had. and I have the two handmade hammered copper pots that my one grandmother came over with and she would make her sundae, you know, tomato sauce in and I have them. They're like, they're our precious belongings. That's, there's no painting. Yeah, but a saucepan. Yeah, a saucepan is a memory and it is what she cooked with. So bringing that with her was part of her.

5:42Why did they leave, do you know? They left in search of a better life. They had lost everything. Well, they didn't have anything much. They worked their land, so it's not like they had vocations. And they just went in search of a better life for their children. In Canada rather than the United States. Well, they were heading to the United States, But at the time, they closed their doors, and then they were not receiving any more immigrants. And somebody in the United States found a sponsor for my grandfather in Canada. And the other one, similar story. So, yeah, one grandfather was a prisoner of war.

6:24They were both in the war, my grandfathers. My mom was born during the war, 43. And she spoke Italian? She speaks proper and dialect. She speaks both. When you say dialect, you mean the dialect of that region? Yes, correct. And it gets even worse because then, you know, it takes on a life of its own in Canada. Not quite like the way the Americans, they've like totally butchered the language. And I don't like the way they cut off the ends of the words when they say mozzarella, when they say... The mozzarella. Oh, it makes me... I know, that's Tony Soprano. Do you remember Tony, in watching The Sopranos, they would always call it mozzarella.

7:05Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. And so your mother, also, your mother had both her mother and her mother-in-law. Correct. With her, yeah. And did they all cook together? Yeah, I think early on they did. And, you know, my mother is, because she came over quite young, She got quite Americanized and, you know, she has an education. Sure. She cooks with recipes. But she also has all the recipes in her head of what she grew up making. Who is the best cook of all of them, do you think? Me. You. Good. Okay, we're going to get to that. I like your answer. Okay, so do you want to read the recipe for the gnocchi with tomato sauce?

7:53Gnocchi? I'm joking. Okay. Gnocchi with tomato sauce. Served six. In my family, three. There's one. Yeah. Okay. Two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil. Two cloves of garlic, finely sliced. I would say a little. You can add more. Yeah. Okay. Good. 800 grams of tin-peeled plum tomatoes, 1 kilogram of white flowery potatoes. Your grandma would be happy that this is in grams, wouldn't she? Yes, she would. 130 grams of double-zero flour, 1 large egg, lightly beaten, and 10 basil leaves. Interesting. Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat. add the garlic and cook until soft. Add the tomatoes, breaking them up.

8:49Season well and cook for 30 minutes on low heat. Bring a large saucepan of salted water to a boil and add the potatoes and cook until they are easily pierced with a fork. Drain and peel when they are cool enough to handle. Immediately put the potatoes through a food mill and then sift the flour over them, making a well in the center. Add the beaten egg. Using your hands, quickly mix to form a smooth, soft dough. Do not overwork the dough or you will make the gnocchi too heavy. Divide the dough into four. Using your hands, roll the dough into a sausage and then cut into pieces. Cook the gnocchi until they rise to the surface.

9:38Remove the gnocchi with a slotted spoon and then stir into the tomato sauce. Add the basil and if you like, grated parmigiano. Now we ran our gnocchi along a fork to get the ridges. You can do that. We sometimes do ridges and sometimes we don't. I prefer without. Yeah, you prefer without. We were also talking today about gnocchi. I was talking to Joseph Trevelli, one of our chefs, he was saying, do you remember, Ruthie, how the cook in our house in Italy, called Giovanna, made gnocchi? And she said to us, when you form them, it's almost like you're doing a book, like you're making a book of the flour and the mixture.

10:19Because it is really true that if you handle them too much, they do get tough. And so you want to touch them. Because the flour gets overdeveloped? Yeah, it gets overdeveloped. And the idea that you want to make them as light. And actually, I also used to say that what we do is we'd make the potatoes and add a little bit of flour and then put one in and then they'd fall apart. And then you would add a little bit of flour. And you would do it so gradually that then you would know that you need that amount of flour for them not to fall apart. But the least amount makes them as light as you can. And then once you've done them so many times, you just know.

10:57Yeah. And do you do them much? Do you make gnocchi? No, I have to tell you, the one thing in the kitchen that intimidates me, well, there's two things, is flour. Like pizza doughs and pasta doughs. Pastry. Gnocchi is easier. Pastry, I don't even. Yeah. I get so intimidated by it. And I make a mess, and I'm never successful with it. We should do it. When you come to London next time, we'll go into the cafe. Okay, you heard her say it. Because actually the young chef, we teach how to make it. And I really relate to what you're saying. I'm not a pastry chef person. I'm never good with it. I can do the science of cakes, but it always just doesn't interest me.

11:46The measuring is, it has to be so precise. And I like to venture off a little bit. I have to tell you about a recipe of yours that I try to venture off with. Oh, what was that? Your olive oil cake with polenta. Oh, the polenta cake. I tried to do it with olive oil. Oh, and how did that work? No. No. And then I tried to do it with a little ricotta. Yeah, that's okay. Did that work? Yeah, better. And then I would love to get to the olive oil, almond flour, and ricotta. Yeah, we could do that. But pastry chefs are really enjoying cooking with olive oil now as opposed to butter. But I do think butter is so good.

12:30And butter and cakes are so delicious. And there's something about that polenta cake, which is just three or four recipes. You know, there's just polenta, there's almonds, there's butter and sugar. And you put it all in that. Yeah, once I've made it a couple times, though, I want to just, you know, change things up. But this was during the pandemic, and I had plenty of time to, you know, play with it. But it didn't. So you never made bread, though, right? If you don't like flour, do you make anything? I'm not a bread. No, because you can buy beautiful bread from great artisans and bakeries. I did with my friend a couple of times, but I made such a mess in the kitchen.

13:11Yeah, I get it. It just wasn't worth it. So what did you do in the pandemic? What did you cook? Oh, I lived in the same house as my brother, but on different floors. In New York? No, in Canada. I wanted to be able to go outside, and I'm very immunocompromised. I have a disease that affects my lungs. And living in New York, you have to, you know, in a tall building, it's difficult. But I wanted to be with my family. So we did a lot of barbecuing and smoking and cooked a lot outside, even made pizzas outside. You did make pizzas. Did your brother make the dough? No. I had a friend come over to reteach me a dough, but it's like a three-day ordeal.

13:55And I'm like, I'm not patient. You don't need three days to make pizza dough. Well, I guess like really sour dough. Yeah, yeah. You know. I did different doughs, but I'm not good at dough. I don't know what it is. You don't have to be. It baffles me because I'm really good at other things. So what do you mostly like? If I come for dinner or lunch, what would you want to make? Depends what I would find at the market. That's a good answer. Yeah. We always say don't go to the market with a shopping list in your head. No. That thing. Do you remember when I started cooking, I would be running all over London trying to find some ingredient.

14:33And then you realize it's just when I lived in Paris for four years, that was one of the lessons I took away, which was that we lived over market and you go downstairs and then you see what's there and then you cook and that's what we do in the river cafe you know we change the menu for every meal because we come in like a domestic cook and see what's in the fridge see what's been ordered see what we have and then we start to cook that is the hardest menu to choose from oh really it's not a very long menu no but you want everything it's like Really difficult to choose from that menu. I loved being there that night.

15:08I love we were at separate tables, which Johnny just said that was annoying. It was just to see your enthusiasm and your happiness for being there. Do you go out to restaurants a lot? I do. I do. What do you look for in a restaurant? I don't want inferior food. If I'm going to eat pasta, that's like an indulgence for me. Because? It has to be. Because it's carbs. Well, because I just try and watch my weight and be healthy, and I always have. But if I'm going to eat pasta, it has to be great pasta. If I'm going to eat a steak, I mean, I eat everything. I don't want to eat a crappy steak. It has to be, like, the best steak.

15:50Otherwise, I'll eat at home, you know? So I can get disappointed sometimes at certain restaurants. Do you go back to the same ones over and over again? I do. Does the mood of the restaurant matter to you, how the waiters are? Absolutely. When you walk in, you want to feel welcome and taken care of and safe. Absolutely. Yeah. You live downtown? My place is in Chelsea. Yeah. Oh, that's a good area. Is that a good area for food? You've got pasta, no? No. That's okay. Shopping? Art galleries. Art galleries. Art galleries. Well, it's good to have, isn't it? Yeah, my son lived on 19th Street. You know the building by Jean Nouvel?

16:31It's opposite that Frank Gehry building. Yeah, right there. Yeah, that's beautiful. It's around the corner, yeah.

16:42The River Cafe is excited to announce the return of our Italian Christmas gift boxes. Our alternative to the traditional hamper, we bring you all of our favorites from the River Cafe, kitchen, vineyards, and the designers from all over Italy. They're available to pre-order now on shoptherivercafe.co.uk.

17:09Parking shouldn't slow you down. ParkWiz gives every driver a shortcut. Book ahead, save up to 50%, and skip the hassle of circling the block. Park smarter, park faster. ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. Hi, I'm Jenica Lopez. And in the new season of the Overcomfort podcast, I'm taking you on an exciting journey of self-reflection. Am I ready to enter this new part of my life? Like, am I ready to be in a relationship? Am I ready to have kids and to really just devote myself and my time? I wanted to be successful on my own, not just because of who my mom is. Like, I felt like I needed to be better or work twice as hard as she did.

17:50Join me for conversations about healing and growth. Life is freaking hard and growth doesn't happen in comfort. It happens in motion even when you're hurting. All from one of my favorite spaces, the kitchen. Honestly, these are going to come out so freaking amazing. Be a part of my new chapter and listen to the new season of the Over Comfort podcast as part of the My Cultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. So let's go back to the beginning. You grew up with an Italian grandmother's two. Two. Two grandfathers. Two. Your parents. What was food like growing up in the Evangelista household?

18:33Well, I complained a lot because we always ate homemade food. and I wanted to have TV dinners or frozen meals or something out of a can. I wanted clothes from Sears Roebuck. Oh, my clothes were from Sears. I said to my mother, not that we had money, but why can't we buy clothes out of a catalog? That sounds so weird. My clothes were from Sears and Woolworths. So it was a lot of homemade food, And I appreciate that now. But, like, growing up, you know, I wanted the TV dinners with the compartments, you know, and the little apple pie in the corner. But, yeah, my father took us out for dinner every Friday because my mother worked late.

19:30She was working in retail. But my father let us choose the restaurant. And by restaurant, I mean McDonald's or Denny's or the pizzeria. Or A &W, you know, fast food. And so that was a big deal because we were very spoiled with that. And fresh, we had homemade pasta Wednesdays and Sundays. We had roast beef once a week. We would have steak or barbecue once a week. My father really spent a lot of money, I think, on food because he didn't have much growing up. They ate like a chicken or a rabbit once a week. This is until he was 16 and came to America. Yeah, until he got a good job at General Motors.

20:22And the food went on the table family style. How many of you were there? Me and two brothers. Two brothers. And he would serve us and he would put like this mound on your plate and you had to eat it all. And for him, the most important thing was you weren't hungry, that you were nourished, that you ate. He also didn't want a lot of talk at the table because where he worked was so noisy. So there wasn't a lot of conversation. It was sort of like dive into your food and finish it because you're not leaving the table too. Did you dread dinners or lunches? So did you? No, I didn't dread it. A couple times I did.

21:02I wouldn't eat the liver. And what would he do? Did he say you have to or would he understand if you really couldn't? They gave up trying to make me eat the liver. I have a friend who had amazing posture. She would just sit. I once said to her, you know, Veronique, how is it that you sit so well? She said, well, because at the meal, at the table, my father and mother said we had to always sit straight. It was just a thing. And she said, as a result, I hated every meal. She said, I just couldn't bear going. You know, she had great posture, but it came from, you know, just this feeling of just dreading a family dinner.

21:37And it's interesting about not having to finish your plate when you don't want to. No, in general, I like the food. Yeah, and maybe because we had to eat what was put in front of us, we weren't, there weren't cooking different meals for us. Like, we all ate the same. and it's crazy because like today I love dandelion and I used to go with my father in the country where no person or dog had walked there was lots of farmlands and we would pick the little baby tender shoots yeah like I grew up on broccoli rabe everybody had a garden and what they produced in these gardens was unbelievable. Tell me about it.

22:20Everything like tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and different like radicchio and and then there were the fruit trees and then there was like basil all the herbs you name it onions and it was just all there and. So you had your own garden full of. Everybody had the whole backyard was a garden but shared what the other one didn't have and it's not like we had a swimming pool or we didn't play in our backyards. We played on the street or the parking lot. Did they bring the seeds, do you think, from Italy? Where did they get the seeds for broccoli and rubbing? The seeds are a whole thing. The seeds was like a network.

22:58And whoever had the best tomatoes that year would do the seeds and hand them out. And it's so funny now. You see all these heirloom tomatoes and I'm like, those are the tomatoes I grew up with. Like, none of them were nice little round tomatoes. And then the fruit trees. And my father, he had a green thumb. And he would graft. He would do these sensational things, like the apricot tree had plums on it. And the red apple tree had a branch with yellow apples. And he would graft. And it would just be incredible. And then he would make his grappas. So do you think that then he would go work at General Motors?

23:39Do you think that his real passion would have been to have been a farmer or to have done this all day? Absolutely. Yeah. Well, he grew up, he didn't get an education because he had to work the land. And I know he had a donkey. And whenever he referred to Italy, he referred to it as the good old days. I think that would have been what he would have loved to have done because he was so good at it. We also had, it was so embarrassing at the time, we had some chickens and some rabbits, but we didn't live in zoning that allowed those. Oh, and the roosters when they would go off at 5 a.m. So this is a suburban, was this a suburban?

24:18Yes, it was a suburb. And you were all, this community was Italian, was it? Everybody who had the gardens that you're taught. And Polish. And then you grew up with this culture, with this food, with these gardens. And then what happened? And then you had to pickle it. Yeah. Or put it in a jar. Or cure it for the winter. So we would make sausages, and they would buy the animal. Don't ask me how it got divided up and who did what. And then they would make prosciutto and capicolo, and we made our own tomato sauce. But they would have to buy more tomatoes because we would make enough to get you through the winter.

24:55And that would be like a passata. And everything got pickled, like eggplants. Did you have olive oil? No, funny you say that, but they do buy, we don't have olives in Canada, but they would get somehow from, I don't know which dealer, some olives and maybe make some jars of olives. But they didn't make olive oil. They bought that. It sounds, it just is a description of life in an Italian hill town. Well, it was. It absolutely was. And does it continue? It does continue. We still make the tomato sauce every year. When you say we, who would that be? The whole family. My father took a motor off of a washing machine for clothing, and he rigged it up to the machine that purees, you know, and separates the seeds and peels with the passata.

25:49So, you know, you wouldn't have to do it by hand. So this thing runs and makes a lot of noise. But I don't know how many bushels we do per day, like bushels and bushels and bushels of tomatoes. They say that now in Italy because everyone is, you know, younger generation are leaving these hill towns. They're kind of empty. They're going, but you can understand also why younger generation women might not want to peel tomatoes for the next season, you know, or to do that through the winter. But it is a tradition and it's a beautiful tradition. It is. It would be sad. It is. It's lost. It's like you come together that day to do it because it's too much work to do.

26:30You need multiple people doing it because the tomatoes have to get dropped in boiling water. They have the jars. The sausage is a lot of work, too. The casings. That's the one thing. I didn't like washing the casings. I know. Did you see the movie 1900, Bertolucci's movie? There's a very graphic part of it which shows the making of the sausages. I did not. Yeah, it's a great movie. You should see it. It takes place in Parma, much more further north. But when you left, because you went to work quite at an early age. I was 18, almost 19. Oh, you were. What was that like leaving this culture of food?

27:07What did you do? How did you eat? I think I ate really simple. I was in New York for about a month or so, and then they shipped me off to Paris. Who shipped you off to Paris? The agency, because I wasn't doing so well in New York. They said maybe you'll be more successful in Paris. At age 18? 19. And I was first in the Hotel Sant 'Andre des Arts, but I got bed bugs there. So I went to the Hotel La Louisiane. I know, Louisiane. I stayed there. We found out our hotel room in the Louisiane was being used during the day. I'm not kidding. What? Somebody once came home and they would rent it out during the day.