Mala Gaonkar

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. In the early days of our friendship, I was amazed by Mala Gwankar, then founding partner of Lone Pine Capital. How could this high-achieving woman be so uniquely calm, thoughtful, and serene. We went to dinner in her home in Notting Hill, entering this traditional London house. We were surrounded by the best of brave and beautiful contemporary art and furniture.

0:42When we went down to dinner, there she was, Mala in the kitchen, apron on, finishing the curries, the rice, the vegetables, and the desserts she'd cooked for us all. I asked her over dinner what she was doing. She spoke about her work in public health at Harvard and with Atul Gwande, a book of short stories she had just published, the immersive theater piece she was doing with David Byrne, and a high-risk skiing adventure she'd just come back from with her two sons. Today, 10 years later, she's founder of Serco Capital, the largest ever fund run by a woman.

1:22Okay, so Mala, you chose, of all the recipes, all our books, pistachio cake, and you made it sound as if like, don't you know that I want to do pistachio cake? So here we go with pistachio cake read by Mala. So yes, pistachio cake, my very favorite. I must have made it about 100 times. 270 grams of unsalted butter, one lemon, one vanilla pod, 100 grams of blanched almonds, 120 grams pistachios, 250 grams of castor sugar, four eggs, organic, 40 grams plain flour, one lemon, 60 grams of pistachios, 50 grams of castor sugar. Preheat the oven to 150 degrees centigrade. Line a loaf tin and grease with 20 grams of the butter.

2:07Soften the remaining butter, grate the lemon peel, split the vanilla pod and scrape the seeds. Grind the almonds and pistachios together. Beat the butter and the sugar until light and the eggs, one at a time. Add the zest and vanilla seeds, fold in the nuts and sieve in the flour. Spoon the mixture into the tin and bake for 45 minutes. The cake is ready when a skewer comes out clean. Leave to cool in the tin. For the topping, grate the lemon peel and squeeze the juice. Halve the pistachios, mix the lemon juice with the sugar, boil until thick, Then add the zest. Stir in the pistachios and pour over the cake.

2:41Delicious for breakfast with a coffee or as a dessert with creme fraiche. Or any time, in my view. Or any time, if we have some. That made me want to have it. But I was interested because I always think of you with the incredible chutneys and with the curries and the food that you made, and you chose a cake. Do you like to bake? I feel like to be a really good pastry chef, certainly in the Western tradition, it's about precision, and I'm terrible with precision. I'm the kind of person who does. Oh, I thought you were going to say that's why I'm so good at cakes. A little bit of sour, a little bit of sweets.

3:10I'm terrible at cakes. And I felt that this was one of the few recipes I could actually make. And there I was sort of, you know, working mom, two young boys with insatiable sort of appetites, it seemed, for pretty much anything. And this just seemed just wonderful. It was just a beautiful, lovely cake. I must admit, though, Ruthie, I did shift it around a bit. Oh, tell me. A great recipe is something that you can build on, right? Like any creative, beautiful thing. And so what I did was I, you know, I did grow up in South India. So I kind of added, let's see, I did all kinds of things. I kept the vanilla.

3:46I added loads of cloves. Cloves. And cinnamon and cardamom. Oh, so you ground them together. I pounded all of those up. And put them in the cake. I put them in the cake. I didn't put the topping. It was a bit of a rush. And that just, you know, there's a lot of, you know this probably, but cinnamon can replace, and we did in medieval times, sugar. So that's what I did. I always say the recipe is half poetry and half science as well. So we kind of, you know, you taste. The precision is really important. But I'm interested that you added the cloves and the carbon. I'd like to try it. But then did you still add the pistachios at the end?

4:25Oh, yeah, yeah. I just put the pistachios on the top. I left out the lemon and the sugary bits. Do you have cake for breakfast ever? I have not had cake for breakfast in a long time. It's very Italian, you know. I would say Italians have their cakes in the morning. They have their cakes for breakfast. They have their ice creams on the street, and then they have a coffee for dessert, you know, and espresso. So there's always a cake, a dry cake to have for breakfast. Yeah, no. In South India, it's really more just a little sambar of sort of lentils or russum of lentils and spices and tomatoes and then some sort of steamed rice or lentil cake like in Italy or maybe a dosa.

4:58So let's talk about that. Your eyes light up when you start talking about cloves and cardamom and lentils for breakfast in South India. Tell me about this India thing. Yeah, so my story is pretty straightforward in some ways for that period of sort of American Indian immigrants. So as soon as, maybe people don't know this, as soon as the Civil Rights Act was passed, there was also a change in the immigration law. So people from being around place of origin. I didn't know that. The American... Yeah, the restrictions on place of origin. And so it was veiled, as you know. And so as soon as that was lifted, my parents were one of the first to come over to the U.S., become graduate students, became academics.

5:37And what do you think that was like for them? Oh, I think if you and I, Ruthie, were go to Mars, it would probably be less of a leap than it was for them. So they both came on scholarships from sort of rural, really semi-rural India. To study what? Both in the sciences. so my father in the mathematical sort of area and my mother in molecular biology so I think that was a huge leap for them and I think I'm consistently sort of astonished by their bravery and the sort of almost gallantry with which I sort of went out with open curiosity to the world and that's something I wish I think we have a lot of in the world and I would love to see us all tap into that a bit more because it's only good for everyone and so yeah I think it was something they did with great gusto and were very happy, but they were also very happy to go back.

6:26And shortly after my sister was born, when I was about six, we moved back to India. They wanted to go back. Did they meet in India and come together? They actually had an arranged marriage. They met in India, moved over here together, and then we moved back, as I said, when I was six or so. We moved to Bangalore. And that's where... So where they came from? They came from just south of Goa. So they come from the coast, the Malabar coast, which is a haven of all of the spice growing, as you might know. And so that's very much, yeah, very much. And I come from a family of sort of academic social workers.

6:59I'm really the black sheep of the family, someone who went into the vulgar world of commerce and never got a PhD. So that's where I grew up in, in Bangalore. So from six to when? Especially until 17 when I came back to the U.S. and then went off to school. And what was home life like? Did your mother work and your father work? Both of my parents worked. I'd say neither one of them was really sort of affiliated with the stove in any particularly distinguished way. But we got along. My grandmother was a maternal grandmother, in particular, a great cook, and so she showed me if she always had something pickling.

7:39It seemed like anything could be pickled. I think at one point she even pickled banana skins, believe it or not. Skins. Interesting. It wasn't successful, but she tried. she pickled hibiscus flowers she pickled gooseberries Did your grandmother live near you? Was she in the house? She didn't, we lived in Bangalore she lived on the coast but she would come visit Do you remember the meals you had around the table in Bangalore when you were between 6 and 17? Would you go to school, come home? We had, so in India there's this whole you take your little tiffin carrier as they call it with these stacked little stainless steel boxes and they all have there's a whole sort of bento box ritual to it And so all these Ayurvedic traditions around how many sours and how many sweets and everything sort of architected.

8:22But, you know, I took my little tip and mine was a bit less polished. But I'd take my little lunchbox to school and I remember that, the taste of sort of yogurt and rice and pickles. What would you have for breakfast? Usually just a very simple, you know, like a dosa and some lentils or something like that. And then you'd come home to a very simple supper. So it wasn't anything primarily vegetarian, right? But it was delicious because the food was very fresh. You know this, Ruthie. Yeah, I do. You know what that's all about. So going to the vegetables is bizarre. What were the markets like in India?

8:55I've never been to a market in India. The markets were overwhelming. I mean, sort of everything is there. But you had big piles of just endless varieties of chilies or endless varieties of greens. I was recently in Mexico, and the markets there very much reminded me of India. And, you know, you know what to do. and you learn how to buy things. Nothing is shrink-wrapped. You can choose, right? So you think you snap the stem of the gooseberry. You know what to look for, and I miss that very much. There's sort of sensuality in shopping that you sometimes don't have. Did you go with your mother or your grandmother?

9:28I'd go with my grandmother or the lady who helped out the house. Did you love food even? I always think of you as such a lover of food. We talk about food. You make food. Did you go into it later? I did love food. Did you know as a child that you loved food? Yes, yes. I still remember there was a season for when the Kashmiri apple juice season would arrive, and that would be actually affordable. And so, you know, I remember things like that. Like, I have a very strong Proustian memory for these little flavors and smells and Indian street food as well. And Indian street food is really just a spectacular celebration, I think, of humanity.

10:03It's just great. Did your parents take you to restaurants in Bangalore? Was that something you did? At that time, the 80s, I'd say it was rare. I mean, Indian food was very much about home cooking, and I think you'll probably have heard that from others. It's less about a restaurant. I think that fine dining idea is something that's developed more recently, which is the growing prosperity of India and a rising middle class, and I think it's fantastic. I mean, there are Indian cooks and chefs and doing amazing things in India right now, but that was less of the story, at least of my specific...

10:33Was there fish in Bangalore? Did you have fish? Very good fish, yeah. There was really good fish. Less so meat, but it was more around fresh fish, particularly in the coast, the Malabar coast. I went to visit my grandmother there. Did you cook with your grandmother or your mother? I did. She actually had an open fire stove, so it was a very, you know, it was really wonderful to have that very, kind of like what you have, actually, which is smaller. And, yeah, she would cook all kinds of seafood on there and all the pickles and the chutneys I mentioned. So, no, it was wonderful. So you'd participate?

11:04Yeah, all was great, but then we had to move back. Were you the cook of the family? I didn't really cook in childhood as much. It was more something I observed, and it was really something that started once I went to university. When you went back to university, did you all go, or was it just you went by yourself? I went by myself. I was at Harvard, and there wasn't much opportunity for cooking there, but that was more just taking whatever was offered to you in the dining hall. Was that a kind of shock? Adding hot sauce to it. Yeah, yeah. Was that shocking? Was that a big adjustment, going from a home where you had this incredible job?

11:38And people food and markets and smells and memories and your grandmother to Harvard, where you lived in a dorm and food was... It was. I mean, I think the arc after that was, though, very much about, I mean, you're so overwhelmed with the intellectual curiosity of that time, right? You don't think about food as much. You're absorbing so much in you in terms of relationships and friendships and ideas and people. And I was just, you know, becoming a young woman with all the sort of uncertainties. uncertainties. And I mean, it was, it was an interesting time. It was almost like three failures in a funeral.

12:09It was like, and literally the arc of that until now was very much around, you know, failing, failing better, learning, and then iterating from there in terms of just, you know, developing in life, going a little bit away from food into philosophy. But I do think it's very important to make mistakes and learn and fail a bit in life, because they're all very intertwined. And I differentiate between failures of hubris and failures of curiosity. And I think failures of curiosity where you're just open-mindedly trying to try something and maybe you mess it up, I think those are perfectly fine. I think that's how you learn and you move on as long as you're aware of it.

12:45And that's what I meant by the three failures in a funeral in the sense that I think my first class at Harvard is one I actually did very poorly on, but it was also the class that was most impactful. And it was a class that the great philosopher John Rawls taught. And it was on developing the ideal society. So what we all had to do as a class was get together and decide what would the ideal society be if you didn't know anything about your status in that world. If you didn't know what your race would be, your gender, what you'd be endowed with in terms of talents or wealth, what kind of society would you create?

13:20And ultimately, what we decided is, because we don't know what we would be, we'd want a society where the worst person off would be not just okay, but actually flourish, because we could well be that person. So it wasn't just about getting, you know, sort of a pittance. And that really transformed, I had a very utilitarian, very rational view of the world. And it was my way of sort of coping, I think, also growing up in a very poor country. But that really made sense to me, finally. So even though the class, technically in terms of my transcript, was a failure, I'd argue in terms of just what it did to my life and my mindset and what I did eventually later, trying to do a bit of good in the world was transformative.

13:57So that was probably failure number one. I think then that led to, I met, the people I met in that class led then to my first job, actually, which I ended up getting fired from pretty quickly. Failure number two. It's going to be a really exciting podcast. Let's just go into it. I like it, yeah. No, I'm just thinking about it in a way that kind of is how it laid out. And that was working in Russia during the privatization program in 1991. Where? In Moscow. In Moscow. And there briefly and then later in Mongolia. And the World Bank really was, I was really working for them through Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at the time at Harvard.

14:38And what was really interesting was that we went there with such high hopes. And it's very relevant to the headlines we're seeing right now. 1991. So August of 1991 is actually when the coup happened in Moscow with Yeltsin. And then December of that year, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. It all happened very quickly. And you were there. You were there. Yeah, we were there. And that was something we went in with high hopes and then just realized this is probably not going to work. And ultimately, that was right. You got that right away. You got that right away. I don't think I got that right away, actually.

15:11I sort of give myself more credit than I deserve. But that's something I think now looking back was fairly clear, and that's something we should have addressed as a broader policy matter and not, obviously, as a 21-year-old who was there for their first job. But then I ended up in Mongolia working there as well. But I look back on that period of just such high, much obviously bigger issue than just me, and my journey was just this whole issue of how, again, failures of hubris, I would argue, where we think we have all the answers, but we're not listening to the local community, and we can, as a result of that, mess up.

15:44And my first big philanthropic project was really around sanitation and subsidized toilets for poorer populations across South Asia. So that was in South Asia. That was my first effort. I first worked in my first fund. It was working really well and wanted to give back right away. I didn't want to sit around and wait until I was some sort of elderly person. And when I did that, I thought, oh, this is going to be great. We've got all the answers. This is going to be about better sanitation for all. And that didn't really work either. It was a complete... I think when we visited some of these toilets that we'd subsidized, most of them were being used as chicken coops.

16:23And why was that, though? One was around, you know, might be a lack of plumbing. The other was maybe around just cultural habits and what was appropriate, what wasn't appropriate. So longer story for maybe a different podcast. But the bottom line is that was sort of another failure, I'd argue, more of curiosity and hope, but also a bit of hubris there where I just stepped back and realized, OK, it's important now to really listen. And that leads me, sadly, I think in some ways to the funeral, which is Paul Farmer, whom I think you know as well, a really dear friend and a great innovator in terms of how public health could be delivered.

17:01And he and I worked together pretty extensively on a variety of projects that he did with many other. He was a real mentor to me in terms of really listening to the community, understanding grounds up. And so that's what I do. And that's what I do. What I do now is someone learning to cook or someone learning to gather friends or someone learning to be a better investor or philanthropist. That's very much about listening to what's happening around the ground and observing rather than assuming. Yeah. Do you remember the food in Moscow that you ate? going back to food. Oh yes, absolutely. I remember the food in Moscow.

17:34Forget the poker. There wasn't much to eat, but there was a good borscht every now and then. There was, you know, a couple of solid dumplings, very solid dumplings. Mongolia was great. That's where I had my first fermented mare's milk, which... What was that like? It tastes like sour milk. That's what you would expect. And then there was a lot of sort of lamb mutton gristle, and that was sort of it. That was pretty grim. Was it an urban context you were in? We were traveling around a lot. At that time, certainly, it still is a largely rural, nomadic society and culture. Have you been back to Russia since?

18:09I haven't been back to Mongolia, but I've been back to Russia. And the big change from 1991. Oh, yeah. Caviar, the galore if you can afford it. Lots of fancy stuff now. We went in, I think, 19, when Richard was chairman of the Tate, we were trying to get an exchange with the Hermitage and the Pushkin for... They have great Matisses, and they were at the Hermitage. We were trying to exchange turners for a show, and it was... I went wanting to love it, but it was complex, and certainly for us. I haven't been back since then, so I've missed the whole wealth and the restaurants and everything else.

18:46It's good cuisine, that, wasn't it?

18:55Sean and I are here, and we're talking about that pistachio cake. I think it's a very delicious cake. It's a cake that you can have any time of day, in that Italian way. But there's something about this cake, and of course it's the pistachios, which I always associate with Lebanon, which feels almost Middle Eastern to me. The green color, the nuts and the almonds, it just always feels like something that you might not have in Italy, but you might have as part of a meal you were having from Beirut, for instance. What do you think about this cake? Do you like it? It's definitely a breakfast cake in my house.

19:33It's really yummy but it's tricky to make in volume. We often have problems with it being oily because the nuts can be, I mean I guess nuts are oily, aren't they? It isn't hard to make but you have to get it right. Yeah, it's all in the fineness of the grinding of the almonds and the pistachios. And actually sometimes we put a bit of flour, some of the flour through the nuts when it gets folded in to sort of hold the nuts, to stop them being, to sort of mop up some of the kind of oils. I love this cake and I cannot remember how we came up with it. I have a very strong recollection of just making it over and over and over again until we got it right.

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21:30Brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council. So we're sitting here in the River Cafe. It's about 7.30 and we're about to go and have dinner. And of course I chose the quietest place in the whole of Thames Wharf to have a studio, except forgetting that some nights we have Sylvia's, which is downstairs, our private dining room. And so the noise in the background is a lot of people, probably 50, having, celebrating something, and Sylvia's having a drink. So that's the background noise. I hope you can all hear us. Your passion for cooking. You were involved in India with your grandmother and your mother a bit, but Harvard really not at all.

22:12And then Russia, you know, you were working and eating a bit. When did you then decide that how important cooking and food was to you? Or was it a decision? Did it happen? I think it came with the birth of my children. You know, I think I really started thinking, having, spending time and allocating time to not just enjoying food, obviously, but to really thinking about cooking again in a way I hadn't in a long, long time and really returned My children's son brought me back to my own childhood in the sense of joy I got out of food. And so I started very early with them, giving them all kinds of adventurous things.

22:51And I was 30 when I had Lucas, my older son, and 32 when I had, or just under 32 actually, when I had Rowan, my younger one. So I was a relatively young mother. We'd just set up Lone Pine at the time in 98, so that was really relatively early on as well in my career. So it was both a young working woman and a mother. How did you come to England? We came to England, Oliver and I, early in 99 because of his work and also because I was setting up our little office here in London. So it was sort of a combination of factors. And we stayed. We thought we'd stay here very briefly, but we ended up staying here 20 years.