Mariella Frostrup

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0:34Welcome to Ruthie's Table 4, a production of iHeartRadio and Atomize Studios.

0:44I'm often asked if it's intimidating cooking for celebrities who come to the River Cafe. My response is that the guests who really worry me are other chefs. It's a bit like that today as I'm about to interview the interviewer, Mariella Frostrop, especially since I was watched the subject for Guardian's Lunch with Mariella. Mariella wrote, Despite such eloquence, Ruthie is a disaster of an interview. My questions get longer as her answers get shorter and inevitably end with a question for me. She's all, don't you think, and do you find, and have you noticed? But I'm reminding myself that I'm not here with Mariella, the journalist, but Mariella, my good friend.

1:24When Mariella books a table in the River Cafe, it's most often for two. usually with her husband, human rights lawyer Jason McHugh. Watching her is watching someone who's diverted only by what she is eating and drinking, as she's entirely focused to the person she's with, sitting close, talking, smiling, laughing, and listening. Her daughter Molly, who's working here as a barback, told me about growing up with her mother, cooking together, eating together, traveling together to Norway, to Greece, all over the world. Now Marielle and I will do the same. intimidated why would I be don't you think do you find do you notice oh Ruthie that's the best introduction I've ever had ever ever in my entire life don't you think how would you like to be described Ruthie I'm sorry I said that but it is true it's true you said it was really sweet you said you just kept turning the questions back I mean so today I'm just going to listen to you and not say, don't you think?

2:28But before we do, first of all, I'm so happy you're here. I love having Molly here. She's just fantastic. I think she feels like she's at a West End show every night of her life. Because she's a bar back, so she's behind the counter. Who did the cooking when you were in your house? Well, in our house, it was very 50-50. Would you have Sunday lunches? Was there one meal that you would have that would be fun? We would have Sunday lunches. And I'd say the most important thing of our Sunday lunch was probably the Yorkshire puddings. My dad was obsessed with them. He'd have, like, 50 at least. Your mum grew up in Norway.

3:03Do you have a food connection to Norway? So we go to Norway sometimes on holiday because, I mean, it's so beautiful. And obviously, like, mum likes the fact that we all get to see sort of where we're from and stuff. But I wouldn't really say that there was a sort of dish. There's this sort of cheese that mum's obsessed with that none of us likes so much. Norwegian cheese. Yeah, it's something. And it's a very brown colour and it's very smelly and sweet and weird. It's not for me. I can't understand. None of my family are converted to it. What is wrong with them? I think it's probably heavily processed and not necessarily good for you, but it is a taste of childhood.

3:41It's called Yai Toast and it's a goat's cheese, but it's... I'm going to make it sound disgusting. It looks sort of caramel-coloured. It's called Brun cheese. Brun cheese, because the thing about Norwegian is that it's very literal. You know, if you pass a lake and it's got brown water, it'll be called Brun Lake. You know, if you pass a house and it's the first one in the row, it'll be called Huswan. Okay. And so Brun cheese is what it gets called. Okay, this gives us a chance to start at the very beginning. Norway. You were born in Norway? Where? Born in Oslo in 1962, where my dad had moved back.

4:21He and my mother met at Edinburgh. She was a very young art student. She was 16 when they first met. She'd started art college two years early. She was an incredible talent, but this was the end of the 1950s. He was studying English at Edinburgh University as a lot of Scandinavians. Well, they still do, but a lot of Norwegians particularly go to Edinburgh. So they met there, and when she was 18, she gave up art college and went back with him to Norway, where I was born, and then my brother, and then my sister in fairly quick succession. Do you remember the food that you ate when you were in Norway?

4:59What age did you leave Norway? Six. Oh, so you might not remember. Yeah, but you know, there's a really weird thing I think that happens. I mean, firstly, my main food memory of Norway is actually because at that time in the 1960s, they really didn't have many ingredients at all. You know, there wasn't this sort of globalization of food. And, you know, you'd get strawberries, but only in midsummer. There was a lot of pickling, fish and vegetables. Salt cod? Salt cod, which I didn't like at all. But I do remember, and I still love it, there's an Arctic chard that they do that's just, I mean, I think one of the most delicious pieces of fish or fishes in the world.

5:40but because of that I think most of I do remember things like cheese we would always have cheese at breakfast and um strawberry jam wasn't like strawberry jam that you get here in jars and things it would be fresh made strawberry jam they'd make it and then it would last until the next summer and so you would have a saucer full of it and you would just spoon it onto your cheese on your crackers or on your rye bread. And I remember things like that. But the thing I remember most was, I think it was difficult times. And I think it was difficult with my parents. And they weren't very happy in Norway.

6:19Very young. And my mum had sort of given up all of her artistic expression to go there. And suddenly she had three children and it was the 1950s. And Norway was very, very conservative then. and my father used to travel a lot because of his work, he was a journalist and he came back from Tanzania, a trip to Tanzania and he arrived back, and this will show you how long ago it was, with a box full of fruit. It had things we'd never seen before. It had mangoes and these extraordinary melons and breadfruit and just all of these things and it was like a miracle. It was like sunshine. It was like all the windows had opened and sunshine just blazed into our apartment.

7:07And I'll never forget it. It was a really, really strong and striking memory from a period of time where I don't have that many memories. But what I was going to say about sense memory to do with food is I don't remember much about the food there. But when I go back, I'm like the woman in the tin drum in the film. I'm like her, the one who can't stop eating fish. I'm sat there with jars of herrings. I can't get enough sursil, you know, I can't pickle everything. Pickled gherkins, everything. And did your father miss it, do you think? Did you have any of it in Ireland? Oh, he used to get sursil.

7:41We would get pickled fish in jars because you couldn't get that in Ireland then. I'm not sure that he missed it. He was never much of a food man, my father. He was more of a drink man. Ah, okay. So his interest in food was sort of minimal. Can you remember sitting down at meals with them and as a child and let's put dinners or lunches? It was the 1970s, Ruthie. And I don't think we did a lot of sitting down for meals. And also because it was always complicated. They split up when I was eight. So I think those sort of family moments were very few and far between, which is probably why Jason and I have been so kind of committed to creating them to a point where my children are like, oh, no, not Sunday lunch, please.

8:28But yet you grew up in Ireland. So what was it like growing up? you were quite poor you said that you had very little money yeah and and so food you know in terms of you know defining childhood food memories they tend to be not very um uh not very warm and cozy ones i mean uh the awful awful memory once when we really had run out of food and my brother who was always the one who tried to be emollient he's he is still the kindest um man you'll meet and he was trying to make light of the fact that there literally was nothing in the cupboard. And he was like, look, look, I've got spaghetti and I've got golden syrup.

9:09It'll be delicious. So you wouldn't have... He wasn't going to have the golden syrup after the spaghetti. No, no, he made it for us with the golden syrup. It was one of the most disgusting combinations I've ever come across. Did you say it at the time? Did anybody able to... No, no, we grinned and went, yeah, this is good, lovely, sugar, sugar and starch, what could be bad? You can have, it's like rice pudding, I suppose. How long did you live in Ireland for? Until I was 16. Yeah, and your father died while you were there? He died when I was 15. He was 46. He had a heart attack. For years in the year.

9:43That was what, 70s? 78. Yeah. And then I moved to London in 79. So when you came after the tragedy of your father's death, is that when you moved from Ireland? Yeah. Right after that? Very shortly. So all three of you and your mom? No. No, me. What, by yourself? Yeah. How old were you? Well, I'd already left home. What age? I left home when I was 15. I lived with my mum for quite a while, but my stepfather and I didn't get on, and he was not nice. Okay. And so then I went to live with my father, but that was very difficult because he was by then a sort of fully fledged alcoholic. And when my stepmother left him with the two children that they'd had, and I ended up living with him, um on my own and trying to go to school and kind of manage what was really a fast deteriorating um situation and he and I were living in some rented house in the far reaches of Dublin and I'd get home from school and there would just be stuff piled in the in the kitchen and everything and and so I decided I had to leave but going back to my mother's wasn't really an option so a very nice um pair of lesbian sisters i.e not a couple but they said i could rent a room from them i'd met them working in a restaurant in dublin called the blackboard where i used to work at weekends and then as a waiter as a waitress yeah and um or a waiter as we say now um and that was for two a lovely gay couple called peter and melvin who really looked after me very well because I mean what kind of estate I must have been in I'm no idea but apparently I was a very good waitress I can imagine I loved it it's my favorite job what did you love about it I loved the interaction and I loved that it made me feel quite efficient and um I loved the whole I think the theater of it actually really I think it is a kind of drama yeah yeah and I just used to love get but I think maybe I also just loved getting to work because it was respite.

11:47You were still going to school but working. When I first started working there and then I worked there full time for about four months and then a friend of mine gave me a job in his recording studio and so I did that until I left for London in Dublin. Yeah, that's when I met all of the people that we have in common. Did you meet them there? I recorded U2's first demo tapes when I was 15 and he was 17. and he hates it when I remind him that he's older. But yeah, that was all when I was working at Keystone Studios. But after my father died, Dublin started feeling, I don't know, I think my father got offered a job at the Sunday Times probably about four years before he died.

12:30And I think in my head that lodged as that would have been the moment that he could have changed his life. That was the pivotal moment where things could have changed for the better and he didn't take the job and I think he didn't take the job because he was afraid and because he was an alcoholic and um so I think for me that always represented this sort of golden light that you could you could fly towards and and so after he died I became quite resolute about getting out so I took the ferry from Dun Laoghaire with my friend. Who did you know in London? Oh you had another friend she didn't know she she just had an address for us she she um there was a she had some irish friends who were living in a squat or friends of friends who were living in a squat in stonely street in west london actually not very far from here off latimer road and we arrived there on a bright summer sunny morning and were greeted at the door by just this crowd of irish men mostly and i was like marade what was the point in coming all the way here if we're just going to live with the whole house full of Irish people.

13:35But they were incredible to us and made, they were so hospitable. Are you 16? 16. Wow. She was, she's 18. And they gave us a room that there was already two of them living in, but we were allowed to share it. I mean, they were amazing days. You know, I think it was a, it was a really great time to be young. It was great. You know, there was huge adversity, but at the same time, life just felt full of possibility and you could afford to rent places for cheap. You know, we were only in the squat for about three months. And then I got a job at Blush's on the King's Road. I don't know if it's still there was a wine bar.

14:10And then it used to be so amazing on a Saturday then, you know, Bob Geldof and Paula. Because they live right around the corner from me. And they used to arrive on a Saturday morning at about 11 o 'clock at the tube station on the King's Road. And then they would promenade up the King's Road. and they would be followed by this sort of retinue of, it was like a medieval, you know, it was like Henry VIII that arrived and all these people would be following along in their wake. And again, it was like theatre, watching, you know, and it was punk and it was just incredible and exciting. Do you remember what you ate at that time?

14:44Would you go to restaurants or would you cook at home or would you eat at lunches? I'd cook at home, I'd cook at home. Food wasn't great in London then, you know it wasn't. And also I didn't really care so much. I mean, I was so obsessed with just survival and getting on, survival and getting on. I mean, it was the 1970s. I think there was quite a bit of sort of beef bourguignon and, you know, black forest ghetto, nothing to write home about. Everyone was eating spaghetti bolognese because that was very exotic and Italian, but not. Chianti bottles with a straw. Chianti bottles. Beaujolais nouveau.

15:19Yeah, Beaujolais nouveau. That was always quite exciting. Yeah. I remember that through the 80s. but not so much the food, really. So you're a 16-year-old in London. You're working in Blushes. You're living in this Irish house. Your father has just died. And? Did you have a vision? Did you know you wanted to be the writer or the journalist? Or did you go back to school? No. So you left school at 15? Yeah. Wow. I did my, you know, the equivalent of GCSEs. and then, yeah, it just wasn't possible. And for a while I thought, I'll go back to school and then I just realized that that wasn't going to happen and then I didn't really have a dream, you know, because it was very much about survival really and it was day to day and I think I was just very lucky.

16:15You know, I had lots of... I think you probably must have been a fantastic kid, you know, to have that courage and to, you know... But you have courage when you're that age, don't you? I think maybe because you don't know you know now I think I'm much less brave than I was when I was 16 years old or 18 years old because now you have the benefit of or not of having seen what the world can do and then you risk for yeah and the risk and the jeopardy whereas then it's just about you know possibility isn't it and I felt possibility in London you know that energized me and just kept me going. You know, I mean, it was, it wasn't, of course it wasn't easy, you know, and I missed my dad so badly, you know, because I think as a daughter, when you lose your father at that age, you kind of deify them.

17:05And so I'd elevated him to this impossible kind of Olympian height. and so I spent an awful lot of my late teens and early 20s you know finding really broken men and trying to fix them because I felt guilty that I hadn't fixed my dad and I really think it took me till my 30s really to escape from the kind of tyranny of his perfection which you know and realize who he who he was you know which doesn't make me love him any less but it certainly helped to create a more functional life for myself. And did you drink? Was the fact that he died of sort of alcohol? No, I think I drank, but I don't think, I mean, I've never, I'm not a very addictive, apart from cigarettes, which I was hopelessly addicted to for sort of all of my 20s and early 30s, which is mad because my father died of a heart attack and was a chain smoker.

18:04But drink, I mean, you know, it was the 1980s. I was in the music business. I had a lot of fun. And then, yes, because the next thing I did was get a job at a record company because of the studio that I'd worked in in Ireland. You know, it was always people who you'd met who then would introduce you to somebody else and, you know, sometimes you'd get a little chink of an opportunity and you would grab that and then you would. And the journalism and the television only happened, again, just by accident. You know, I worked for this record company. I worked with Bob Geldof. I worked on Band-Aid and Live Aid.

18:38and he stole my desk to sort out Band-Aid from. And, you know, I was there on the day when we all went to that studio in West London and all of those people. It was a kind of amazing, magical time. Then I set up my own little PR company. But at the same time, they were looking for a TV presenter for a music program that Channel 4 were making. And it was going to be all world music. And that was what was really exciting about it to me because my father always used to bring back amazing records from Africa, Miriam Akiba, just incredible music. And so I was really excited to get involved in it, and they gave me the job.

19:19I was appalling. I mean, someone sent me like a YouTube clip the other day, you know how everything lives on YouTube, of me presenting. Oh, absolutely, look at it. Yeah, it was called Big World. And I spoke in a monotone like that, and I was clearly just shit scared and really self-conscious. They didn't train a thing to sort of teach you how to do that. No, no. But so I did that for a couple of years and then it just... Did you have a domestic life as well? Did you live with anybody and have to think about a kitchen or food or bringing shopping home or did you just basically food? You smoked and had some way through it.

19:55Did you eat something? Smoked and drank Beaujolais Nouveau. But I did get married when I was 18 to another lost soul who's a wonderful and old friend of mine now called Richard Jobson, who was the lead singer in this punk band called The Skids. Skids, Skids, yeah, Skids, great band. Yeah, great, into the valley, working for the Yankee Dollar. Come on, Ruthie, you know you've got to go to them. Never went anywhere without The Skids. But Richard was a really interesting and unusual character. He was another lost kid. He left home at 16. he had you know huge intellectual aspirations many of which he went on to realize a huge determination and I think we sort of fell together out of loneliness and we tried to you know we gave it our best shot for two kids and we stayed together till I was 21.

20:45So young. But um so we had a domestic life then and very rudimentary. I used to make things like grilled pork chops with mustard on them and a lot of potatoes, spaghetti bolognese. Did you use cookbooks? Do you remember using? I had the Constance Sprine cookbook that my mum had given me because that was sort of her bible. So she did cook your mum? Yeah she used to bake more than cook. I mean when I think about food that my mum made she used to make incredible gingerbread. She did make a mean spaghetti polonaise she used to make she made really good normal food you know she'd make a great shepherd's pie um did she come from she came from an english family and she's half scottish half english scottish she was scottish really but she learned you know we used to she's she taught me how to make lobskass which is a it's a very rudimentary norwegian stew which is just beef and potatoes but cubed, very small, and cooked in their own broth for quite a long period of time.

21:51And she used to make these things called milkeringe, which are sort of yogurts, basically, that Norwegians used to make. And it was very weird because both she and my stepmother used to make these yogurts. Once I left her house and went to live with my dad, every cupboard you opened would have yoghurt, you know, breeding. Yeah, was your father's second wife Norwegian? She wasn't, they weren't married, but I mean, she was. But she was Norwegian? No, she was Irish. So your father obviously influenced. Had an influence. No, but they all wanted to impress him. They wanted to impress him. He had this thing, you know, which clearly worked for every woman in his life.

22:30And I don't think my mum and my stepmother were the only ones either. So, yeah, he had a thing. That's the thing of cooking for, you know, seduction as well, isn't it? That people can remember. can you remember a meal where you wanted to impress somebody and you cooked? I've never cooked when I wanted to impress somebody. Well, you're joined by Judy Dent. She said the same thing. He came down and he said something to her like, you know, she said, this agent is coming so I'm going to make him the best omelette. She tried to figure out how to make the best omelette and he ate it and she was looking and he said, I think you should stick to acting or something like that.

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25:56So would you like to read the recipe for spaghetti vangole? I will read the recipe for you. Four tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, four cloves of garlic, finely chopped, three dried red chilies, crumbled, three kilos of small clams, a bunch of flat leaf parsley, finely chopped, and then brackets divided. Talk about organization. Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, 400 grams of spaghetti, one lemon, quartered. Fairly precise, I think probably listeners will realize. That serves for, you heat the oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat. Add the garlic and fry over a medium heat for one minute until just beginning to brown.

26:41That's where I go wrong often. You should just have bigger pieces of garlic and then you can take them out. Or just cook it slower. Yeah. Maybe. Add the crumbled chilies, clams and two tablespoons of water. Cover and fry over a high heat for about five minutes until all the clams open, discarding any that don't. Add half the parsley to the clams. Season with salt and pepper. Drain the spaghetti and add to the clams. Serve with the remaining parsley and the lemon quarters. And you made it with Carlotta. Hi, I'm Carlotta. I'm a chef at the River Cafe. So I'm going to start sweating off the garlic with parsley sauce.

27:22So it's sweating rather than frying. I think that's the important thing, isn't it? Now a bit of chilli. Now a flick of chilli. Dry chilli. Dry chilli, yes. Always dry chilli. So that's starting to fry off. And at this stage I'm going to add the clams. So you've scrubbed them, you've done all the hard work with them. Because that is the boring thing, isn't it? And these clams are from where? Because the tastiest clams, I think, come from the Bay of Naples. And I think it's partly because it's a bit grubby. Are they? Oh, sorry. So at this point we just want to get a little bit more heat into the pan.

27:59And then I'm going to, so usually here we use suave to cook the mongole in. Nice to sort of drink it and stick it in the dish as well. It's multi-purpose suave. You can overcook the clams as well, can't you? Yes. So what's too long? You want to catch them just as they're opening up. and will they if you stop the heat when they're opening up will they keep opening up the way you want them to yeah absolutely so this day they're starting to open up so i'm going to finish cooking the pan that's so good and the starchy water the wine and the oils are going to come together and thicken the sauce so let's go back on i bet you can flip a pancake can't you yes She's got brilliant hand tipping technique.