Peter Sarsgaard

11:50Ruthie Rogers:oh we put them in a pot and steamed them and covered them with like um lots of seasoning like like uh hot they turned red and then you take them in a plastic bag and you shake off the plastic bag and uh adults were making them that way so we figured we'd do it like that but the ones that we caught were always just kind of like a joke they went out and bought you know the actual ones that we used very small though small very small not much to eat and mostly about like sucking the sauce off the outside of it and i think it's you get covered you know you need like an apron when you when you're doing it the other thing we would catch down there that was really good actually were catfish um and i remember fish yeah like a catfish has big whiskers like this and they're bottom feeders and you put like um something like liver or something very smelly on the bottom of a hook and let it really go down to the bottom.

12:47Ruthie Rogers:And it was super exciting to catch one. I would actually, when I caught one, instead of reeling it in, I would turn around and run away from the water, like jog, and kind of just pull it slowly.

12:59Peter Sarsgaard:Oh, you would take it with you?

13:01Ruthie Rogers:Yeah, just not reel it in at all, just kind of walk. Just take it for a walk. Yeah, take it for a walk. But I remember that being exciting and like, you know, there's some excitement in just cooking something that you caught.

13:12Peter Sarsgaard:Yeah, of course.

13:13Ruthie Rogers:Yes, of course. And I think that's why I became a gardener when I was young. I started gardening when I was like 13 or so. And I learned beekeeping briefly then from my uncle. And it just makes it more interesting.

13:31Peter Sarsgaard:So, yeah, let's talk about that. So you grew up in various places. You moved from place to place. Various places, yeah. So I would start like learning how to do something and then I would move. So, yeah, so you would start a garden, for instance. Yeah, I'd have to leave it multiple times. Yeah, I actually had a garden in St.

13:46Ruthie Rogers:Louis that I grew like there was a garage where the cars could narrowly pull in and then there was a strip along a concrete wall of dirt. And I grew corn there and it really grew. I grew like a row of corn perfectly there. But then when I discovered that we were going to move, move to a different house, I actually went out there with my soccer ball and just practiced shooting and just cutting them down like a scythe with the soccer ball.

14:14Peter Sarsgaard:Because you didn't want anyone else to have it.

14:16Ruthie Rogers:I mean, I was just like, what's the point in growing this now?

14:18Peter Sarsgaard:How old were you?

14:21Ruthie Rogers:Ten. I think we were moving to Oklahoma, actually, from St. Louis. There was a freedom that my kids and a lot of kids I know these days don't have. it's maybe you know like being a latchkey kid which i was where i i actually broke into my house frequently when we lived in oklahoma i would uh go through a doggy door into the garage pull down the attic ladder in the garage go up into the attic and walk across the framing to avoid the insulation and go through this door into the second floor and into the house and i went into the house like every day like that but there was freedom to come and go not do your homework do your homework and now i mean maybe it's partly living in a city like i do i can't let my you know when they were young they didn't just go out the front door you know and if they wanted to be alone they went into their rooms but it's not as much for you did you but maybe they

15:14Peter Sarsgaard:live longer i survive maybe i think about one of our kids once fell out of the car because you know they had those doors in the back that opened like that, like a little mini. And it was that as she runs this whole program. And suddenly he was like on the dirt road. Luckily, it was a dirt road.

15:33Ruthie Rogers:Well, my grandfather's name, well, I called him Pawpaw. And he was a real Mississippi dude. And he lived in Sardy, Mississippi. And he had a very old pickup truck. And I just loved to go into the flatbed and put the back lip down and sit on the back with my legs dangling over the edge. if I had fallen off one he would have never known yeah because he was in the front smoking cigarettes you know but um yeah I also obviously have nostalgia for that time you know having made

16:04Peter Sarsgaard:it out alive I guess did you cook for yourself at that time I frequently cooked for myself growing

16:08Ruthie Rogers:up and my parents um kind of learned to cook a little bit as adults but you know the food that we come from in the south is not like soul food. Wow, that's you know, sort of like Wonder Bread with Velveeta cheese. The other thing we would take is like a hunk of Velveeta, melt it to make like some sort of dip, take a can of Rotel tomatoes that already had the cut up green chilies in them, put that in and mix it together. And people ate that all the time with like store bought potato chips or something.

16:44Peter Sarsgaard:That was just like a dip.

16:45Ruthie Rogers:It was like a dip. And then the grilled cheese with the same fake cheese on Wonder Bread was what everybody ate all the time.

16:53Peter Sarsgaard:I love a grilled cheese sandwich.

16:55Ruthie Rogers:I love a grilled cheese sandwich. I would opt for better cheese and bread next time. And so I grew up around people who were trying to educate themselves about food, but were off and on available to do it. And so they learned like Polly Bergen's chili was big in our house. I think Polly Bergen was maybe a famous cook from that time. steak diane what's steak diane steak diane is like i guess some famous cook name diane made it or something but it was like these recipes that got like sort of famous yeah in america another one was like a curry that chicken curry that julia child had in one of her books randomly yeah and my parents really liked making that and at that point your father's working for the military my dad's working for the military and just monsanto there as well and then ibm and then ibm we go

17:44Peter Sarsgaard:everywhere did they go did they entertain did they have friends over for dinner no no we we didn't

17:49Ruthie Rogers:have uh anything like that we were very i you know i cooked a lot of uh meals where i would just come home and like have a pack of ramen noodles i'm like a kid yeah and i would just start like i was sort of being creative but without any foundation of even like put the oil in the pan and then the onions and keep it on low heat yeah you know like so then i started teaching myself i did this with a lot of things in my life and i learned like weird ways of doing it how did you teach yourself through books just reading about it yeah i would i would try to follow a recipe because i was always really into gardening and what happens to a gardener all the time you get your heart broken when you grow something that's just a fantastic pepper and then you take it in and nobody does anything with it and you just watch it die on the counter i think i've also always liked being in situations that have a pressure to them maybe that's why i like acting yeah it's like um i need a situation where there's like a deadline where today we're doing the scene And by the end of the day, we'll have done it.

19:00Ruthie Rogers:And that will be that. I like the feeling of that. And so...

19:04Peter Sarsgaard:It's a parallel to cooking.

19:06Ruthie Rogers:Yeah, yeah.

19:07Peter Sarsgaard:A restaurant, you know, the curtain goes up. And you know that when we go in there now, you'll see all the hours of preparation that it took. And then it's over. Yeah.

19:18Ruthie Rogers:I love what I love about a restaurant in theory. And your restaurant really has this. Is it's such an act of love being fed. And it's one I didn't particularly grow up with. I was telling you, we didn't have many family meals. For my family, I always want a family meal. I make it happen. Obsessively, I'm probably a little annoying. We're talking about performance and the performance of having a place like this as well. And I think a lot of people think of performance as a bad thing, or at least they have an attitude about performance. I think of it as such a beautiful part of the way that people share their inner life in public, you know, because we're all quite private.

20:07Ruthie Rogers:Nobody likes to really be sincere about what they're thinking and feeling. But through performance, we can relate.

20:16Peter Sarsgaard:Well, I talk about performance a lot. And also we moved, you know, the kitchen when we had the fire in 2008. It's a completely open kitchen. And so people can come over and, you know, say, I can cook this lamb better than you can, or what actually is in the sauce of the pinterel. And I always say to the chefs, how do you want to present yourself as chef? How do you want, you know, if you're going to have people, if you're going to be seen that you don't want to have a dirty apron, you don't want to have your area around you, you want to present yourself as somebody who's actually performed something something that is, you know, hard to do and creative to do.

20:57Ruthie Rogers:And there's also like, I love watching chefs cook who have like real economy of movement, because you're just doing it a million times all day. And that kind of behavior when you watch movies is frequently missing, actually. What do you mean? I mean, for an actor to get to the place where they could actually do it like the chef does it, I would argue you'd have to do twice as much preparation as most actors do. Like just for physical behavior. There was actually a great movie recently called Late Shift. It's a Swiss movie. My friend Leonie Benish is in it. And she plays a nurse. And it's all the business of taking the thermometers out and putting the thing in and everything and adjusting the light.

21:41Ruthie Rogers:And it's so much physical behavior, but she did it for a very long time. And the reason the movie is interesting is that learned behavior really says something about someone. You know, that's their expertise, the way they're moving. People always ask me, how do you get, you know, the pasta out at the same time as the grilled fish?

22:01Peter Sarsgaard:How does, you know, how do you manage somebody who orders five sea bass and one veal? How does a restaurant work? And I could say the same thing to you about how do you prepare for a role? How does a movie get made?

22:14Ruthie Rogers:I get curious. I mean, that's all. Like I would say the way that I prepare for anything I'm doing in life, but acting also, yeah, I just get curious about something that has something to do with the movie, and that leads me to something else, and that leads me to something else. It's like I used to read like the bibliography after I read a book, and I would just read the next one that they had read and just kind of go on this, what people do on the Internet now, like a deep dive through. And sometimes I'll do it on the internet, but I like going to meet someone. And then I'll say to that person, like, I just played a brain surgeon.

22:55Ruthie Rogers:I met this brain surgeon who was quite a mechanic about it. Didn't want to meet the person. He's like, I work on a car. I don't need to meet the owner to fix it, which I understand. And I met someone else who It was the opposite. But when I met that guy, I said, who do you think I should meet to learn how to play art? It doesn't have to be a doctor. And he was like, oh, I'll take you out to meet this guy. We work on old cars together. Literally, this guy who just told me about being a mechanic. And I saw that he really profoundly looked at it like that.

23:29Peter Sarsgaard:Doing an engine of a car. Yeah.

23:32Ruthie Rogers:Because he actually was doing engines of cars on the side.

23:34Peter Sarsgaard:Because when I had a surgery, I remember thinking, you know, the surgeon came in to see me before the surgery. And then I never saw him again. You know, you see the next stage.

23:48Ruthie Rogers:The difference, though, is in Switzerland, where I worked with this doctor, his name is Philippe, he was incredible. He would sit with the person for as long as they wanted. And I sat there with them. They're speaking Swiss German. And so it was like, in a way, still private for them. So I think that's why many people are okay with me sitting there. And he would answer their questions and talk to them for like sometimes two hours, really long time. And I said, why do you do that? And he said, because then when I'm in there operating on them and I have to make a decision, like a decision that will affect their life.

24:27Ruthie Rogers:I know what their priorities are. I'm acting with them in mind. not with some objective idea of this is what being a success being a this is the successful surgery there are different versions of success for each person and i thought that that was like i was like i'm going to get operated yeah that guy well we were talking about like being not only okay with a heightened kind of pressured moment but being attracted to that

24:54Peter Sarsgaard:Yeah.

24:55Ruthie Rogers:And I didn't know. I went and saw many, many brain surgeries. And on the first one, I was like, it occurred to me, I was like, well, I don't know how I'm going to react to this. Like I said, I've seen held a guy as he died from a bike accident. He was very injured. But like, I had a moment to think about this to walk into it. I was like, maybe I'll throw up or pass out. And I walked in and I was like, this feels very comfortable to me. I don't know why. Why do you think that was? Because I think I'm like good in an emergency. Yeah, I think you are. Yeah, probably. I get like, it's like being around the bees or something like that.

25:34Ruthie Rogers:I get like very focused, very calm, and it feels good.

25:49Peter Sarsgaard:No one knows what the future holds, but you deserve a weather app that can help. WeatherBug is easy to use and provides forecasts for your every need. From storm warnings to pollen levels, right at your fingertips. Get the fastest local alerts and comprehensive 10-day forecasts wherever you are. It's hyper-local, real-time, customizable alerts. Make sure the weather never takes you by surprise, so you can plan every day with confidence. Download the free Weather Bug app from the App Store today and start getting accurate weather forecasts 24-7. We ask everyone to choose a recipe from our books.

26:23Peter Sarsgaard:And of all the recipes, of all the books, of all the bars, you chose Punta Real Ra 'ala Romana, which is actually my favorite. And it's so great that you chose it now because it is absolutely in season. I know. I dread the day when it leaves us, which will be probably in a couple more months.

26:42Ruthie Rogers:I have like a real yen for puntarelli or whatever you're supposed to say. I started growing it like on a lark maybe about six years ago. It was right before COVID. And I had so much of it, you know, because I just I do that sometimes. I'll just like so like, you know, 25 foot row of it. and I just had so much of it and so I give it away a lot and um but then I started looking up what to do with it because I kind of grow that way sometimes where I'll think like oh I had this once and it was really good I don't remember well I'll just grow a bunch of it we'll figure it out and um so I looked up what to make and that's what I came across and I was like I made I made enough of it so that now sometimes I'll think, oh, I really wish I could have that in front of me.

27:37Peter Sarsgaard:Did you have, have you ever been to Rome?

27:39Ruthie Rogers:Uh-uh, it's from, it's alla Romana. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

27:42Peter Sarsgaard:There's a time when you go to Rome and every restaurant has their own. And they're all pretty similar, but some make it thicker, some do it on the, they julienne it, some make the anchovy more, you know, robust. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is our recipe. Is this the recipe you'd like to eat? Fantastic. You can change it in any way. Okay.

28:02Ruthie Rogers:Puntarelle alla Romana. Ingredients. Two puntarelle heads. Twelve anchovy fillets salted, cut into one centimeter pieces. One garlic clove, peeled and finely chopped. One dried chili, crumbled. One teaspoon black pepper. Four tablespoons red wine vinegar. Extra virgin olive oil. Well, I can't read it as well as Olivia Colman did because I listened to her read it.

28:33Peter Sarsgaard:Did she read the Poitouille?

28:34Ruthie Rogers:No, but when she read her recipe for this, honestly, she made it sound fantastic.

28:39Peter Sarsgaard:Have you heard Rafe do the Nemesis? Oh, does he do it? So sexy. The bar is very high. I'm having an affair with the children of Nemesis. All right, I'll try it on the recipe. Try it on your method, yeah.

28:53Ruthie Rogers:Recipe. Fill a bowl with cold water and add ice cubes. Pull the hollow buds from the puntarelli heads. Slice the buds thinly, lengthways. Place in the water to crisp and curl up. This will take an hour. Mix the anchovies, garlic, chili, and pepper in a small bowl and cover with the vinegar. Leave for 15 minutes and add six tablespoons of olive oil. spin dry the puntarelles place on a plate and spoon over the sauce that sounded beautiful yeah

29:30Peter Sarsgaard:that was beautiful i was into it that was good i tried to read it like a poem yeah it sounded like

29:35Ruthie Rogers:one i'm a snob for good ingredients and grew up that way i think because of gardening and growing up around you know my grandfather lived underneath a pecan tree i know what pecan is supposed to taste like and if it doesn't i'm not interested in it it's huge yeah like i can taste stale nuts yeah the way that other people can't because i've had them not stale you know and so i think i frequently would kind of wherever i was living you know if i was at bard or even now the way i live as an actor i'll go out to eat sometimes but a lot of times i'm just collecting good local ingredients which in switzerland for example was a great thing to do because they have lots of great local ingredients.

30:16Peter Sarsgaard:What do they have?

30:17Ruthie Rogers:Cheese and yogurt and fruit and plums when I was there and vegetables, which are less available like at most restaurants. And so it just makes it so wherever I am, I'll just think like, right, what's growing here? What's the thing? And cheese, I met a guy at the top of the Alps who has a herd of maybe 30 sheep and that other people leave their sheep up there sometimes for him to take care of and he makes this sheep's milk cheese which is maybe my comfort food would be like either something to do with a sheep like either sheep's milk yogurt yeah or sheep's milk cheese that's very fresh or during lockdown i had a friend who had a cow and i would get the wrong milk yeah i was in vermont and i would uh just put it overnight in the oven with the starter and i was making i that was my favorite thing i could just have lived off that and my honey i thought this is maybe the perfect combination did you have the kids there then you were all in for yeah we also you know we did everything with i'm like uh vigo mortensen in that movie captain america where he makes his kids do the push-ups and read and now we're gonna tap maple trees we tapped maple trees and made maple syrup as well which I have enormous respect for the people do it because it's like you sit there for so many hours and then you can screw it up in the last three minutes.

31:52Peter Sarsgaard:What would that be?

31:53Ruthie Rogers:By going over by making it to you can burn it. So you know you need to measure its its density with a hydrometer and I'm not that that's the part of cooking that I've never been great at like I bake bread and do different things like that, but I'm not an exact person.

32:14Peter Sarsgaard:Well, it sounds like if I came to your house, I'd have sheep's yogurt and I'd have honey from the beans and I'd have persim. That sounds pretty good to me.

32:32Peter Sarsgaard:No one knows what the future holds, but you deserve a weather app that can help. Weatherbug is easy to use and provides forecasts for your every need. From storm warnings to pollen levels, right at your fingertips. Get the fastest local alerts and comprehensive 10-day forecasts wherever you are. It's hyper-local, real-time, customizable alerts. Make sure the weather never takes you by surprise so you can plan every day with confidence. Download the free Weather Bug app from the App Store today and start getting accurate weather forecasts 24-7.

33:02Ruthie Rogers:I'm still, at heart, a forager in some way. Yeah, you keep using that word. You know, when I'm in Vermont a lot of the time, too, like I will literally pick an apple, eat it, go down, be gardening, be eating some of the stuff while I'm gardening.

33:17Peter Sarsgaard:Yeah.

33:17Ruthie Rogers:You know, I'll collect some berries. I'll eat half of them before I get back to the house. You know.

33:22Peter Sarsgaard:Actually, I keep thinking about that story about the corn. Because that's a really beautiful story that you actually grew it on the wall next to the house. I grew it. It had to be like really.

33:34Ruthie Rogers:it was probably only a foot wide of earth there and i actually remember knowing i needed to get better soil for it you know like i'd learned something from my uncle like to work some compost into it or something like that but i could tell that it drained well like i remember checking it out like i knew something you know i'm that's the thing my uncle taught me they're very simple things you pick up the ground the soil and you hold it in your hand and you smell it and you look at it and that's step one if it's not good either don't grow anything there

34:09Peter Sarsgaard:or make it better you know that's good maybe a good allegory to life yeah and also you are making things better because you're also politically active in terms of if you know food is i was talking to um andrew karecki about prison food yeah i mean actually with prisons and sentence

34:28Ruthie Rogers:reform in New York State in particular with this group, the Center for Appellate Legislation. And what they do is, you know, we have a private prison system in a lot of our country. So, you know, there's an incentive to have more prisoners because you get paid per prisoner. And so there's overcrowding and it's obviously terrible. We also have a problem with sentencing of juvenile offenders. and yeah some of these guys did things that were really wrong and they needed to go away and they needed to be rehabilitated but you know you do something when you're 16 that you're still in jail for when you're 50 and there's something really wrong and broken about it especially since you could if you had the money get a lawyer and apply for resentencing yeah it's a couple hundred thousand dollars you're going to end up spending so for people that have the means there's a way to get out what we were doing is trying to raise money for the people that don't have the means really investigating different cases and finding lots of people who had demonstrated great behavior were really reformed, had maybe it sometimes just been an accessory in the crime.

35:45Ruthie Rogers:They're with their friend who has the gun, they shoot the person, they steal the thing. Obviously, again, I don't want to live in a society where that happens. But the punishments have just been horrible. Yeah, there are lots of things to raise a fist about in the world.

36:09Ruthie Rogers:It can be hard to, you want to actually have an effect. And that's what I feel a lot of the time. And I felt like when I met this group at the Center for Appellate Legislation, they are literally in my backyard. I can see where they are. And I thought, I feel strongly about this. This is something I can actually show up for. So I mostly just tried to raise money for them. I also work with the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, who has a program where they have a lot of private lessons and stuff there. They have an old building that has a finite number of rooms. And they're pulling from this relatively wealthy community that includes Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Prospect Heights.

36:54Ruthie Rogers:All the kids there are going and spending their money on Suzuki lessons, regular lessons. they then take a large portion of that money and go for community outreach and they bring music to schools that don't have it most of the public schools don't have it and they've hit all of the boroughs they have like an enormous number of programs and they are almost able to meet the need of new york city and just recently actually i can say this because it was announced like billy joel just gave them an enormous amount of money because this idea of music we were talking about music at the beginning people think it's an extra thing it is an essential thing to me and music and the arts in general without them i think is a very very thoughtless potentially violent scary world you know um because we learn something about ourselves by watching someone else do something somebody else act something out when i watch my daughter and all those kids do the tchaikovsky yeah it's classical music and whatever you may or may not like it but that is a real emotional moment that happened there you you would have to be not educated in the arts to not feel it and isn't it worth feeling the suffering of a guy from 150 years ago and then you go like oh people have been feeling like this for a long time i'm not alone i'm not alone and there you go that's the whole

38:22Peter Sarsgaard:That's a good period on the sentence where you can stop. And so I was going to ask you for our last question. And I hope you don't need much comfort. But if you do need comfort, is there any food that you would go to for comfort?

38:39Ruthie Rogers:Yogurt with some of my honey on it.

38:41Peter Sarsgaard:Is it your yogurt with honey? Yeah.

38:42Ruthie Rogers:I mean, I actually do eat my honey a fair amount, like on a piece of toast or something like that. But for me, comfort food is like very simple food. like yogurt with a little honey on it is something I might eat at 10 o 'clock at night it might be something I eat in the afternoon or in the morning I kind of feel like I can eat it any time of day and to be honest like when I'm on location sometimes and I come back home and it's 7 30 and I'm gonna wake up in 10 hours and do it all over again I just want like a bowl of yogurt with some honey on it, maybe a persimmon.

39:21Peter Sarsgaard:Sounds good. Now that is the period at the end of the sentence. Thank you.

39:25Ruthie Rogers:Thank you.

39:30Peter Sarsgaard:Ruthie's Table 4 is proud to support Leukemia UK. Their Cartwheel for a Cure campaign raises funds for vital research and more effective and kinder treatments for acute myeloid leukemia. Please donate, and to do so, search Cartwheel for a Cure

39:52Ruthie Rogers:Ruthie's Table 4 was produced by Alex Bell, Robbie Hamilton and Zad Rogers with Andrew Sang and Bella Cellini This has been an Atomize production for iHeartMedia

40:30Peter Sarsgaard:We'll see you next time. Download the free Weather Bug app from the App Store today and start getting accurate weather forecasts 24-7. This is Julian Edelman from Games With Names.

40:42Ruthie Rogers:I want to take a second to talk about something that's personal to me. I've had the privilege of working closely with Robert Kraft for a long time. And one thing I've always respected is how seriously he takes up standing up to hate.

40:56Peter Sarsgaard:As a Jewish athlete, my identity is something I am proud of. but I also know what it feels like to be singled out for it. That's why this new commercial for the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate that aired during the big game really hit home.

41:11Ruthie Rogers:It's about showing up for someone when they're targeted even if you don't have the perfect words and sometimes standing next to someone is enough and you can show support by sharing the Blue Square.

41:23Peter Sarsgaard:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.