Rachel Eliza Griffiths

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human Hi, this is Shirley Strawberry from the Steve Harvey Morning Show Toyotathon is on So stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year-end deals on the cars, trucks, and SUVs known for their legendary reliability Like the stylish and efficient Camry The ready-for-anything RAV4 Or check out a rough-and-rugged Tacoma or Tundra all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit BuyAToyota.com to find out more. Toyota, let's go places. Welcome to Ruthie's Table 4, a production of iHeartRadio and Atomize Studios. There is nothing better than a friend you love falling in love with someone you love.

0:52When my friend Salman Rushdie brought Eliza Griffiths into our lives, we were happy for them and happy for us too. Eliza's smart. She's funny and she's kind. She's a beautiful poet, a photographer whose black and white images evoke for me, Darthia Lange. Promises her work of fiction just published, the story of a family, the story of the civil rights movement, the story of food at the table and food in the kitchen. For food is important to Eliza. And today, in the River Cafe, we will talk together about friendship, memory, writing, and love. So thank you for being here. So good to see you. It's so good to see you too.

1:35Thank you for having me. Yeah, no, it's great. And you've just been in the River Cafe kitchen. Yes. And what were you making? I was making this wonderful dish with broad beans and pesto and garlic bread, and it was heaven. It was so delicious. I just want to go back to the kitchen and eat. It looks so yummy right now. Plus the colour is so pretty too. Yeah, really bright. I love the green. It's good. That should be enough blitzing. Would you like to taste some at this point? Absolutely. I'm not shy about tasting anything.

2:24it's a dish that we make when the broad beans are in season you can't really do it when they're kind of older and more flowery i like cooking by season i think there's something very special about what's available and what you get to look forward to when the time comes and i'm used to cooking for like six people or more in my family so i love making you know large pots of things and a lot of food, and even now sometimes my husband is like, don't make so much, we're going to eat this for five or six days, just cook for two. Is that true, Salman? Yeah, when Eliza cooks dinner, when everybody's finished eating a lot, it looks like it hasn't been touched.

3:09And then we have it for the next week. Do you ever cook together? I'm the eater. You're the eater. He's a good eater. Good eater. Richard was a good eater. Yeah. I think you need a good eater. Yeah. But yeah, when Eliza decides to cook, which isn't always, but when she decides to do it, it's always a treat. Yeah, I imagine. Do you go to markets? I used to go to markets more frequently. I used to walk down to Union Square and go to the market and walk to different places to get specific things. and growing up with my mother, she had the butcher we went to and then she went to a different place for her flowers.

3:52Sometimes we go as far as Philadelphia just for a certain spice shop to get spices. I have a lot of very vivid memories of you just don't go into one place. She would have neighbors who would bake bread and so she would put in her bread order or something. So where was this? Where did you grow up? Is this a small town? I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, between Wilmington, Delaware and Washington, D.C. So in Washington, D.C., of course, there's just so much culture and so many kinds of food, you know, Ethiopian food and, you know, French and Italian. I mean, all of these different things. And, you know, my mother's kitchen, she would really experiment with cooking different types of food.

4:40So tell me about her. Was she born in the United States? She was born in Washington, D.C., and when she married my father, they moved to Wilmington. And my mother, I think one of her gifts as an artist was cooking. I mean, it was a classroom to be in her kitchen. That would be the place where so many things would happen, but she would experiment with food. She would find recipes. She actually did classes for cooking. She had a whole chef's uniform she would put on. And she had some really wonderful, her bread pudding recipes, she won prizes for. Do you know what it was? What did she put in the bread pudding?

5:27She put a special ingredient that only myself and my three siblings can ever tell. So it was kind of locked down, although I can't bear to eat bread pudding now. Why? Because it makes me think of her too much. Yeah. I've been spoiled by her bread pudding, and so whenever I see it on the menu, I just immediately see her face saying, you know, no one's bread pudding is as good as mine, and her pretty much being right about that. She's being right. That's so interesting. I love the idea that she had a chef's outfit at home. She did. Because, you know, when you put on a chef's outfit, when you change, we all change for work every day.

6:05We come in here in our clothes, and before we write the menu, because we write the menu every day, Even just sitting down and writing the menu, you need to be wearing the clothes of cooking, you know, and puts you into that world. And she did that, did she? She was very meticulous about it. And her equipment and materials and things that she began to acquire, cooking was very serious business for her. And yet it was the place where, you know, you learned a lot of lessons, but your hands are always busy. And I loved that. I mean, I felt like she was a real artist with color and how the dishes would look and the flowers.

6:46And it was just a whole kind of event. Even if you were making like a grilled cheese. Yeah. Like, how is this grilled cheese so amazing? You know, and. Did she entertain? Did you have. She did. She did. growing up I mean our home was a place where people in our community you know if they knew that my mother was cooking they were not declining that invitation and it would just be a whole thing and I remember I'd have to like iron and starch the tablecloths and help with the flowers and you know polish the silver and it was just this whole kind of stage that she set even down to the music that might be on.

7:28And it just, there was so much joy about it. She would keep, you know, trying different things and she would have her tasting spoons and she wouldn't give up on a recipe until she really got it, until she didn't have to look at the book anymore. And I think, I think some of that is probably involved in my process as a writer. Like you can fail at your sentences, but you keep pushing language until it gives and you think, I hear it now, I can see it. But my mother, food is one of the greatest gifts that she gave our family. And certainly to me, being the eldest daughter, I would be sous chef quite a bit.

8:15And it's made me a better person. and I love cooking for my friends and my husband and my family. Did she have a career? Did she have a job? No, she mostly was at home. She had four children. I'm the eldest. And we were young, and so she was more of a homemaker. When she was older, she went back to school and got a degree. she did a lot of kind of things where I would kind of call her like a kind of businesswoman of her of her own where she sometimes did real estate or she would you know literally be selling things that she cooked to people in the community sometimes she actually would cater things and growing up maybe when I was 11 or 12 she got diagnosed with kidney failure and so her ability to work maybe a more traditional job changed because she was trying to raise four children and then she had this kind of chronic illness.

9:22And one of the most beautiful things about her cooking was when she was in the kitchen, it was like that was the cure. Like she would kind of dance around. She put on like Smokey Robinson and Diana Ross and the Supremes. and she suddenly wasn't a sick mother. She was making things and being a creator and having to kind of balance the day, being in bed on medications. But then she would rally and want to be in the kitchen and make things for her children and her family and for her friends. It's interesting that you draw the parallel of the artist because there was a great film about Christo building a fence in California.

10:07And the whole objection by the ranchers was that it wasn't art because it was temporary. And a woman who actually was in favor of the fence got up and said, you know, I make a cake every night for my family, and I really think that that cake is a work of art, and then it gets eaten. And so you think about that it is temporary, and that your mother doing what she did and creating, as you said, like an artist, and then feeding people she loved is a part of the whole circle, isn't it? I think it feels so special because you have in that moment, whoever is there, whoever is present, they have this kind of feast and then you can't be precious about it.

10:54It's to be devoured. It's to be savoured. It's memorized. Then you go and boast and brag to other people, you need to taste this. but then it will never be the same. So you get a whole new experience. If it's art, it's also a performance because we have an open kitchen in the River Cafe and I have an open kitchen at home. And so you put the food down and then you want to see people's response. And you see, I often look at a table and see if they're sharing, if they're tasting, if they're shaking their head no or shaking their head yes because it's an immediate response to what you've just made.

11:34And they may be right if it doesn't taste good. I've always loved the open kitchen here. It's kind of like that's where the excitement is and you kind of look over. The drama, yeah. And everyone's excited and everyone's pleased because there's just something about cooking. It's beyond the food. It's the whole kind of sensation and experience of it. You're there with the people you're with and whatever you might be talking about and sharing stories or just how you feel your moods. And then you're looking at the kitchen, you're watching the waiters, you're looking at all the details. And I think, too, when you're on the page, it's different, but you as the writer bring attention to the details for your readers of what you want them to look at in a way, which is a little bit similar with also being a photographer.

12:27Here's what I want you to see, the light, the atmosphere. Can I draw you into this, you know, flat photograph? But in the kitchen, everything's alive and it's all connected with people.

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13:23One iced coffee? 99 cents, please. For real? No way. Mmm. Mmm. One iced coffee? 99 cents, please. For real? No way. Mmm. What a deal. Your new morning groove. Iced coffee from McDonald's any size for just 99 cents till 11 a.m. Price and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. When you left home, when you left this incredible home of food and your mother expressing her love through food and feeding her children and teaching her children and handing over the reins to her children, and then you left, you know, what, 18 years of every day having your mother do this, where did you go?

14:15What was your next step? Well, after going to college, I moved in. Where did you go to college? I went to the University of Delaware for graduate school. I went to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Did you cook when you were in college? What did you do? Did you go home? In college, I was the person doing the dinner parties. Baked pots of pasta and garlic bread. And I would drape scarves over the awful fluorescent academic dormitory lights. and I would have candles everywhere. And people would kind of feel like, well, this is like home away from home. I do not like doing the dishes, so people would volunteer that part.

14:59Where did you find this kitchen in college that you could cook in? Did you have your own apartment or did you? No, I was in the dormitory, but I would just take the kitchen. You cooked for everyone. And then when you graduated, did you live a domestic life where you continued cooking? So, you know, when I, in 2003, when I moved to New York, I kind of, it was that moment, I think many writers have them and have many moments where I just thought I need to live in New York. I'm a writer. I want to see what I'm made of. Can I make it? And, you know, reading so many books about, you know, the writers and the poets and, you know, they're in the village and they're all over Manhattan.

15:36and I thought, well, that should be a good place for me to go and see if I'm cut out for this life. And I worked every kind of job, and then I finally thought, I'm going to go back to grad school just so I'll be able to feed myself if the writing doesn't work out. And during those years, I taught at college. I was a nanny at one point. I was a waitress for about an hour. Did you have to cook for the children? No, it was a very small baby. So, you know, we spent a lot of time with me reading bad poetry to the baby in Central Park. But I got to kind of get into the rhythm of the city. Did you eat out?

16:23Did you discover restaurants? Yes, I loved finding little places. And, you know, New York is such a feast of little places and well-known places. and it was just wonderful to kind of have these discoveries of things and also to go to restaurants that you'd read about, you know, as you're wanting to become a writer, suddenly you're going to... What restaurants were they, do you remember? I loved Cafe Dante in the West Village and, you know, little places. Oh, the Romanian pastry shop up in Colombia, that's just divine. And then, you know, going to, you know, NoHoStar or I feel like the diner situation was really great for me to just sit in a diner and write and write and write.

17:18So do you write, how do you combine working and writing and doing your work with food? I often ask actors if they eat before the play or after the play, or artists who feel that they live such a solitary life that they only want to go out to parties, and film directors who basically don't want to stop for lunch because it ruins the rhythm. What is your writing and food day like? Like I won't really have that much food in the morning. I'm someone who, with wellness things, I'll have like my green mucky drink, which is delicious. Or I'll have just some poached eggs or something like that, which I like with a little spinach.

18:00And it depends what I'm doing. If I'm out in the field working on photographs, then I probably don't eat. I'll just have like some fresh squeezed juice and then I melt because I need to follow the light very carefully. if I'm writing I can write for long periods of time and a lot of tea in New York you know going to friends homes to eat is a thing that we enjoy and going out to really lovely restaurants we both my husband and I both have an appreciation for wonderful cooking and food and kind of the imagination so we'll kind of work all day and then perhaps we'll go out to a restaurant to meet a friend or we'll just go together.

18:44These days we're more inside. We love to have, you know, Indian food delivered. Have you taught Eliza more about Indian food? Because I know that you are passionate and grew up with it and we talked about Indian food. Well, New York used to be not good at Indian food. Unlike Britain, yeah. Yeah. It's getting much better. You know, there now are like half a dozen really good Indian places in New York. So that feels great because it felt like a real, you know, in this city which has every kind of cuisine, Indian food was a kind of absence, but now... Why do you think that is? I think Americans hadn't discovered India somehow, but now they have.

19:29And, you know, my view about eating and working is that I've always thought work hungry. You work hungry. You do. eat later as a writer are you tempted do you get up and down do you get up and look in the fridge and then close the door or do you go into the kitchen I think one of the important things about writing is to stay sitting down helps New York I always think that it is interesting and this is a diversion that Britain, British food which is so you could say quite bland and you know adventurous and people cook the traditional food they grew up with. But except for when I came to London, I couldn't believe how Indian culture had, you know, everybody can make a curry, you know, or, you know, whether it's a good curry or not.

20:20But then you'd go to a small town outside of Britain, there'd be an Indian restaurant, you know, there would be people selling all sorts of chilies in the market. No, it's sort of interesting, but we know why. We know, yes, it's to do with an empire. It's to do with an empire. Not a very hard question to answer, but it was to do with an empire. But coming back, I guess, and saying, I had this fabulous food, and we have to learn to make it. One of the things I love to do when we come to London is to sit at Salman's sister's table. Samin, her cookbook is amazing, but it's such a treat that she usually cooks when we come to visit.

21:03And so everything she makes is so delicious. And she'll have the chutney and she'll have the sauce and the samosas. Or she's, oh, I just put something together. And it's like the best thing you've ever tasted. And it's so good. And so when I've kind of looked through her cookbook and I look at the spices and things, I kind of just feel so overwhelmed. But I know sooner or later I need to be able to kind of get a proper curry in my skill set. Yeah, it might feel the same way. Yeah. And then can we talk about the food in your book, Promise, and how you integrated and brought food in to tell a story, a complex story?

21:47Sure. So, you know, one of the things I've always loved when reading novels is food and how it's kind of, you know, how it's introduced to the reader and the presence of it or novels where no one's eating. You kind of notice, well, what were they eating? What exactly are they drinking? Where are they? What's in season? I think in Promise, the two black sisters who are the central characters of the novel, they're coming of age in 1957 in a remote sea village in Maine. And in that space, which is very spare and bleak and suddenly kind of hostile to them, the shelter of their home and the relationship that their mother as a nurturer has provided for them.

22:39One of the things that is most important is, you know, how to feed the children, what's available, what's in season in a kind of place like that. And the kitchen is a kind of classroom too as they're coming of age. And so, you know, to grow up, to have a mother who has her rules and her recipes and that in the space of the kitchen they're all safe. Whereas elsewhere outside of their home, things are beginning to become quite unsafe for them. And so there's something in the girls that they have their kind of authority and imagination and respect for their mother's stature in the kitchen And in the home, you know, their mother cooks them a kind of special, you know, before the first day of school meal.

23:33And that's almost as important as Christmas dinner for them. and that there are these different moments through the food that certain things about each character is revealed and how they feel about the kitchen or what they're eating and the kind of comfort that food offers them in a place that is really starting to shift as different things are happening elsewhere in America. So, you know, I think a lot of my own upbringing is transmitted into the space of food and thinking about food. And just, you know, if I were to expand outward and think about Black American families in America and the real trajectory and storylines and stories of food and recipes and things being handed, it's real kind of delicious lineage that is important to survival and to joy and to having a place where different family members live on through the foods they made, the foods they invented, their revisions of a recipe, secret recipes.

24:45I find all of that really lovely and magical. Families can be victims of racism or victims of poverty or people who've just immigrated from another country. It's so interesting to me that many people who've emigrated from one country to another bring the food with them, or the grandmothers bring the food with them. They talk more about their grandmother's food than their mother's, because the grandmother's actually bringing the food. The mother might be trying to adapt, and the children kind of throw it out. But they go back to the grandmother to experience what those memories she's brought with them, very often just being the food.

25:21Yeah. I mean, I've read many accounts where enslaved people would come over and have stitched into the hems of their clothes seeds from their country of origin. And that they would try to literally bring kind of pieces from the homeland or the motherland with them to try and grow it wherever they were being taken against their will. And so there's such a power in that. But also I love stories about, you know, what I'm thinking in African-American families, you know, taking something that was the scrap and then making it into something that then finds itself in the mainstream of American culture, you know, and how things can, you know, transform and become these other things, even though they were supposed to be the food of the poor or this is all that was available.

26:15And then it becomes this thing that everyone's like, what is that? There is a politics to it. There's also this really wonderful humanity of like, we all need to eat and how we eat as important as what we eat, what we can afford to eat, what we can afford not to eat. And, you know, for Promise, which takes place in 1957, 58, that would have been an issue of where black people could go to eat versus other places and what that means. And, you know, it's so powerful to really think about that. But in my research, you know, I would look at advertisements and read different things and watch films and, you know, colored only or they can't stay at this hotel or they can't stop on the road to get gasoline at this place.

27:08It all is so politicized. Do you see the photographs of Gordon Parks? I love Gordon Parks. Me too. He's one of my favorite photographers. Me too. And those ones that particularly take place in the drinking fountains or outside a diner, outside a place of food, and you see the separation. They're painfully beautiful photographs. His photography is just astounding. It's heartbreaking, but then it's also beautiful, the way that he shows the dissonance, and yet there's a beauty and a dignity. Dignity, absolutely. I agree.

28:14We'll see you next time. By December 31st, 2025. And save. Discover more at brightviewseniorliving.com. Equal housing opportunity.

28:27One iced coffee. 99 cents, please. For real? No way. Mmm.

28:36One iced coffee. 99 cents, please. For real? No way. Mmm. What a deal. Your new morning groove. Iced coffee from McDonald's any size for just 99 cents till 11am. Price and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer.

28:57Hi, my name is Sophia and I'm a chef at the River Cafe. Today we're making bruschetta with smashed broad beans and a ball of mozzarella. So for the smashed broad beans, here we have some potted broad beans. You want to choose the smaller ones if you can get them because they're not so starchy. so a bit sweeter put them in a food processor give that a bit of blitz you don't want it to be blitzed too much you want it to have texture then into that a little, little bit of crushed garlic a bit of roughly chopped basil and mint it's fantastic give that another blitz