Simon Schama

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0:31and join today. Welcome to Ruthie's Table 4, a production of iHeartRadio and Atomize Studios.

0:43Last night, I was with my good friends, Josh Berger and Alexandra Crapanzano. I said I needed to go and write the introduction for Simon Sharma, today's guest, knowing he had taught them both at Harvard 20 years ago. As good friends do, they did my work for me. Simon Shama, I never missed his class. And the other thing that I would never want to miss was I wanted to see what waistcoat and what glasses he would wear because he was not only brilliant and articulate and taught me about architecture and about art and politics in Europe, but he also taught me how to look good.

1:24I would simply say that Simon was and is an extraordinary storyteller. So we would all sit in his class, and I took British Empire with him, and we would be riveted the way that we would be riveted watching a thriller, a suspense movie, because we would just be hanging on every word. Art and politics in Europe from 1660 to 1820. He was the best professor at Harvard, and I was gutted when he went to Columbia. Simon is our most renowned historian. His books on the French Revolution, the Dutch Masters, or most recently Foreign Bodies, an exploration of pandemics and the health of nations, have changed the way we think.

2:07His television series, Civilization, the Story of the Jews, and the Power of Art have reached millions. I know all this about Simon, but I know something else. He is a fantastic cook. There is much to admire and respect and be in awe of Simon, all of which I do. But quite simply, he's my great friend. Thank you, Ruthie. Well, I feel my work on this earth is done. They were so cute because they were there. I guess, when was that? Was it 20 years ago? I think Josh just went for his Harvard reunion. I think more like, probably more like 30, because I moved from Harvard to Columbia in 93. But they're very kind.

2:49I don't think they're kind because it's something I've heard over and over again. Okay, praise is embarrassing you, So why don't we go straight to the food and talk about your cooking? You just made a recipe in the Kitchen of the River Cafe, or you helped, or you watched. I'm not sure which verb. Would you like to read the recipe for? Yeah, this is tagliarini with broad beans and pancetta. And I chose it, I think, principally because of the broad beans. One of my nicknames, one of my two nicknames at school when I was about 12 was Beanie. What? Are you very thin? I was obsessively, I was obsessively enjoyed all forms of beans.

3:28I really still do. But I think I enjoy broad beans the most. I love the way they shrivel. Don't you? And I love the way the color is different, that you get that pale green color. And then you, and it's a taupe color. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so read your, read this recipe. Here's the recipe. Shall I read the ingredients first as well? Okay. So 50 grams butter, four TBs, tablespoons of olive oil, one small trapea onion, finely sliced, two garlic cloves, finely sliced, 100 grams of pancetta, matchstick cut, cut into matchsticks, 400 grams, very healthy, of broad beans, 100 milliliters of dry white wine, 250 grams of fine pasta tagliarini, a small bunch of mint and a small bunch of basil both torn I think and 50 grams of pecorino and yes what was going on in the kitchen very beautiful I helped a bit with you would just do a very simple lovely braise of the onion and the garlic in the butter and oil together which is never be afraid of doing that until soft and then the pancetta matchsticks go in.

4:47So everything is braising together. You don't want, and I was talking to Jess, whom I was cooking, this is not a recipe where you want the pancetta to crisp up. So you really want a gentle braise. Hi, I'm Jessica Philby and I work at the River Cafe. And we're here today making broad bean and pancetta sauce with Simon Sharma. you started with a little bit of choppy onion in the base right which I just kind of melted down and then I put the pancetta in until that oh the pancetta's there already I'm looking at it it's like an idiot it's too I haven't had my coffee it's too small so it's a tiny bit of really good pancetta and then a little bit of garlic okay we never use too much garlic okay we don't want it to overpower anything right so everything is braising really yeah exactly including the pancetta a little bit of white wine so you're not yeah fantastic So you're not wanting the panchero to be crispy.

5:42No, it's kind of more melting. Yeah, I get it. And then I'm going to add a little bit of peccarino at the end. Right. And some fresh basil in it. OK, fantastic. And then comes the magic moment of adding the broad beans in their skins and stir to coat. You fling the wine in and then the gentle braising heat goes down even lower and everything marries together. You're non-stop stirring, but only for about five minutes or so. Again, making sure the beans don't just completely mush up. And then you can actually, we used a freestanding mixer, processor. The recipe here says, of course, puree. But actually what we did was sort of bash the beans, really.

6:32So I'm just going to... Oh, here we are. Here we are. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, so, right, a stand mixer, which is wonderful.

6:44So it sticks to the pasta a bit more, is that? Right. And then we were just making the sauce, so the tagliarini has to, obviously. Tagliarini, like, or very fine pasta. You're cooking it, and then almost, I don't know, what do you think, you know, a minute, two minutes. Two minutes for the pasta. You're really basically taking out almost as soon as the water has come to a boil. Make sure you keep a little half a cup of the pasta water. It's going to carry on cooking when you're adding it to the sauce. Okay, Jess. Thank you. So nice to meet you. You too. Yes, yes, yes. You add the pasta to the sauce, not the other way around.

7:23Always. Always. Always. It's supposed to cook in the sauce, exactly. You have to persuade people to do that, really. Because then, that whole idea also, also I don't drain pasta. I always, if you have a colander next to you and you just lift, especially if you're in Italian, you just lift it out over the pot, put it into the colander with a pair of tongs, and then put it into the sauce next to it. You don't have to do that thing of carrying it over to the sink, draining the pasta, putting it back in the pan, but you're just, and also then you get a bit of the water from the pasta into the sauce, which kind of, you know, which I always say.

7:57I always love the Marcella Hazan when she says, toss, toss, toss, and then toss again. Yes, that's very nice. And I think that also is that kind of, you know, that you can't, almost you can't toss pasta enough. No, absolutely right. I'm interested that you chose a recipe, that the recipe has pancetta in it. And that brings us to our next kind of starting at the very beginning of the Sharma household. So because you did grow up in a kosher home. I did. So was pancetta, we did an interview with Otto Lenke the other day, and he was telling us that in Tel Aviv there was a man who sold pork under the counter, like in Prohibition.

8:33But did you have pancetta as a child going on? It's called basalavon, which means literally white flesh, actually. Is it? That's the Hebrew for white flesh. So it's no longer very secretive. No, it was very kosher, strictly kosher. Tell me about your family. Well, they were both great storytellers, my mother and father. I had a sister who was, she died, hence was, about 12 years ago now, 13 years older than me. And I wasn't meant to happen particularly. My mother started, she had a job as secretary to Havilland Aircraft Corporation executives during the war. And then she was so brilliant, ferociously organizationally brilliant.

9:17she became PA, personal assistant to Sir Basil, you know, the hell of the whole thing within about six months. So come the end of the war, I was born in early 1945, the war was going on. I was a massive inconvenience and would not have happened, I think, had it not been for the fact that where my parents were living, which was near to the de Havilland HQ in Nebworth. And de Havilland was in Welling Garden City in Hertfordshire. and their next door neighbor was an obstetrician, a rather fancy society obstetrician. I only know this to be true because he confirmed it, wrote me a lovely letter when I became a young Don at Cambridge saying, well, you not only would not have been a Don, but you wouldn't have been around at all, had it not for my persuading your mother that it was a good idea to have this baby.

10:03So he told her, he said, well, if you decide you should have this baby And you can have this baby, Marova, in my very fancy clinic in Maryland and Welbeck Street. And what he did not realize was that Welbeck Street would be the receiver of one of the last V2 rocket raids, but it didn't hit the clinic. It missed me and the clinic. So I was not supposed to happen, courtesy of both my mother and Adolf Hitler. You know, nonetheless, actually, I made it through. No, not together. They weren't in cahoots. So we were fairly strict. My father was... What did he do? Well, he wanted to be in the theatre.

10:43He was a very theatrical personality. You'll be shocked to discover. Yes. But it was very sad. He left school at 14. Like a lot of Hackney Grammar and a lot of those kids, he was largely but magnificently self-educated. I mean, we had not all... It's a mistake, actually. I'm going to be very disloyal now. But if you're part of the German-Jewish community that had come around time of the Nuremberg Laws or later, your house was full of books. If you're part of an older Ashkenazi community, not quite so much. My father was very unusual in having not only all of Dickens, all of Shakespeare, all of George Eliot, but he had things like Manzoni's in translation, the betrothed.

11:25He had all of Honoré de Balzac's comedy men. And he would read out loud on Sunday afternoons. So he wanted to be in the theatre. What generation came from another country? Well, my father was born in 1901. His father was born in Bochan in Romania. Romania. And my father's grandfather was born in Izmir in Ottoman Turkey. So my father, however, he's, you know, we went to the theatre a lot. He produced charity shows which ranged because he had lots and lots of thespian friends, actors and producers. Ralph Richardson, for example, to Rowan Guthrie. And he produced from, you know, productions of Macbeth to Oklahoma at the Golders Green Hippodrome.

12:11Did he do Oklahoma? Yeah, he did, he did. So when I was about eight or nine, I think. So that was really lovely. Did he cook? No. My mother was an arduous, I feel guilty, as all Jewish sons do, about slagging off my mom as a cook. She was an enthusiast and there was something she could do. She was from a different Jewish tradition. She was from Lithuania, pure Ashkenazi. So they were soups she was good at. There was one called Garden of Eden Soup, which was based on lamb stock and lamb bones and barley, which was a kind of deep classic Lithuania, which was actually very good in the middle of winter.

12:53And sometimes white beans as well, butter beans or small white beans. She went into the kitchen because actually what happened to her after the war, she had to abandon her job. I was, you know, there. Now, and she did not really want to be back as what was then called a housewife, really. One scary moment I will never forget is when my mother, she had these old mincers, you know, that you attach. You still, some restaurants still have them, actually. So you clamp them onto a table, right, exactly. So you've got a coarse mince. And when she was mincing up some beef, she managed to mince the end of one of her fingers off.

13:36And so she bled a bit into it. I looked at this with, I must have been like nine or something, with horror. And I remember her poking around with the fork trying to find. She did wrap her finger in a bandage, but carried on cooking. And she never really found a better finger. And she did produce these clops, you know, the equivalent to a kind of kosher hamburger. And I looked on with absolute horror. And my mother said, when she made jokes, which wasn't that often, they were very funny. And she said, don't tell your father, after all, it's perfectly kosher. I think it was. I think it was kosher.

14:14So I was looking to see if my dad suddenly, you know, was chewing suspiciously, really. I think it's quite interesting about women who don't have an interest in cooking, you know, that they don't have to, you know, that actually if she, there were so many other things she might have been interested in. Right. And perhaps the, but what's interesting, I suppose, is what did you actually then eat? Were mealtimes a pleasure for someone who loves food so much? Right. Did you sit down to dinner and just wish that it tasted better or did you not? Yeah, my mother, there was what my sister and I called a Friday night memorial chicken.

14:50which was inevitably over-roasted. And in deference to my father's love affair with garlic, which my mother did not share, there'd be one lonely clove rattling around there somewhere. So it was always dried out. That we really wished. Chicken soup made from scratch was actually okay. Did you sit down to dinner every night as a family? Yeah, we did. And so she would prepare dinner, your father would come home, and you and your sister when she was old enough to come to the table. The one thing I want to do before we leave the family kitchen. No, let's not leave the family kitchen. We can stay there for a while.

15:27The one thing my mother did very well, which was, and it's interesting in English cooking, because famously fried, not poached gefilte fish, that's a rather horrible greying thing, kosher form of canel de brochet. the first time that Jewish cooking appears that I know of in print is Eliza Acton's book, Cookery Book, which I think is 1845. And there's a little add-on chapter in the second edition on Jewish cooking, which is then slightly fancy Sephardi, Balkan and Turkish cooking, kind of fried fish patties instead, as we'd say, cod cakes or something like that, which she describes as being eaten cold sometimes in the morning, even for breakfast, which we did.

16:22My mother did that very, very well, actually. Did she? Did they go to take you to restaurants? Yes. This is the arbitrariness of being kosher. If you're really strictly, strictly super kosher, you would never go to anything except kosher restaurants. My parents would redefine the Torah and the rules of Kajra would say, it's fine providing you don't have bacon or don't have meat, which is absurd, of course. So we went to places like in, again, the 50s, the Trocadero, which was so grand and then owned by our mutual wonderful friend Nigella's family, the Salmons. And that was magnificent. I remember seeing and not quite believing the miracle of Peanuts sitting in what I thought was a silver bowl.

17:14It was really stainless steel. Then you went down. The Savoy Grill was another place. Were these for special occasion? Or would your father come home and say, we're going out? Yes, he would. Yes, yes, the latter. We certainly would go special occasions. Scots and Simpsons, I think. And the place was sort of just steaming. Quite grand, yes. Well, my dad was extravagant in that way. He was very much like Max Bialystok and the producers, flaunt it, baby, flaunt it. He did tend to flaunt it. Theatrical, you know. Yes, so cloche and tureens and all the ceremoniousness of eating fish, particularly. We were a great Dover-Sol family.

17:56Fish. Exactly. So eating out and eating at home and eating seemed to have a priority. It was a priority. It was a kind of idea that you ate well in the Shama House. Yes, the family was food. There's no doubt about that. Whatever one thought of the food, it was crucial. And my wife and I have always, I mean, I don't want to pat ourselves on the back egregiously, but we taught our children how to cook from the time they were quite young. They're very good cooks, both of them. And there were no TV dinners. I mean, I sound so snobby and grand here. And, of course, they'd go off, you know, if they had an extra late class at school, they would go off and have a pizza or a hamburger or something.

18:40But overwhelmingly, really, that family dinner was crucial because you talked and, you know, even when they were tight-lipped teenagers, still you talked. So...

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20:03When you left this home of, you know, of food, of sitting down at the table, of your mother cooking your father with this great character, and you went, did you go straight to university when you went? Well, I had the so-called gap year. I had most of a gap year. And I was actually briefly on a kind of slightly broken down cruise ship that went from Marseille to either Alexandria or Haifa. And I would poke around the kitchens there and sometimes actually even, yeah, exactly. And just was, you know, massively in awe of these gigantic turines of stuff that would be served out to all classes of passengers.

20:40And then working on kibbutz, you were very close to, too close sometimes to, you know, the way food happened. I worked in the chicken shed on kibbutz, the so-called lul, which was, they weren't battery chickens, but they were sure not free-range chickens either. And my job was to load them onto the trucks, going to the slaughterhouse, which was not fun. In case you didn't know, and I expect you did, the way to stop a chicken panicking is to turn it upside down. And then upside down. You do, yeah, exactly. Hold it with the legs. So that wasn't great. But did you seek out, when you were in that year abroad, apart from being on the kibbutz, would you seek out the food of wherever you were?

21:24Is it something that was important to him? Street food. I loved Arab food, actually. I had a distant relative, was a mining engineer in the Negev Desert, and he rattled around in an old jeep. He was an incredibly romantic, rather raffish, bohemian figure. Well, bohemian isn't quite right, but certainly he belonged to a colorful generation. So he was a very romantic figure to me. And he spoke Arabic very well. And we ate a lot of Arab mezzah, actually. Which is delicious, yeah. Wonderful. And the year then was 1962, 63. So that was actually, you know, I don't know, maybe it's, you know, the tragic and poisonous enmity that now exists.

22:11We didn't necessarily, I mean, maybe we're kidding ourselves but we didn't feel i mean he there were so many so many arab friends of his so many bedouin friends actually yeah so that was something so long before wonderful yotam came along and all our friends now you know i i knew that what was called israeli food was basically arab mostly or you were stuck with my mother's kitchen you know so well that's what we always it's a revelation isn't it yeah that you know people talk about you know because i grew up Jewish in upstate New York. And my parents' family were Ellis Island immigrants who came and brought the food that they had eaten.

22:52And food was very basic, I'd say. My grandmother actually was like a Hungarian pastry maker. She rolled out the dough. She traveled with her rolling pen. I always tell the story, but she came to see her first grandson in Woodstock, where we lived on the countryside. And my mother said, do you want to see your first grandchild? And she said, no, let's eat first. And that was the kind of view of food in our family. But when you went, but also Britain was coming out. You know, the famous story of all of Jewish history can be wrapped into three short sentences. They tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat.

23:30We are now in Cambridge, right? Was it Cambridge? Yeah. And was that really hardcore? Was that 60s? Well, I was still, yeah, I arrived at Christ College of Cambridge in 1963. and I was still kosher and it was really bizarre because I'd stopped believing in God really basically I was certainly at least an agnostic but somehow I didn't want to my mother would send food including cold chickens sometimes and I didn't want to offend her so it was totally irrational and I had a great professor who we used to have a kind of a supper seminar and he who had produced gorgeous kind of oozy grouse and things that everybody else, and I would get a kind of bouncy rubber cheese omelette from the college, and finally one of these terrible omelettes actually broke me.

24:22And famously, I've told this story a lot, but it is true. In 1965, I went to see the Ipcrest file, Len Dayton. And did you ever know Len Dayton? We did actually exchange letters. Is he still alive? No, he is still there. I don't think he is. Okay. Michael Caine, of course. Yes, I wrote a piece to the Guardian called Michael Caine Taught Me to Cook. And not only did he write spy novels, one of which became the Ipcris file film, but he wrote so-called cook strips, which were cartoons for men beginning to cook, you know, what is parsley and how to dice an onion or mince parsley the proper way. And these were fantastic.

25:03and it was when there was a scene where Michael Caine says to his fellow spy, Courtney, I'm going to cook you the best meal you've ever had. And it cuts to her saying, Palmer, that was the best meal I've ever had. Do you always wear your glasses? And he said, yes, Courtney, except in bed. And she takes the glass off. I thought, okay, I've got to learn how to cook. And I went out and bought my first little battery to cuisine. There was one gas ring at the end of the corridor in the student building at Christ. So I made friends with John Bolton, the college cook, and he lent me the oven. And I made myself an omelet, hot butter, you know.

25:43And I instantly knew, and it was, you know, Bavre was kind of creamy inside. I thought, boy, you are hopeless with almost anything at your hands. But this you instinctively understand and know how to do. You understand timing and heat. And then you can make people happy by doing it. And then I was just absolutely off and running. And that continued throughout college. Yeah, I only really cooked for myself all eight out in Cambridge. And then in tiny spaces when I became a baby Don, I mean, you had just a kitchen the size of a toilet really, had minute things. But I was just in love. I bought my first cookery book other than, it was actually Dayton's book of these cook strips.

26:33I'm not kidding. It was called Oue Le Garlic. Oue Le Garlic. Oue Le Garlic. And you can still find it. But the first thing I bought was Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking. The first serious thing I made with John Bolton's College Avon was the Alsatian Onion Tart. So Elizabeth David, of course, was wonderful to read and also incredibly forgiving. or you could say irresponsible about quantities. And then it was also the period of Robert Carrier's cards, which were great if you're a baby cook, basically. They were wonderful. So there were all sorts of Anne Jane Grigson, Alan Davidson. There were everybody...