Simon Sebag Montefiore

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1:00at washablesofas.com. Authors are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. Next week is our 100th episode of Ruthie's Table 4. And to celebrate, we thought we would turn it over to you. If you have a question for me, a food memory you'd like to share, or a recipe you just need help with, record a message and send it in. The phone number is in the text below. Ask me anything. Happy birthday. Ruthie's Table 4. I would like to think that Simon, Sebag, Montefiore, and I have much in common. We both had what he calls a loving and indulgent childhood. We believe in trust and openness and flexibility.

1:40Our families fled the pogroms of Romanov, Russia. We see food as one of the focuses of our life. Simon and I also love to tell and listen to stories. Food and history, food and fiction, food and exploring. I love the stories. Simon has lived them. His books and television programs, Catherine the Great, Potemkin, Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar, Jerusalem, the biography, Titans of History, The Romanovs, 1613 to 1918, and most recently, a fantastic book, The World of Family History of Humanity, educates, informs, and inspires us who read, listen, and watch. Today we're here together on a beautiful autumn day in the River Cafe to discuss this and more.

2:29Lucky me. Lucky me too. Great to be here. Thank you for coming. So Simon, you've chosen, you wrote to me, you called me, we spoke about it, that of all the recipes in our 12 cookbooks, you wanted to do the cannellini bean and cicoria soup. So you could read the recipe and then we could discuss why you chose this. Of course. Cicoria and cannellini bean soup. So this serves six. 250 grams of cooked cannellini beans, 200 grams of cicoria leaves, half a garlic bulb, fresh sage leaves, two garlic cloves chopped, three tablespoons olive oil and parsley leaves chopped with extra virgin olive oil. This has been marked up by Ruthie herself.

3:19Can't read the writing. This is a proper, this feels like an archival document. It reminds me of working in the archives. When you see Stalin or Catherine the Great. I like to be compared. I think you're the Catherine the Great of restaurants. Not to Stalin. You might ask some of my staff, they might say I'm the Stalin. I'm not asking that question, Ruthie, because I might not like the answer. I think you'll find out more Catherine. I think you're more Catherine the Great. I don't know enough about her, but I'm happy to take a woman over there. Anybody over is Stalin would be fine. I think so.

3:48I don't think you're a Stalin. But anyway, to cook it, in a large saucepan, cook the garlic, then the olive oil until soft but not brown. Stir in the parsley. Add the chicoria leaves to the oil and braise until slightly soft before adding the beans. Put three quarters of the beans into a food processor with some of the reserved cooking liquid. And the mixture should be thicker and thicker. and return to the saucepan and season. Reheat. If too thick, add more cooking liquid. Serve with a generous amount of extra virgin olive oil. Well, that just sounds... And I've already tried it. Generally be with a chicken rift.

4:28God, how am I going to be able to eat all that? Oh, my God. That looks delicious. I think I'm going to switch plates now from the sea bass to, I'd say this is kind of River Cafe Georgian Lobby O 'Beans. Of course, people always compare Georgia, which is one of my favourite countries, to Italy, especially to Sicily. And the food there is a real mixture of Lebanese, Iranian, Persian and Italian. And they're basically my two favourite countries in terms of food. So this soup is the ideal mix. Hi, hi, hi. I want to take it home with me. Can I? Can I take it home? Joseph, Joseph made it. Joseph, it is absolutely delicious.

5:09It's absolutely delicious. I cannot waste a single bean. It's so good. Anything you've got, I'll take. Thank you. I'm here with Joseph. This is a River Cafe classic recipe, is that right? It really is. It's in the yellow books, in the book two of our first books. And it's a real classic that we make. Almost every portion of the soup that I've ever eaten, Ruthie's made herself. And it really reminds me of her and arriving here and learning how to cook. You know, it's that. It's early days. River Cafe for me anyway. It's more in the maybe a bit more wintery. It's one of those recipes like many that it just has few ingredients you know so it has this tricoya which is a wonderful green which gets labeled a kind of bitter green but really when it's well cooked loses an awful lot of that bitterness and it's really rather sweet and then chili and then if you've got really lovely cannellini beans and that's kind of all it is but it's amazing how those combination of a few things can be tweaked in different ways and it can actually be rather rather different but it's you know it's one of those rather hearty quite thick country soups what do you think i absolutely loved it it's a delicious mixture italian hammersmith hammersmith what part would you say was the your part rufy the river cafe part and i love the way you've marked this up okay well it's yours to keep and because they because i found out i liked it so much i found out that they they had a bigger pot of it.

6:37So I'm taking that home with me if I'm allowed. You're allowed. By the cat from the grate of the River Cafe. So why did you choose it? I chose it because bean soup has played a big part in my life because I started off in the very early 90s with the fall of the Soviet Union and I was always in Georgia and Georgia became my favourite home from home. I was there for all its wars, its coups, its tragedies, but also I came to love its food. And the heart of its food, the heart of Georgian cuisine is the bean soup. And Lobbyé bean soup is the national Georgian dish, one of them, along with satsi, the khadjapuri, and all these other delicious dishes.

7:18But in Georgia, they have the Georgian supra, which is a feast. And there's a tamada who's elected the Toastmaster. By the way, Stalin was always, of course, Toastmaster at his feasts. But he was a Georgian. But of course, normally, the Toastmasters are a little bit more benign than that. What does a Toastmaster do? He tells stories, he makes toasts. Quite often, he goes around the table and clinks glasses with different people. Basically, what's unique about the Tamadan is that he's a storyteller as well, which brings us back, which is why I thought food and stories. But, you know, I had many, when I was there, the Soviet Union was falling apart.

8:00This is 1990. 1989, 1990, 1991 to sort of 94. And I was very lucky. I'd been an investment banker, believe it or not. I left investment banking and I went out there. And I was in all the wars of the former Soviet Union. But some of my favorite moments were in Georgia, eating Lobby O 'Beans. Once I remember in the Ossetian War in 1990, Ossetia is north of Tbilisi. It's a region that broke away from Georgia and was backed by Putin and is still backed by Putin. But I went up to the war and I was with the Georgian side. And we were up at the top on this kind of amazingly beautiful mountain with these amazing Georgian churches on the mountaintops.

8:43And the fighters all lent their guns against the tree. and a bit, so I was kind of imagining I was in a Heming, you know, for whom the bell tolls. It was a bit like that. And there was this huge table laid out for a Georgian. That's interesting that during, you know, the fighting, they had a table for a feast. Well, three boys had been killed in the village. So this was their funeral supper. So we all sat down and the Tatamada took control. We all made toasts and everyone got drunk and drunk and the food, more and more food kept arriving. and then after a bit I said to them, you know, you've got to imagine we're on the top of this mountain, the blue sky in the distance and I said to them, you know, I guess the funeral happened earlier because the, you know, the boys were buried earlier I guess, this is their funeral supper and they said no, they're with us and they lifted up the tablecloth and their bodies were under the table.

9:35So you can see why I have a visceral feeling for Georgian feasts. Would it be very regional food? Did you find that Georgia is very different from Chechnya, which is different from... Very. The Caucasus is fascinating because it's the sort of borderland of empires. So there's a huge Persian influence. They controlled it for a long time. There's a huge Ottoman Turkish influence. They controlled it for a long time. And then the Russians. And now, of course, it's three independent republics. And Chechnya tried to break away. And I was in the Chechen war in 1994 so I witnessed all this amazing stuff happening there's nothing like Georgian food and Georgian food it does have a touch of Lebanese food is that the Persian food yeah Persian Arab and Turkish but it's it's not like any other because it's filled with coriander and tarragon and walnut and ajika which is sort of chili sauce it's very original it's not like anything else I think you'd love it Zada who's with me has a brother-in-law Jason Osborne and And he's Georgian.

10:36And he's actually doing the Georgian Film Festival, he called me this morning, and has very, very strong roots in Georgia. And brought me a cookbook with a chef who had written it. And it was so interesting. It was beautifully done, first of all. It had a sense of the culture. And then it had the cooking. There are dumplings, a lot of dumplings, too. Yeah, they have dumplings, which I forgot the name of. But all the dishes have a sort of role. And in that way, Georgian food, it's almost like there's a story behind many of the dishes. It's not quite like a Passover Seda night. But the Georgian Supra, that's the thing it's most similar to, is a Passover dinner.

11:16Because of the storytelling. And of course, Stalin used to sit up with his cronies and have these Georgian feast. I think you alluded to the fact that he was a good eater. That he was interested in food. He loved Georgian food. His real name was Joseph Jugashvili. Many Georgian names end in Adzi or Shvili, which means son of. And he came from Gori, which is a small town in Georgia. Until he was about 30 or 40, he was completely Georgian. He spoke Georgian. But his mother, who was very ambitious for him, and she wanted to be a bishop or an archbishop, because she was very religious, she got him into the seminary in Tbilisi, which is where he was trained to be a priest.

11:56There they were taught Russian, very good Russian. And if he hadn't been taught Russian, He could never rule the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union. Do you speak? Yeah, I can tell. Well, I can tell when you're naming the soups and the names. If you speak Georgian, you have to learn. It's nothing to do with Russian. No, it's nothing to do with it. It even has a different alphabet. And they have an amazing history. In the 11th, 12th, 13th century, Georgia was a huge kingdom. And at one point, under the great Queen Tamara, who's another great female ruler who I write all about in the world book, It ruled from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea and was one of the great powers of the Near East under a female ruler, which is quite something.

12:37So going back to Stalin and being a good eater, when you were writing your book about him, what did you find out about his food? He loved Lobbio and he loved Kajapuri and he loved all the soups. He loved Chakapuli, which is the lamb stew. And he used to put Georgian bread in it, soak it and eat it. He was a great trencherman. One of his few winning features, I should say. But the interesting thing about Stalin was he reinvented himself several times. I mean, he became Stalin, which means Man of Steel, in about 1912. And before then, he'd been basically Georgian. And Stalin is a kind of Russian-style name.

13:18And so he really invented himself. He was kind of always a Georgian in terms of kind of eating and drinking. He loved Georgian wine, for example. And the thing he really loved was Georgian singing. because Stalin, surprisingly, was the star choir boy of the seminary. His falsetto was supposed to be the most beautiful falsetto, very high and very pure. And when his voice broke, he became a tenor. And even when he was dictator, even during the terror or just after the war or during the war, he liked to sing to piano. And he used to sing, there's a very famous Georgian song called Sulico, which his speciality was singing there.

13:55So he was this rather sinister choir boy. A choir boy. Going back to the beginning, tell me about growing up in the Montefiore household. My father was a doctor who was also a psychiatrist. He had a very fascinating practice. So we grew up in a very kind of strange household because the surgery was under the house in Kensington. He had all sorts of patients. He was the sort of person that saw lots of people for free. But also he had people like Peter Sellers and Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. and they actually did a sketch about him. Did they? Yeah, because whatever you said to my father, whatever terrible thing you'd done as a child, he'd always say, don't worry, Simon, that's perfectly normal.

14:35Oh, that's what you want from a psychiatrist. And a father. Five cents, please. Yeah, and a father. So their sketch is, there's a sketch where they go to a psychiatrist based on my father and everything they say to him, he says, don't worry, that's perfectly normal. Can I just ask, what's the connection between the Montefiore Hospital and the Montefiore family. Go back, because I tried to do your family treat. I would say to Michael Ignatieff, who was a mutual friend of ours, that his family killed my family, probably. Yes, yes. They were very white Russians, and my family were the, you know, the fiddle-around-the-roof family that came from the poor village.

15:10No, but we don't have a hospital named after ours, so there might be a diversion somewhere. So just go back to the roots, because I think it goes into the 18th century, your family. It goes even further. So maybe I can trace mine back to about 1906. So I think it's quite different. But tell me about that. Well, my mother's family are from Lithuania. Yeah. Like yours, right? Yeah. How do you live? Oh, you're from Kiev. So we were Litvacs and some of them for Odessa and some of them from Galicia. And Galicianas are notorious, which were Jews from Galicia, which is sort of southern Poland, around Lvov, which is now in Ukraine.

15:46Yeah, yeah. And Galicianos were famous playboys, notorious womanizers and boulevardiers. And food? And they loved food. They were sensuous. Usually they go together, don't they? They were sensuous. Boulevardiers and, you know. You know what they were? They were Epicureans. Yeah, nice. Notorious. And so that's my mother's family. But they were interesting because they got out when all the pogroms began in 03, 04. Yeah, mine too. Just around the same time as little. We may have been on the same boat. Yeah, but yours got off in England and mine went to Ellis Island, right? Well, mine were tricked.

16:17We bought tickets for Ellis Island. Oh, dear. After about two days at sea, they said, I'm afraid that you're getting off here. And so my family said, but hang on a second, we bought tickets for New York, and we haven't seen the Statue of Liberty. And they said, sorry, look at your tickets. And they looked at the tickets, and they said, that's not New York. It's New Cork. New Cork. Yeah, which is Ireland. They were tricked. So they got off there. But the Montefiores have a longer story. So that's your father's family, yeah. My father's family. And they would come, the sea bags came from Morocco.

16:53Sebach. Sebach. So that's an Arabic name. And the Montefiores were originally called, we think, called Carvillau, which was Spanish. And they were expelled from Spain in 1492. They went to Portugal. And in Portugal, they were expelled in 1498. So they went back to Spain and converted to Catholicism. But they were only pretending. They were crypto-Jews. And when Philip II was trying to recruit governors to govern New Spain, which was Mexico, he gave them the job of governing a huge province. But there was a feud. They were denounced by their servants who spied on them. And they were denounced for secretly being Jews.

17:33And most of the family were burnt alive in Mexico City. It's very sinister because when you read about these... This is after Cortez. After Cortez, yeah. This is about 1600. and one son got away and went to Italy and adopted the name Montefiore. Ah, because it sounds sort of, is it so Italian? It's Tuscan. It's Tuscan. Interesting. Yeah. So you grew up in this household. A mother from, his family's from Lithuania. Your father felt, did he identify very strongly with being Jewish? Yes, the family was a very Jewish family. But my father's family, the Seabag Montefiores, were sort of fox-hunting Jews.

18:12They were very different. Well, my mother's family, she would kill me for saying this, but they were shtetl Jews from Lithuania and Poland and so on. And your mother's mother, then, she would have been born in Lithuania? Did she cook Lithuanian food? No, they didn't cook Lithuanian, but they didn't really eat latkes and bagels. But chicken soup was key. I remember when I was a child, my parents had a huge row once. And my father was being impossible. and my mother just got a thing of chicken soup and poured it over his head. Was it hot? It was not that hot, luckily. But then they started laughing.

18:48Good for a psychiatrist, right? Did his psychiatrist say that's normal? Did he say that's normal? I think he would say that was perfectly normal. Kitchen behavior. I don't know if that happens in your kitchen, Rufy. No, we don't. No, we stop short of pouring soup over people. So your father would be downstairs with his patients. Would there be family meals? would there be? How many siblings do you have? I've got three brothers. I'm the youngest of the whole family. We were always aware that the surgery was going on downstairs. And we were always told, never repeat anything that you see in this house, because it would ruin your father.

19:20But they were very open. So we knew all the stuff that was happening. And all sorts of crazy stuff happened. People will kind of arrive in the middle of the night, but they're sort of having had a row with their wife or, you know, somebody was giving birth to a baby or something. It was like growing up in a theatre. It was very exciting. But you would have, would he come up for dinner in the evening? He'd come up for dinner. And who did the cooking? My mother did the cooking and there'd be, there'd always be delicious kind of food, but not really Jewish food, actually very English food, like roast chickens, roast lamb.

19:51Yeah. So she was born in... She was born in England. She was born in Nottingham or Newcastle. Her grandfather was the first Jewish Lord Mayor elected in Newcastle and he ran for he ran for Lord Mayor and when he was campaigning, they used to say, we hear you lie in bed all day. And he replied, so would you if you were married to Mrs. Wolfe. Oh. Which worked very well. Was it? It won in the election. That's nice. It won in the election. And I've got her picture in my room and she does look quite attractive. Someone who'd want to stay in bed and not be campaigning. Was food important though? Was it the family meal that was important?

20:30Food was all important. Food was all important. And we're absolute Epicureans, Ruthie, and we absolutely live for food. And we love delicious food and hate bad food. Did your father cook? No, he never cooked. Never. He never cooked. Did your mother have help? She did have help. Domestic people. She did have help. And it was all about meals. And everything happened at meals. And I still live for eating. Yeah. And then your boarding school, was that a shock? That was a shock. Yeah, why? That was a shock. Well, the food was appalling for a start. But on the other hand, my parents were so kind of overindulgent.

21:03And I think if I hadn't gone to boarding school, I'm not sure I'd ever been able to function at all in the world. I mean, I was so close to my parents because I was eight years younger. I was an afterthought. You were the youngest one. If not a mistake, you know. And then boarding school. And because I was Jewish, I had to have special food. I remember once going to the kitchen and there was a very old lady plucking a chicken. And they said, that's your food. because that's all you can eat Were there other Jewish children there? No, there were virtually no other Jewish children at my prep school and then at Harrow there were quite a lot of Jewish children If you like listening to Ruthie's Table 4 would you please make sure to rate and review the podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts Thank you

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22:47Plus, they're earth-friendly and trusted by over 200 ,000 happy customers. It's time to upgrade to a stress-free, mess-proof sofa. Visit washablesofas.com today and save. That's washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. Parking shouldn't slow you down. ParkWiz gives every driver a shortcut. Book ahead, save up to 50%, and skip the hassle of circling the block. Park smarter, park faster. ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. You are now a historian, but in the beginning, Did you feel that sense that you had to not just write about what was happening, but live it?

23:28Yeah, I wrote long letters about describing everything I saw in the mines, the politics. And of course, I worked in a kibbutz as well in Israel. And that was also fascinating. And I saw amazing things there as well, because that was the beginning of the invasion of Lebanon, which was an appalling mistake on the Israelis' part. So both of those things were good preparations. And the third adventure I went on was going to visit Jewish refuseniks in Russia, in the Soviet Union, with my father. Was that the first time you went? Yes. Right. And that was the beginning of my relationship with Russia.

24:01And so all of these things kind of were good preparations. What year was that? 84. 84, I was going to say, it was the early 80s. I went with Richard to Moscow. He was chairman of the Tate at the time. and the idea was to go with the director to try and get an exchange of turners that Britain would give them for the, and I'm sure you've seen them, the Matisse. Fascinating, yeah. In the Hermitage, that was in Leningrad. And we ate nothing. I wanted to have the borscht, I wanted to have the Russian food, but it was quite severe. There was food shortages. It was miserable, really. But did you discover good Russian food when you were there?

24:40No, I didn't find any more food. I mean, I love sterlet fish, sturgeon. Yeah, sturgeon, yeah. And that is, you know, those are fish that sort of mainly live in the Caspian. Yeah. And they create caviar, of course. But Prince Potemkin loved sturgeon. He was obsessed with sturgeon. He used to continually roast sturgeon wherever he went. And he had it brought for him, packed in ice, of course, all for hundreds of miles. But we didn't have any of that when we were there. But when I went back later, after boarding school, I went to Cambridge. Okay, let's talk about that for a moment. What was it? Did you live in rooms and did you eat again?

25:16I live in rooms. I ate in the dining room sometimes. But what I really loved doing was eating. There was a great Turkish kebab house there. And we lived in there. And it was called Omar and Ozzy. And Omar and Ozzy are very key figures in my university years. So that was the sort of best food we had. We used to go there every night. And we lived on that delicious food. and whenever I travel anywhere I want to experience the food and you know one of the reasons why I've often written about family history I mean all of these books like the Romanovs or the world is just because family is a way of writing conveying continuity but also depth and grit of life and so I always wanted my books people to know what people were wearing what music they listened to and what food they were eating, hopefully, if I could find out.

26:08Food is what families do together. Even sort of families that's barely hang together still eat together normally, don't they? Pre-1917, that would be the Roman, am I correct? Yeah, the Romanovs, yeah. Was there a real sense of pleasure in food for wealthy people? I mean, what would the Romanovs, what would the aristocracy have eaten? Well, I mean, they love French food, of course. And they all had French chefs who they brought over. they would have eaten all these splendid proper Russian dishes, borscht. What are they? Yeah, let's talk about the real borscht. Well, borscht is very garlicky with beetroot.

26:41Do you like it hot or cold? And spices and ginger. I like it hot. Yeah. How do you like it? Well, my experience of Russian food was, there was none of that in our house. But my father is a treat. He'd drive us maybe once every couple of months. And we'd go down to New York City and we'd see the big ships. and then we would go to the Russian Tea Room for lunch before seeing a musical. And what would you eat there? And so we would have the blinis. And I think you could have the choice of cold or hot borscht. I prefer hot as well. You can really feel the flavors much more, don't you? I think it's delicious.