The Food That Shaped Us… Kamala Harris, Sadiq Khan, Ab Rogers, Marina Hyde and Richard Osman, and Rashida Jones.

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:34Ab Rogers:Would you like to tell everybody what you had for breakfast when you came to the River Cafe this morning? I had the most exquisite breakfast. A beautiful slice of home-baked bread that was toasted just to perfection with burrata. just a nice slice that was melting and just kind of just being. And then the most exquisite slices of cured anchovy with slices on the side of heirloom tomato. I was in heaven. I was in heaven.

1:20Ab Rogers:The food we eat when we're young stays with us forever. And this special episode celebrates these memories. Kamala Harris, Mearsideen Khan, Abe Rogers, Marina Hyde, Richard Osman, and Rashida Jones tell us their stories. My mother said to me when I was young, and you can tell the kids that like to eat good food, right? And my mother said to me, I'll never forget, she said, you like to eat good food, you better learn how to cook. Yeah, I agree. People ask me why did I start cooking? There's a point. Either if you don't have the money to go out to a restaurant every night and you want to eat well, well, then you learn to cook.

2:04I have the apron. I got it from a friend, and it says, I like to cook the food people like to eat. Yeah.

2:12Ab Rogers:So when did you start cooking? When did that? When I was a kid. Well, I remember one of the first things that I would make, we would wake up early, mommy's sleeping, and I would make scrambled eggs and I'd make it into a circle on a plate. And then I would cut Monterey Jack or cheddar cheese to make a smiley face melted on top of the scrambled eggs. What age are we talking about? That's so sweet. six seven yeah and you bring it to your and here's the thing about yeah my mother did not like eating breakfast but she was like don't talk to mommy before she had her cup of coffee right but tell me about a day in your house would you all have breakfast how many were you in the house it was the three of us my mother and my sister and me because my parents divorced when i was five and it was usually my mother would start cooking like Saturday morning mmm for the week make for the week how well and I'd wake up kind of just smelling the food and just kind of just half asleep going into the kitchen and and you know that's the thing about cooking right it really is all the senses it's literally all the senses.

3:31It includes the sense of sound. Sound and smell. And of course smell and sight and flavor and taste. It's all of those things.

3:40Ab Rogers:Would she repeat? Did you know that Monday was lasagna and Tuesday was Chinese dumplings? No, no, no. She would just make the food. Sometimes she would, because she worked. She worked long days. She did Saturdays because she had to work. We always had fresh baked cookies or a cake in the house. She was phenomenal. And she loved to cook. loved it yeah to cook and sometimes she would look at us and she say okay girls tonight we are having smuggers board we get so damn excited about smuggers boy do you know smuggers board was that's a Danish buffet well open sandwiches or something what it was what it was I was just that's a Danish yeah is that she would take cookie cutters and cut the bread into heart and flower shapes she'd get those toothpicks with the little colors on them.

4:30And she'd put little mayonnaise in a thing, mustard in a thing, and pull out all the leftovers. And we were having smog as poor. All the leftovers, but it was fun. My grandparents came at the beginning of this.

4:49Ab Rogers:They were part of the Ellis Island migration from Budapest, from Hungary, from Kiev. And they, again, the men came first by boat, you know, if you imagine that journey. My grandmother, one of my grandmothers, they had seven children. She was a seamstress. My other one was a seamstress. My other grandmother was a kind of union organizer, apparently. She got jobs, you know, making ties. And she was very political. Is that where you get your politics from, is it? Probably, yeah. And she was a great cook. She used to apparently used to bring her rolling pin wherever she went. She didn't trust any of her daughter-in-laws to make a strudel.

5:29Ab Rogers:But I just think what this shows is a parallel of two families, people who leave their families, come to a new country, and work and take care of their kids. And how much do we celebrate these people who have that?

5:43Sadiq Khan:You know this from your family history. Actually, anybody who's taken a conscious decision to leave home, travel thousands of miles, is not going to go and sit in their bum. They're going to work hard. they've got to work i think if you want a job done ask an immigrant that's a great line in hamilton um but that's the story of america and actually of london i mean london over the last 2 000 years it was originally called londinium during the roman times it's grown and evolved and it's now in my view the greatest city in the world because of successive generations of migrants what's fascinating about london it goes back to your rolling pin story my mom's got a rolling pin she makes chapati roti with her right she doesn't trust either her sons or a daughter or a daughter to make raw tea she makes it herself um but evokes memory from evokes memory from a mom of being back home the food yeah because she was incredibly homesick i mean even now she misses uh pakistan but it's but food brings it back the food brings it back

6:33Ab Rogers:and she could cook it here and she could make it and she could yeah we should mother too i've got

6:37Sadiq Khan:i've got really fond memories when i was living at home as a child during the month of ramadan you have a meal a meal just before dawn and you fast all day and they have a meal at dusk and my mum had been fasting all day she'd get up before dawn to prep you know half the job in cooking is prep right dawn breakfast was around 3 o 'clock she must have got up at 1 30 so she's you know getting the flour ready making getting the the the rotis ready and I'd wake up with the smell by hand also when I was growing up everything was fresh I mean it's either of even you can you can cheat now if you're making a curry and get plum tomatoes in a tin no no they're fresh tomatoes you chop them up you stew them for a while um and so i'd wake up with a smell of what's called paratha a version of chapatis but with potatoes in the middle of it she'd make fresh paratha i could smell the omelet being made um and we'd go downstairs and she'd been up an hour and a half before us we'd all have um pre-dawn breakfast she would have a pre-dawn breakfast we'd go to school or whatever we come back up and have a nap because we're starving hungry my mom would be cooking while she's fasting uh uh you know fast breaking meal which were fresh samosa fresh bakora you know um silence uh curries um rice there's two things you learn to do when you're uh raising the khan family one is eat fast oh uh is that because you had so many siblings yeah if you want seconds and two is to talk quickly.

8:08Sadiq Khan:So if you want to be heard or if you want to eat, you talk fast and eat quickly.

8:13Ab Rogers:Do you remember going to restaurants? Yeah, I remember going to Chinese, going to Mr. Chow's, to kind of go into Chinese restaurants, Pizza Express. Yeah, a lot of that. Definitely, with you and Richard. And going to restaurants, yeah, in Paris. Yeah. I also remember those holidays where we would live in a boathouse and you would cook, you know, sardines. I mean, it was a very, it was not a lavish existence. That was in Filacudi, wasn't it? In Filacudi, we lost the house. We had the keys to the house. We had a map to take us to the house. We had three children. I was pregnant. It was boiling art.

8:45Ab Rogers:And we stayed there for three weeks and we never found the house. No. And so. I know where the house is now. I have found the house since. You have found the house. It does exist. So we stayed in this room, which we thought was going to be one night and ended up being sort of three weeks. But I think we did eat. You know, we ate from the sea. We ate from the land. Yeah, completely. And so I think that probably part of your childhood and growing up with that exposure. I mean, Richard couldn't cook, but he would gather. We'd go to the sea urchins, we would get prickly pears. We'd be covered in splinters.

9:12Ab Rogers:There was a time that, I think it was you, that had been going every single day down to the harbor to try and fish and catch a fish. And every day we had this little fishing rod. I think maybe it was Drew or it was you. And we'd stand there for hours. And one day we just thought we can't go on any longer. So we bought a fish, a little fish in the fish market. And then you dove down underneath the fishing and attached it to the fishing rod. And he pulled it up and he said, there's my fish. What's they doing down there? Don't worry, it's fine. It's swimming. So they attached it to the rod and he pulled it up.

9:47Ab Rogers:Of course, what he didn't really caught on to was that it was a dead fish. And so then he was so proud. It was a sardine. So it was this big. It had been gutted. And we brought the fish back to the house. And then by that time, Ru was so attached to it, he wouldn't let us cook it. And so he slept with it. For three nights. And we were all sleeping in one room. So it started to really, really smell. And this dried, freckly fish. And we had to persuade him to let the fish go. And it was going to go back to his mom. He wasn't well. His mom was going to make him better. Maybe we had to go to hospital.

10:20Yeah, we had to add a funeral. Oh, he said to back it. And we launched it back into the sea. And this rigor mortis, completely stiff.

10:26Ab Rogers:Did your parents entertain? Did you grow up with dinner parties in your house? Did you have? No. They never really did that. And actually, we never went out. No, I think it was expensive and we didn't go out. But my mother sort of hated cooking and sort of still does, but cooked every single meal. But we had about five dishes on rotation. And they were called funny things. Some of them were like obvious what they were. It was like kidneys and rice or spaghetti bolognese. Some of the things were called things like chicken in a mess with rice. So there were all of those things. But when I was coming here, I was thinking, my gosh, you know, if I was giving the honest sort of that account of all those things, there were certain moments and you look back to them.

11:05Remember the shop Bee Jam? I remember. I had a Saturday job in Bee Jam. You didn't? It was the precursor to Iceland. Yeah. I was going to say, was that a freezer? It's a shop that sold freezers and also things that went in freezers. So clever. One stop shop. Very clever. Fill it up and I'll take it. Aesthetically, it's a nothing experience. But for a certain type of woman who did not want to cook particularly, those chests were treasure chests. And in them were things like, I mean, I remember the first time we saw a vionetta, we were like, how could such a thing be created? And look so perfect and retain it.

11:40I mean, the answer, of course, was a little ultra processed or whatever. But at the time, we didn't know any of these things and we lived in blissful ignorance. No one's ever topped the vionetta. Well, Sarah Lee's had a good go, I tell you. Talking of ultra high processed food, one of the greatest moments of the 1970s was when they brought out Ice Magic. Do you remember Ice Magic? Yeah. So Ice Magic, you'd have some, you know, Sainsbury's vanilla ice cream and you'd get the squeezy bottle that was chocolate flavoured. And you would pour this, you know, squeeze out this chocolate sauce and it would instantly form like a hard crust.

12:18Again, sorcery. Like a chocolate bomb. Yeah. Yeah. There are some things even now that I think if they hadn't existed in the 70s and someone, if you went to a restaurant and someone showed that to you, you go, this is the greatest act of gastronomy in the history of restaurants. But they were so far ahead of the curve. I think the best ice cream flavor, I don't know if you agree with me, Ruthie, and I don't think there's any argument with this. I think the best ice cream flavor is mint choc chip. Oh, my God. I'm so embarrassed for you.

12:42Ab Rogers:Oh, OK. Are you going to say Strachatella or something? No, you'd be really surprised what I'm going to say. Oh, amazing. I really love vanilla ice cream. Wow. You know, it's kind of boring. We should get some. Do you want some ice cream? We could have some ice cream. Yeah, yeah. Why not? This is the best podcast ever. Tell me about your family. Tell me about the kitchen. Tell me about the house. My parents loved food. My dad especially loved food. And he loved food from kind of every culture. Anytime I traveled with my dad, it was like a sojourn to get something amazing. like you know he loves like chay lomi louis louis yeah does he loved love love love um he's the first person who exposed me to soul mounier or you know he loved he just loved food um because that probably that again was not part of his background no you know no it was something he did and he traveled a lot in his 20s to europe and to the middle east he worked for the state department he was in the state department band was dizzy gillespie and so he What years would that be?

13:50Ab Rogers:1950s, early 1950s. Isn't it great there was a State Department band? I wonder if that exists anymore. I doubt it. I doubt it. I don't know for sure, but I doubt it. But he traveled everywhere, and for him it was language, food, and the kind of beauty of being out of the United States. Do you think your grandparents fed him? Were they interested? Do you remember your grandparents? I do. I didn't know my grandfather. I knew my grandmother. And no, it wasn't like, I think his relationship with food probably came from an absence of food in his own childhood. My dad was such a lover of life and culture and food.

14:32And, you know, he just loved beautiful, delicious things. So I think that came from not having that.

14:38Ab Rogers:Your mother was Jewish. My mom was Jewish. And my dad loved soul food. He also loved his favorite dish, which is so weird because it's like German, I think, was chicken, potatoes, and sauerkraut. So we had that at least once a week. So was your house full of people? Filled with musicians. Yeah, filled with musicians. Really awesome. And what was that like for you? So great. I feel like my sister and I talk about this all the time. And we feel so lucky that our house was filled with music and artists and people who value that, obviously. But also, for our assessment, and I think empirically, the best music.

15:20I feel like my dad's taste, my dad's sophistication, even though he made Thriller, which is the biggest album that ever sold ever in the world, when he was 50. and so he didn't like he was he was you know successful but he wasn't famous he wasn't world renowned in the same way that he was by the time i was eight so that kind of happened when i was a kid that that was like happening um which is you know changes things but but the point is that he brought all of the richness and sophistication of his early jazz days into his like pop world or into our pop world, which is like a real gift for the world.

16:08A gift.

16:08Ab Rogers:A huge gift. And with being a child in that atmosphere, were you, so you weren't shy, you weren't waiting on the stairs, you know, for them to go home. You were, would you be involved? Yeah. I was there. Everybody was engaged. You were totally social and relaxed because my parents were very relaxed. Everybody felt invited and warm. I was actually talking to a family friend the other day who was like a little younger than my parents. And he was just saying how much he loved coming to their house because it was like, oh, this is what you can have as a family. You can invite all your friends. And it's not stiff.

16:43It's not formal. You just come, you relax, and you laugh a lot. And the kids are welcome and all the different generations are welcome. And, yeah, I've always loved that, which is, by the way, why I love what you do. Because that is the kind of – that's the mandate is everybody come and feel relaxed and at home and welcome. Yeah.

17:10Ab Rogers:Ruthie's Table 4 is now a book. Paul McCartney, Michael Caine, Kamala Harris, David Beckham, Tina Fey, Elton John, and many more. It's full of stories, beautifully designed in a celebration of the way food connects us all. It's available now wherever you buy your books. if your bookshelf and your for you page are equally important to your personality welcome home pro society is a weekly podcast that's part book club part group chat for anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse each week we're connecting the dots between books the internet and pop culture with your favorite writers book talk creators and plenty of overthought opinions yeah i'm obsessed i'm Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

18:25Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.