Trudie Styler

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1:00at washablesofas.com. Authors are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. Here we are. Oh, this now is getting very official. I sit there. I go here. Yeah. So it's easy. You're on the red chair. Yeah, have a seat.

1:21Oh, my headphones. Yeah. Yeah, you've got headphones. Okay. Do I put my hands on to it? Yes, of course. I'll bring you in and be with you. Okay. I've always lived with and loved Only Connect, E.M. Foster's epigraph in his novel, Howard's End, expressing the moral importance of connections between people. And this is one of the reasons I'm so happy to have Trudy Styler, producer, actress, activist, farmer, here today, for she and I are connected. Trudy and I are both passionate about the landscape, wine, Trudy has her own vineyard, food, and history of Southern Tuscany, where every summer we fill our houses with our children, our children's friends, and our friends' children, occupying every bed and making space for yet another chair around the big table.

2:15So here we are. Trudy has stories to tell, a recipe for grouse she's chosen, and knowledge about all that she produces. Trudy is a woman I admire, a woman I adore. What a connection. Hello, Ruthie. Hello, Trudy. I'm crying. Okay. It's been a long time since I've seen you. I know. You chose, of all the recipes in all our books, the grouse. Yes, I'm very excited about roast grouse from the River Cafe. One grouse, plucked and cleaned, and 250 mils of aliatico di pulia. So, preheat the oven to 230 C. place the grouse in a roasting tin and roast for 20 to 30 minutes. Depending on the size and how rare you like your grouse we serve them slightly pink.

3:06The easiest way to test for doneness is to pull the leg away from the body at the thigh. Remove from the oven and leave the bird to rest for two to three minutes. Remove and untie the string. Heat the roasting tin over a medium high heat, add the remaining wine and reduce by half, return the bird to the tin and turn to coat it in the juices, then serve. This is delicious served with braised cabolo nero.

3:39Can I introduce Sean Wynowen, who is the executive brilliant chef at the River Cafe, and she knows more about grouse than probably either of us or even a grouse, don't you Sean? and everything else so we can talk with Sean as well. What do you think about grass? Is it your, of the game birds, is it your favourite, Sean? I think it's when you get them in August, September, before they've become high and really aged, they're very perfumed and you can really taste what the grouse feed on, for example, like heathers and little berries and you can almost imagine the hills that they've eaten off and you can really taste that in the flesh.

4:23Yeah, well, I can't wait because this really is the bird that I have never, and don't ask me why I've never tasted grouse, but I haven't. So when I saw it on the menu, it was like, this is for me today. Yeah. Brave. Yeah, it's good. And when you cook it, what do you think? If Trudy wanted to go home and cook a grouse, would you say to be brave as well? I think in English restaurants people cook the game very pink. But I think in the way we cook at the River Cafe, if you think of dishes like a Rosto Misto in Italy where things might go on an open fire and cook for longer, you can cook the meat slightly more.

5:05We also put bruschetta, really, just for the juices. Today we're doing it with a massive big tomato like a Sorrento tomato. and a bit of brunello, actually, and cook all that with the grouse. And the tomato works with the grouse at this time of year because the grouse isn't too strong. Why does it get more pungent as it goes on this year? I think if it's hung. So once it's being shot, they'll hang them for a while and they seem to get more punchy. And I'm sure that's why they would have served them in gentlemen's clubs followed by cigars. because Richard, my husband, used to come in and always, embarrassingly to me, always say, I'd like a grouse to the waiter, and I'd like it really well hung, a well hung grouse, which could have another connotation.

5:56Richard wants his grouse well hung. I was like, okay. But he liked it. He liked it when a friend of mine once told me that Peter Rice told me that he was sent a grouse, and it was over the holiday, and so it just sat in the post office of some Irish small town and then he went home and cooked it. He said it was the best grouse he'd ever had but just been probably about to disintegrate. It was so old. So this recipe for grouse seems to not be something that you might have eaten in your childhood because I know that you had a very different kind of childhood probably from your children's and so maybe we should go back to the very early days.

6:38What was it like growing up in your family, food-wise? Well, I was born in the Midlands, in the West Midlands, in a little village called Stoke Briar, near to a town called Bromsgrove, near to the county of Worcestershire. And so we were brought up on a council house estate in Worcestershire, where sort of being post-war, I was born in the mid-50s, there was still this feeling of people had to conserve and preserve. My mum could go to the butchers just once a week for the roast, the Sunday roast. And then the Sunday roast was made to stretch throughout the week. And she was very inventive with how she could stretch it.

7:20And in fact, I became a lover of offal, which I preferred over the Sunday roast, just because it was just very flavourful. And so we would have liver and onions and kidneys that she'd sauté with some mushrooms. and then we would have, do you know what faggots are or savary ducks? Because my mother was from the north. I always get confused about faggots. What are faggots? So faggots were... Like a sausage? So no, it was using up the rest of the joint that hadn't been used on a Sunday. So you could use cooked meats or if you hadn't got enough to stretch for three kids, in our case, and mum and dad, then you'd buy some sausages.

8:02and then raw onion, lots of raw onions were used and I got the job of being her apprentice to mince everything up and then she would buy a pig's bladder and then the cooked meats and raw sausage meat with the onions, salt and pepper wrapped up in the bladder, the pig's bladder and into the oven it went and was utterly delicious. But also, the way you describe her, to take that effort, you know, to do that, she could have easily made kind of cold beef sandwiches or done lots of other things with the leftover joint. But that she actually did that work was, you know, to get the pig's bladder and to make the faggots.

8:46It's a show. But I think it was really, you know, at the time living in rural England, you had a butcher who had every part of the animal and nothing was ever wasted because, you know, now we have, you know, so-called superfoods. I live in New York and so, oh, let's have bone broth, you know, bone broth. But we were having bone broth because my mum made stock from big animals' bones and she would make soups from her stock. And that was very typical of the time, I think. Did you sit down for dinner as a family every night? Yeah. Did she work during the day? Yes, she worked. She was the school dinners lady.

9:29Have you had faggots? Yes. Did you ever make them? No, but my mum was saying, had that kind of post-war kind of faggot, do you think, with faggots. And I vaguely remember having gravy on. Did she also cook one big roast and then do that with it? My mum did, yeah. And then in Welsh, actually, the day Thursday actually translates into liver day, and that was a day you just have liver. Oh, really? I love liver, but I like very pale veal liver. Really, really subtle. Bring on the blood, I say. Sheep's liver, I think, would be normal for us to have lamb's liver sorry yes lamb's liver was the sort of the posh one yeah oh is it yes and pig's pig's liver was the cheapest one lamb's liver that's actually very tasty though pig's liver yeah very yeah yes and bigger yeah but also i have to say that before you know it's just that if you look at italian food you know the food of tuscany and in the winter particularly you'll make a minestrone on a you know one day and then you'll make ribolita and then you know you'll have tomatoes and then you make you know using the bread as a way of extending the the food again no waste you know that everything is always used was it you're only your mother who cooked or did your father we all I mean we were um three girls in in my family and uh dad worked in a lampshade factory and he was also as a school caretaker and I was also co-opted to help him which was always much more fun than helping mom sort of like because I got the washing up jobs But with Dad, I got to change into my overalls and sweep the playground with him.

11:15And in the summer, we were given permission from the headmistress to go into the orchard, which was part of our playing ground fields, and it was full of plums and apples. And we would put the ladders up against the trees and we would take home literally boxes of apples. and as we both rode bikes, we'd have to sort of do copious journeys to get the apples back. So we'd wrap up the apples in newspaper or brown paper. It was usually newspaper because we had the Daily Express every day, so we had piles of Daily Express papers, and they would all go under my bed. So under my bed, I would have throughout the winter, my little pals, these piles of apples.

12:01They'd smell? Does your room smell like an apple? Yes, they did smell like an apple. And then we would sort of start to use them through the winter bit by bit. But still by March they were going strong. Why wouldn't they go off? Because having them in a dark place, they didn't go off. But they did get a bit wrinkled. But it didn't stop Mum from being able to make, you know, baked apples. And she made so many apples. She made toffee apples for Walls Road. in November, November the 5th, bonfire night, she made all the kids in our street toffee apples from the purloined, with permission, apples that were under my bed.

12:46Yeah, that's nice, that's nice. We used to get sent out blackberry picking with a big tupperware thing and my mum would be like, you can't come home till it's full. And then she'd make, obviously, chutney, jam, and then apple crumble, apple pie. because you've got your, in your basket, you've got the suet, haven't you? I was so impressed that you grew up with this family. Have you come across a tour or a suet in your... No. I grew up in upstate New York, you have to remember, Woodstock. Trudy arrived in the River Cafe with a basket, a beautiful basket, and I would like you to tell Sean and I what's in this basket.

13:30Yes. So, Ruthie, this is called the Original Atora Shredded Beef Suet for fluffy dumplings, pastries, puddings, and pies. I think I'm going to throw up, yeah, but that's fine. That is a classic. I love very... So this is... By appointment to His Majesty. Okay, and actually I really like the packaging, if I'm allowed to say that, because it does look of its time, doesn't it? Beautiful. for so fluffy dumplings were one of the first things that my mom taught me to make and they couldn't be simpler to make because it's three ingredients it's a torah beef suet which is lard really it's sort of like made from the cow they've shredded it for you and it doesn't have to be refrigerated you just this is no i just keep it in the pantry and so you have uh say eight ounces of a Taurus suet, eight ounces of self-raising flour, pinch of salt, water, combine the lot.

14:25And then as your chicken casserole or chicken stew is bubbling away nicely, you put them in at the last 20 minutes. And so the gravies go into the dumplings, but the dumplings are rising because of the self-raising flour. They actually sort of like provided much needed carbs for kids It's in the growing up late 50s, 60s. So if you couldn't afford potatoes at the time, this was a very sort of cheap fare. Did you make them? Yeah. Yeah. What do you put them in? Do you put them in soup? In stews and soups. And, of course, I live in New York too now, so I have chicken soup and matzo balls. Matzo balls.

15:06I was going to say that I'm sure every culture has their dumpling. Chinese food has dumplings and Jewish food that I grew up with. my grandmother always made matzo balls. So matzo is that cracker. And there would be chicken soup and matzo balls. These are probably better. Have you cooked with suet? I mean, that is really familiar to me as well. My mum and my grandma used to make dumplings. It was such the most delicious thing. Yeah. Really yummy. Yeah, but it does sort of slightly explain. It's just pure saturated fat, isn't it? Yeah. Like nowadays, they probably have a health warning on them.

15:43like too many dumplings. I do think we need fat. 3 ,816 calories in 100 grams of this. So, yeah. They're so yummy. But then you could use that to make pudding as well, can't you? So you could make the suet puddings. Yeah, suet puddings, they're good. And so growing up, food was clearly important. There was a value to sitting down and having a meal. Yeah, I don't think my mum had it in her to open cans of things and make pies. I mean, Sting talks about his mum making fray bentos pies from cans of beef cubes and then making a pastry case, you know, and that's pretty inventive. But my mother was just what she'd say was a scratch cook.

16:33She would begin with the stock and she'd begin at the beginning. And the end of it was that we would sit down, even in a council house, with an embroidered tablecloth that she'd embroidered and sit together. It was important to her. Did you ever go to a restaurant? No. You'd never been in a restaurant? No, we went to a restaurant once with my nana that works cook, grandmother. And she brought us to, sort of it was like a lion's tea house. in cheshire and that was the first my first memory of being in a restaurant how old were you six seven something like that and i saw um somebody eating what looked like a plate of worms to me uh and it was they were these long long strands and it was red and i could not believe my eyes It's like, are they eating worms with all that red sauce?

17:37Is that the worm's blood? And I think back to that image. Was it spaghetti? Yes, it was spaghetti. And declaring I'll never eat that in my life, only to now. Sort of like spaghetti, aile olio, peperoncino is actually my favorite thing. And it's served every day in a house in Italy because I just love it so much. I could eat it all day long. Nice. You said that you had an accident you had to get through, which sounded very scary and very disabling. Yeah, I was only two and a half, so I'd toddled out of the house. My mum was bathing my younger sister, and I went down the stairs, and the little girl from over the street had called me to see if I could come over to her place and did I want to have a sweetie.

18:38So I said, oh, yes. And she was only about five herself, I think, and she took me over to their house. She got me a suite and I think her mother thought that I was going to be escorted back to our house and I wasn't. So I was crossing the road and a 15-year-old kid had jumped into a baker's van. The baker was delivering his bread and the kid had jumped into this lovely big van and knocked it from neutral into first and took the handbrake off and the truck started to, the van started to roll down the hill the same time that I was on the ground. And luckily the wheels missed me, otherwise I wouldn't be telling the story now.

19:36But the exhaust pipe caught me at the back of my head and dragged me along the street. So it was sort of like really taking off quite a lot of the left-hand side of my face. Do you have a memory of it? No, don't have a memory of it. What I do have a memory of, because it must be sort of deep in my cellular system of being fearful of the road. So, yes, being, I think growing up, you know, kids can be a bit cruel to children who look a bit different. And I did look a bit different as a youngster. You know, I had very livid marks on my face. but mum got a job as the school dinners lady and she sort of like, she was a very formidable looking woman my mum, she was about 15 and a half stones and was like nobody was going to mess with Pauline Styler so she protected me from a lot of unfair remarks that were being made

20:40Did you know the River Cafe has a shop? It's full of our favourite foods and designs We have cookbooks, linen napkins, kitchenware, tote bags with our signatures, glasses from Venice, chocolates from Turin. You can find us right next door to the River Cafe in London or online at shoptherivercafe.co.uk.

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21:50That's why over 200 ,000 happy customers have made the switch. Upgrade your space today. Visit washablesofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life. 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. So you grew up in a house that valued food, picking apples with your father. It seems like a very close childhood with a very severe trauma.

22:35What was it like when you left home, you know, when you decided to be an actor, right? Yeah, I decided to be an actor. Well, things weren't so good when I decided to be an actor with my dad and me because he was very fearful of, you know, what is that? Nobody in Walls Road has become an actor. And it was just an upsetting time because I was a headstrong 17-year-old who, you know, had been to a grammar school and had a great education and loved literature and loved everything to do with the performing arts. And I think it's a way to sort of like express myself too, that I felt that all those years of not knowing who I was was expressed through character.

23:20And so it was a very big passion to become somebody in the performing arts. What was his ambition for you? Did he want you to go to university? No, he wanted me to have a safe job that guaranteed a paycheck. And the Harris Brushworks was the paintbrush factory that was the closest to us. So he wanted me to get a job in the typing pool and make use of my grammar school education by an office job. Yeah, suddenly my life changed profoundly. being an actor, the student actor, going to Bristol, learning the arts, getting a job, sort of like going off to Manchester, so exploring areas in England. And then eventually, the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, I had a season at the warehouse when the Donmar was the RSC's other home other than the old which, and then they moved to the Barbican and put all the plays into the barbican um so you know the horizons just being opened and opened and opened with these these life experiences and then you know sort of then if we're talking food and wine sort of trying new uh new things traveling to morocco was a big change of scenery for me when when i was 18 hitchhiking through the country with my boyfriend and staying there for three months it was sort of like an amazing experience of first time I'd had Middle Eastern food so you know all these sights and sounds and smells are evocative aren't they to the the the country's palate and what they alike so you begin to be inclusive in your own diet of so many different flavors and tastes that you acquire with the years that go by i think it's exposure isn't it and i always think that one of the defining things for our families you know i know that my my grandparents were immigrants from russia and hungary so their their vision was very small so my father and mother were a product of that and grew and grew.

25:46But when I think about what my children are exposed to in terms of travel, experiences, food, restaurants, the exposure factor is so much greater than what I had. But did your father hold it against you? Did you see him? Was he a friend or did he... We took a while to become close. But when Sting and I bought Lake House, it's a farm that we've had in Wiltshire for 32 years now we'd had two kids um he came and um visited and and then I found my dad again because you know he was a man of the country I loved the country and and we would go through the grounds and I'd say Harry what shall we well after we fell out I never called him dad again he was Harry to me and uh and I'm proud to say I've got a beautiful grandson who's named after him but we we became pals you know and that was important that and I didn't need him as my dad anymore because I'd sort of found my place in life with without my parents but he became a really important component of steering and guiding me with how to create a really good organic farm and made me sort of feel more courageous about us having this sort of diverse farm.

27:16It was an organic farm and Soil Association were like fantastically helpful and Dad was always coming over and giving me his 10 cents worth of, you know, um you know just plant different varietals and of of apples and of potatoes and uh you know he we'd had like even in our very modest garden in the midlands uh we because we were a middle house we sort of had this double lot and so we grew a fantastic amount of um of veggies and dad was very proficient with that and didn't use any fertilizers or anything you know was we were always rapturous when we saw so many worms in the garden even with lake house your first home that you did an organic garden was that a family decision it was something that you had to push no i think it i think it's to do with my very early childhood of i'm not afraid of the soil I know that if the soil is good, good things will come from good soil.

28:25Bad things will come from bad soil. So when, you know, having Lake House and creating an organic farm was sort of easy because it was England, getting to Palagio and getting... Yeah, I was going to ask you how Tuscany and Wiltshire marry. So, Pelagio, I certainly planted a veggie garden, so many tomatoes, because that was sort of like hugely satisfying that these brilliant tomatoes just grow and thrive in the heat and you can smell the heat in them and the sweetness that comes from them. But taking on Palagio just was a whole different animal than taking on Lake House. But what I did decide after two years of just having vegetable gardens and seeing that we've got rather wonderful olives, that probably just I should learn a bit about the vineyard.

29:25And so with that, started to get the hands into the soil. There was a vineyard when you bought the house? There was a very broken down vineyard, not really tended that well, no drainage really. What was the wine like? The wine was, well, it was being sold into the community at that point. But I was having my neck adjusted at a chiropractor. And I said, where is that picture? It was a picture of a marvellous vineyard. And I said, what is that vineyard doing on your wall, Stefan? and he said oh that's my vineyard and I said oh can I come see it and I said how are you doing this and he said well there's this guy called Alan York and he he does biodynamic wine and would you like to meet him I said absolutely cut to Alan York coming to Palagio and so for the first seven years uh we uh worked together alan and i and i had the great pleasure to um learn a lot from alan and 2002 we planted a lot of um varietals and so you replaced all the vineyards with your own your own grapes we we kept some and we created more in 2007 we had our first vintage for sister moon and when we dance and um and then all that we have to say that the wine named after the songs yeah so a lot of the wines are named after sting songs message in a bottle message in a bottle sister moon and when we dance yeah and i bought you today what my favorite which is a white vermentino actually it's called back it's called baccius a la bocca um we made this in 2020 when we were full on you know pandemic and wearing masks nobody seemed to be kissing anybody so i said let's call this kisses on the mouth and hope for the day to come back and uh and so that's that's the vermentino this is a chianti reserva called when we dance who does your labels me do Do you do them?

31:37Yeah, I do them. I love that label. It's beautiful. It's so cool, yeah. Why don't you describe it? Because nobody can see it. So the picture of a lady dressed as Catwoman, and she's in pointe shoes, ballet pointe shoes, and she is very nimbly walking across the top of two wine bottles, perfectly balanced, because I think that wines should be balanced and food should be balanced and all things in life we aim to be balanced. I always think when we do the olive oil trip to taste the new olive oil and the wine in November, we have a romance about wine, we have a romance about olive oil, we see these beautiful bottles of the product.

32:22But in the end or in the beginning, it is agriculture. It is a farm. It is about the weather. And when you talk to them about what olive oil are going to have and what it's going to taste like, they'll talk about a bug that they had, you know, on the trees. It's a virus, yeah. Or they'll talk about this year, you know, everyone is very, very worried about the fact that the heat of the summer is going to mean that both wine and olive oil production is going to be very endangered for this year. Are you involved to the extent that you are concerned about weather? Well, we're quite lucky where we are because we have a cooler evening.

32:58So there wasn't one evening, I don't know about for you, Ruthie, But we, so we had those insufferable 41 degree days. But in the evenings, you know, we went, it went down to, you know, maybe in the late 70s. And that is the best news for the vines because they recover themselves. And it wasn't a morning without the sort of being a sort of feeling of a dewy sort of morning. And can we talk about the olive oil? Is that olive oil that I see in there? Yes. Okay, nice, nice bottle. Is it all from your... Yes, absolutely. You don't mix it with other... No. So it's extra virgin. Biologico means organic.

33:42And the olives are Frantoyo, Mariolo, and Lecino. Oh, we know those. So why don't you talk about the wine trip and the olive oil trip? Because this is a big deal in the River Cafe that we've done since almost the day Rose and I started. but when we did it the first years, there were like five of us or four of us, or actually Rose and myself. And now? Every October we take anyone that's worked at the restaurant, any of the chefs who've worked for a year or above a year, we take them to Tuscany to do big olive oil tastings and wine tastings at the main wineries that we kind of buy from. But, I mean, we can always swing by if you're around.

34:26It's a very special relationship that we have to meet the people who grow the olive oil, who produce the wine, who live it. It's all mostly in Tuscany, although now we've extended to Piemonte and Puglia. It's now probably about six producers that we go to that are really like family. You taste the wine, you taste the olive oil, and you learn. And what it is for the people who've worked here, who've been cooking this food, who've been making the bruschettas or frying cavallonero or whatever they've been working with. It's a bed back to our children. It's about exposure. Some of them have never been to Italy or have ever been, certainly to Tuscany, and have certainly never sat down at a table where the food was cooked in the kitchen and the ingredients were grown in the garden in Tuscany.