For Genius Recipes's 10th birthday, Kristen revisits the one that started it all; and, the two that introduced it to her: Ruth Rogers and Amanda Hesser.
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Kristen Miglore (voiceover): Hi, I'm Kristen Miglore, a lifelong genius hunter. For almost a decade–wait, for a decade!– I've been unearthing the recipes that have changed the way we cook. Now on The Genius Recipe Tapes, we go behind the scenes with the geniuses themselves, and we get to hear from you. This week I'm going way way back to the very first Genius Recipe that I wrote about for Food52 precisely ten years ago this week. So I will give a moment for you and maybe me to process just how long that is.
What were you doing ten years ago? I was writing with a lot of wild adjectives about my excitement for a three-ingredient strawberry sorbet from the River Cafe in London. I learned about the recipe from my boss, Amanda Hesser, who had written about it herself for her column, The Arsenal for The New York Times Magazine, five years earlier. And the shocking thing about that sorbet and the thing that remains shocking and the detail that sticks with you is that you chop up a whole lemon, the juicy tart flesh, the good smelling rind, and even the spongy white pith in between that everyone says is so bitter, it will ruin your food. I started the column with a three-word sentence that isn't technically a sentence, “That dastardly pith.” That sentence fragment has made me cringe for almost the entire decade.
But anyway, you throw that whole dastardly lemon into the food processor along with some sugar. Then you blend up some ripe strawberries too and then churn it all together, and the sorbet you get is hot pink and just astonishing; it’s the brightest strawberry-ist strawberry you've ever tasted, everyone loves it. My husband says it's one of the best things he's ever eaten, but even though I've been preaching about this recipe from Ruth Rogers and the late Rose Gray, the co-founders of the River Cafe for ten years. I put it in the first Genius Recipes Cookbook, and I taught it in cooking classes; I had only talked to Ruth very briefly over email here and there. I had never heard the entire story behind the recipe and the origin of the whole lemon. So in honor of Genius’s tenth birthday, I thought it was time to know more. So I called up Ruth, or Ruthie as she goes by. And later in the episode, I talked to my boss, Amanda, about how she first found this recipe for The Times and what made her so sure that it was the perfect one for launching the Genius column all those years ago. And we will hear about the Genius Recipes that have stuck with listeners over the years too. But first, to set the scene, I asked Ruthie to tell us how she and Rose began their famous partnership.
Ruthie Rogers: Rose knew my husband Richard before I did, and they went to kind of the equivalent of American high school together. She was close friends with my husband's ex-wife, and her children were the same age as some of our children. So the two families were friends. I always say the first time I was introduced to Rose, the door opened, and there was this gorgeous woman with a baby on one hip and a glass of champagne in the other hand. That was Rose.
Kristen (voiceover): The more I learn about Rose, the more apparent how much she lives on in Ruthie’s memories of her and the River Cafe. Here is how the two of them decided to launch the river cafe almost 35 years ago, even though neither had run a restaurant kitchen before.
Ruthie: The story of how Rose and I decided to found the River Cafe is a story of two women who were both domestic cooks. Rose had four children. I have three stepchildren and two children. And we just were always women who cooked at home for our families, and we're passionate cooks. My husband's architectural practice bought this site on the Thames, which was warehouses. They took one building, created a green space where there was none, and opened the view to the river. There were other architects, designers, tapestry makers on the rest of the property. That was their idea, to create a community. And of course, with the community, you needed somewhere to eat, and there was nowhere to eat. And so they put out applications for people to do a small restaurant there.
I remember saying to Richard, the only thing worse than not having a restaurant would be to have a mediocre one. So I called up Rose, who had just returned from New York. Rose never worked as a professional chef until she assisted in her friend Nell’s nightclub. Having returned from that experience, we looked at the tiny space, with only enough room for seven tables. We spent very little money, and we transformed into a small cafe. And we were restricted by the fact that we could only open at lunchtime and only to the people who worked in the warehouses. The local neighborhood didn't want us there. And those restrictions helped us because, with minimal experience, we were able to start very small for only lunchtime and only a small group of people. So I always say that we grew with the restaurant.
Kristen: Did you ever think there was a chance that you would never be able to open to the public? Was that ever a fear of yours?
Ruthie: We were told that to open, we had to take the restrictions of being open for lunchtime only. And then we were allowed to open to the public six months later or maybe a bit more, almost a year later. And then we were open at night, and then we were allowed to open on Sundays. So it was just a gradual process.
Kristen: That sounds very lovely.
Ruthie: It was good for us. When I hear about chefs and my young chefs wanting to open restaurants, I always encourage them to start small and grow. I still do that with everything we do. Even our inspiring new online shop started small. We began in each other's kitchens over lockdown, and that has grown in the past year into something which is quite a big business.
Kristen (voiceover): And as they grew, sorbet and gelato were a pretty significant and continuous presence in all of their cookbooks and on their menus. I just picked up their very first cookbook, the Rogers Gray Italian Country Cookbook, and there are twelve frozen dessert recipes. I asked Ruthie how that came to be.
Ruthie: When you go to a town in Italy, you want to find out where the ice cream shop is first. So I think Rose and I always knew that we desired our menu to focus on ice creams. Much of the inspiration for our Italian cooking came from living in Italy. Still, it came from my husband, Richard's mother, Dada Rogers, an Italian who came here just before the Second World War in about 1938. She was born in Trieste and lived in Florence. She was a very sophisticated, excellent cook. I think she became a cook because of necessity. She left her country, missed the food tremendously, and couldn't find it here. So she started cooking, and I think her ice creams were the most famous. When my family visited her, we headed straight for the freezer because she would make sorbets in the summer and ice creams in the winter. I think that was the inspiration for many of our ice creams. And today, we still make her recipes. Dada’s recipes for sorbets were to take the fruit, weigh it, and then take the berry weight and cut it in half. Add that weight of sugar and then lemon. The sugar and lemon would vary on the sweetness of the fruit. She would put in some lemon juice, but she would also take the peel of the lemon. She put half of a lemon in the food processor. She thought that machine was just the most remarkable invention. So she was always trying to do mixtures. And I just believe that the simplicity of ingredients is unparalleled in recipes. This iconic sorbet only has lemon, sugar, and strawberries.
Kristen (voiceover): Finally, after ten years, I know the inspiration behind the sorbet: Ruth's mother-in-law Dada Rogers. Dada was a great Italian home cook who fell in love with the Cuisinart, just as many other people did when it first hit the market in the 19 seventies. But I've seen a few different sorbets that you used this lemon trick in the River Cafe's cookbooks, one with raspberries, one with blood oranges, even one with lemon and banana. Did they all come from Dada?
Ruthie: It's very hard with the recipe to remember where one started, and another one took off. People always say to me, where did you get the idea for that recipe? And I say there are very few ideas for recipes. The work that we do is a progression. She might have put in one half of a lemon, and then maybe we said to put more. Then my new pastry chef says to make them smooth, and we want to have two sorbets on the menu, one with lemon and one without lemon. But they are all based on the tradition of Dada’s recipes.
Kristen (voiceover): What Ruthie is saying perfectly illustrates the challenges in crediting recipes to a single source, as Genius Recipes does on its surface. And also the importance of digging deeper to learn more of the story, which Genius Recipes also tries to do. But back to the sorbet. I wanted to know more about this memorable genius step that Ruthie learned from her mother-in-law. Why is the whole blended lemon so impactful? What exactly is the lemon doing in this sorbet?
Ruthie: The chewiness of the lemon identifies the lemon in the sorbet. The whole lemon gives it a texture. It is pretty rough–it differs from other sorbets that are very smooth, like the French style. And this one gives you a texture. It gives you a bit of drama. And I think it makes you think about what you’re eating, and it gives you a sense of drama.
Kristen: Are there any tips that you would give to people at home in trying to achieve the right balance in any sorbets where you're using a whole lemon, like the strawberry sorbet?
Ruthie: I think that the most important thing is to taste the fruit.Taste the pear, the strawberries, the raspberries, the peaches. Intense sorbet flavors match with other meals we make at the River Cafe. A piece of mozzarella with smashed black olives and grilled asparagus. Tomato sauce cooked down. The way that we cook is not subtle. We're not a restaurant where you want the taste of the tomato and the cheese. And I think that when you end a meal with a sorbet, you want that same experience. I always say to the chefs, does that fruit in the sorbet explode in your mouth? Does it feel like you have something that is almost challenging to you? The lemons must be ripe; the fruit must be juicy; the fruit must be in season. We don't do sugar syrups; we don't add chopped-up other things. We give the essence of eating a strawberry. It should be as powerful as ending the meal. In Italy, dessert is often simply strawberries, lemon, and sugar. So make a sorbet out of that!
Kristen (voiceover): I love the word drama for this sorbet. And it feels like there's just the right amount of drama in every part of the River Cafe. Drama in the unadorned intensity of their recipes. Drama in the bright pink hearth and the otherwise minimalist restaurant. Drama in the hard shadows that crisscross the photography of their books and their shop.
I also have to say, though, when I've taught this recipe in cooking classes, it's always the one that everyone loves the most, where every single student's sorbet comes out great, no matter how new they are to cooking. And even if the strawberries weren't already the very best. So it just might be a little less dramatic.
If you're enjoying this conversation with Ruthie, as much as I did, head over to The Genius Recipe Tapes and hit subscribe, so you don't miss out on other stories like this one. Like our recent story with Marc Matsumoto, founder of NoRecipes.com. We discussed the early days of food blogging, the next big thing in climate-conscious farming, and Marc’s one-ingredient trick that has forever changed how I season salmon and pretty much everything else. In the second half of the episode, we hear from Amanda Hesser about how she found this recipe and what makes it stick with us. Meet you back here for that.
So that's how this sorbet got from Dada to Ruthie to the River Cafe's menus and cookbooks to find out more about how its cult status has continued to grow. Next, I wanted to talk to my boss, Amanda Hesser, about her part in spreading the word.
Amanda Hesser: At the time, sometime between 2004 and 2006, I redid the magazine pages. One of the things I felt like I was missing from the New York Times cooking coverage, then I wouldn't say this about it now. There wasn't a lot of writing about the basics. It was a lot of writing about food that was pretty sophisticated and more advanced cooking, and I felt like there needed to be room for cooking that was approachable but engaging and essential. So the Arsenal was a column that was created essentially to address that. We ran recipes that were not highfalutin–they were excellent but straightforward versions of essential recipes. Sometimes they were thematic—for instance, the power of eggs. I focused on a Spanish omelet called revueltas, which is essentially a rapidly cooked scrambled egg often done with a strong flavor like chorizo or anchovies. It showed how to treat the egg differently than the traditional American-style scrambled egg. With a few tiny tweaks, it made this incredibly different and super cool dish to me. Like nothing would be more tiresome than just like a column focused on basics. It feels like eating your vegetables–who wants to do that? So I selected memorable essentials.
Kristen: And how would you usually find the recipes that you feature there?
Amanda: Oh, you know, I sniffed around. I often it was a matter of talking to people and looking in cookbooks. I sometimes developed them. But it's always fun to search and find other people's recipes. You know that as much as anyone! Finding recipes that have not been fully appreciated in the way that you think they could be or should be is so satisfying. You're a recipe sleuth. Especially with the dawn of the internet, there are millions of recipes out in the world. The average person doesn't have time to sift through them and distinguish one from the other, and you need people to do that. And it's also a way to appreciate the value of the art of recipe creation. And two recipes on the surface could look very much alike but be significantly different based on details.
Kristen: So you think it's the job of everyone at Food52 to find the recipes that have exciting details?
Amanda: That was one of the premises behind Food52 was. We wanted to create a site that had excellent recipes, and we curated them for you. We were essentially saying, “Here are the ones you should pay attention to.” It also gives great cooks in the world opportunities to say, “Look at mine!” The community essentially helps curate as well by deciding this is a great unknown recipe. It hasn't been published in a national publication; it comes from this person in the community.
Kristen: I was just thinking this strawberry sorbet struck a chord with you. I remember when we were trying to figure out how to launch Genius Recipes. I had a few ideas bumping around, but none of them felt like the first one. I had Diana Kennedy's carnitas and the crispy-skinned fish from Le Bernadin. I thought they were both fabulous recipes that were simple with a trick that could change how we cook those things. Still, I was hemming and hawing and indecisive. Finally, I remember you walking through the room at General Assembly and saying, “I've got one for you.”
Amanda: I don't remember lobbying a declarative at you, but it doesn't surprise me! I was so excited when you decided to do this column because I intuitively knew it would resonate. It is what all cooks look for, and it celebrates just what is so interesting about cooking.
Kristen (voiceover): I just want to break in here and mentioned that when Amanda says, “I decided to do this column,” she’s gracious. The concept of the column and the name were her ideas. I wrote more on that story on Food52 today. Let’s jump back to why Amanda immediately knew this recipe was the one to launch the Genius Recipes column.
Amanda: I felt dazzled by it when I first learned about it. Who on earth would think to take an entire lemon and stick it into the food processor along with your beautiful fresh fruit, delicate fruit and expect that anything good would come out of that. Especially when you've learned that the pith is bitter and the skin needs to be simmered several times before it's edible, or it's something that should only be grated and put into savory dishes. Lemon is this potent ingredient, but it’s always treated in its parts rather than the whole. And I also loved the irreverence of throwing a lemon into the food processor along with everything else. You’re going to come across various fruit sorbet recipes with a bit of lemon juice, but it feels like a pinch of salt. You just do this throwaway thing out of habit or because some cooking school told you to do it. What I saw was that the lemon and its fragrance just make the strawberries come to life. And it's funny because there is another recipe on the site, which I think you may have done as a Genius Recipe. Lazy Mary's Lemon Tart is another one of these where you stick a whole lemon into the blender and get this very smooth lemon curd. How does that work? The blender figures that out for you. It's those sorts of things that tickle me. They make me love cooking. Also, it's a recipe perfect for serving friends; it blows them away.
Kristen: Right? And it gives you something to talk about with them as you're serving it.
Amanda: It’s great–people can't believe it!
Kristen: I'm curious if this melts your mind as much as it does mine. You wrote about the strawberry sorbet in 2006 for The Arsenal, and then it launched the Genius Recipes column in 2011, about five years apart. So it’s been twice that long since then. The column is ten years old. It just doesn't add up to me. You at The New York Times writing The Arsenal feels like a different era. And then all of our time at Food52 feels like another era. A lot has changed, but it just still feels like one long era.
Amanda: Now I am feeling old. It's only Monday! But thanks, Kristen.
Kristen: You're feeling old? I've been writing the same column for ten years!
Amanda: A lot of time has passed. It's been more than 15 years since I wrote about this. The thing that's amazing about a recipe like this is that it doesn't feel old like it feels perfectly modern and present. There's nothing modern that will improve it. And I think that's nice. The more I cook, the more I have an appreciation for those kinds of recipes. How cool is it to create a recipe like that and feel like the recipe will live on for potentially forever.
Kristen (voiceover): And now here are some of our listeners’ favorite Genius Recipes. May they live on forever too.
Listener Molly: This is Molly Georgekis from Arlington, Virginia. My favorite Genius Recipe is Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter. Or how it’s called in my family, The Sauce. I made it once for my sisters who are visiting, and now they and my mother all make it. My sister Katie even upped the Genius quotient using an immersion blender to smooth the sauce after simmering. The finished product is so creamy and bisque-like that my ten-year-old nephew has been caught eating it from the pot with a spoon.
Listener Katie: Hi, I’m Katie, calling from Salt Lake City. My favorite Genius Recipe dessert is Smitten Kitchen’s Salted Brown Butter Rice Crispy Treats. You cannot get better than this simple dessert. Starting from the nutty browned butter, the gooey sweet marshmallows, and the sea salt to finish it off. I have made snobs of all of my children. Now, none of us will accept any rice crispy treats except for these. And I am asked constantly to bring them to every function.
Listener Amanda: Hi, I’m Amanda, and I am calling from Brooklyn. My favorite Genius Recipe is Lady & Pups's Magic 15-Second Creamy Scrambled Eggs. These are indeed the most delicious, creamiest eggs I have ever had. There are a handful of ingredients: eggs, milk, butter, and cornstarch. And the cornstarch and butter make a fantastic combination to make these delicious, creamy eggs.
Kristen (voiceover): Thanks for listening. And my thanks to Ruthie for joining us today, who I want to note was just about to jump into a shift of cooking at the River Cafe. Strawberry sorbet was on the menu that night, and they just added it to their online shop too. It’s called Shop the River Cafe, which they first launched small at the beginning of the pandemic to sell their ingredients such as olive oil and pasta. And then they added things like slow-cooked tomato sauce, whole fish dinners, and now beautiful homewares and cookbooks too, growing it slowly and deliberately, just like they did the cafe three decades before. Thank you to Amanda Hesser, the co-founder of Food52 and my longtime boss and mentor. And to all of you for listening and cooking and commenting and supporting Genius recipes, whether you've been here for ten years or 25 minutes. Thank you.
Our show was put together by Coral Lee, with support from Emily Hanhan. If you have a Genius Recipe to share, I would always, forever love to hear from you at genius@food52.com. And if you like The Genius Recipe Tapes, take a second to rate us, leave a review, and subscribe if you haven't already. You are the best. Talk to you soon.