The River Cafe Look Book: Recipes for Kids of all Ages

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There is always pressure when your mentor comes to lunch. Anna Tobias worked in Ruth Rogers’s River Cafe in two spells, before opening Cafe Deco, a room of her own in Bloomsbury, a couple of years ago. Tobias greets her old boss in her new place at noon sharp with a mix of affection and a slight nervousness, the more so when Rogers, who is an avid hugger, but quite steely of eye, asks her what we should eat: “I’m told you do fabulous quiches?” The River Cafe Look Book: Recipes for Kids of all Ages Ruth Rogers, Sian Wyn Owen, and Joseph Trivelli A series of juxtaposed images... conjure up curious, often wondrous visual echoes.' – Financial Times, How to Spend It Partly in homage to those last years, Ruth created The River Cafe Look Book, published towards the end of 2022. In a rainbow of colour it pairs surprising images with pictures of River Cafe food – a plate of spaghetti vongole and some wilting tulips, a pink telephone and a raspberry sorbet – the recipes for which follow. “I was asked to do a cookbook for children,” Rogers says. “But [the photographer] Matthew Donaldson and I thought perhaps you could do a book that works for 12 year olds and 82 year olds. After Richard fell, he had quite severe neurological problems. Somebody gave me these books, which paired images – a Vermeer painting with the moon, a baby’s profile with the edge of the sea – inviting you to make connections. People with autism, people with dementia see things in that. And Richard loved looking at these books. So we thought maybe we could do the same kind of thing with food, pair of photographs together – the look book.”

The River Cafe Look Book is a new cookery book from the acclaimed London restaurant that Ruth Rogers CBE launched with Rose Gray in 1987. Over the decades, the restaurant has introduced Londoners to modern, Italian cuisine, and trained up some of the world’s best-known chefs, including Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Whether your kid has Top Chef Jr. aspirations or simply wants to hone their pesto-making prowess, this compilation of 50 beginner-friendly recipes and vivid meal illustrations from the iconic restaurant is bound to help them step up their culinary skills.' – Domino Bring a large saucepan of salted water to the boil and cook the gnocchi for 3 minutes until they rise to the surface. Remove with a slotted spoon. Award-winning chef and bestselling cookbook author Ruth Rogers CBE launched the River Cafe in London alongside Rose Gray in 1987. Since then, it has trained many superstar chefs in its kitchens and won multiple awards, including a Michelin star. First heat the oil in a large frying pan. Then add the garlic and fry over a medium heat for 1 minute until just beginning to brown. Add the crumbled chillies, clams and 2 tablespoons of water. Cover and fry over a high heat for about 5 minutes until all the clams open. Be sure to discard any that do not open.

With more than 50 iconic recipes, each of which has been masterfully adapted and revised by the River Cafe chefs specifically for those new to cooking, the fabulous dishes in this collection bring the warmth, beauty, and sumptuous ease of Italian family home-cooking to cooks of all levels of kitchen expertise - including your kids!

Having lunch with her is both to be reminded of Baroness Rogers of Riverside’s restless charm – she gives the impression mostly of wanting to listen, rather than speak, eager for news – and a sense of how much of another country that easeful, hopeful past now feels. The restaurant is doing well, she says, in spite of wider problems with staff and supply “that have been part pandemic and a lot of Brexit”. “I had a customer recently who is in the current government,” she says. “And he said to me: ‘Don’t worry, things will eventually be OK.’ I said: ‘I am worried, and things were already OK. Young people were coming in and going out. We were relaxed, part of the continent – and now?’” I was dying to talk about Trump with Nancy Pelosi. But we talked about having ice-cream for breakfast Rogers’s own second-generation American parents had roots in Russia and Hungary; food was always an occasion for conversation. Her love of Italian food was nurtured when she married Richard and came under the culinary influence of his formidable mother, Dada, who grew up wealthy in Trieste. On her deathbed, Dada pulled her daughter-in-law close and gave her two familiar pieces of advice: “Ruthie, promise me you will put more cream on your face and fewer herbs on your fish.” She and Richard, it always seemed, from their years living in Paris while he worked on the Pompidou Centre, had a marriage made of love and wonderful bold colour. She pulls out her phone. “My brother lives in Paris,” she says. “And he sent me this today which is a picture of a sign outside his local school – that day’s lunch menu: cucumber vinaigrette, fish meunière, cheese plate, fruit salad. Children get four courses, proper cooking, all subsidised or free. And here?” There are two places that I feel safe, inspired,” she says. “The River Cafe and my home. I mean, everybody has different ways of dealing with grief. There’s no right way or wrong way. My way has always been not to stop. Just keep going. And then one day I might just fall on the ground.”The first cookbook from London's iconic River Cafe written with beginner cooks and children in mind - a collection of more than 50 delicious and easily achievable recipes, including a host of River Cafe classics that have been specially adapted for new cooks It’s that thing,” she says, “if you love them, let them go. They always appear with that look in their eyes, asking for a word, and you know it’s over.” She smiles. “Later, they say: when I worked with you my biggest problem with the day was making my ravioli thin enough to see through. Now they talk about worries about the electricity bill. Owning your own place often takes you further and further away from the kitchen.” In 1996, the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik described London’s River Cafe as “the best Italian restaurant in Europe.” High praise is certainly justified, but that specific claim might not be wholly true. As Rose Gray, the restaurant's late co-founder, told the New Times Times a few years later: “we cook Italian food, but we're not an Italian restaurant." This highly anticipated cookbook is more accessible than any other to have come from the kitchen of Ruth Rogers' legendary Michelin-star restaurant The River Cafe, set on the banks of the Thames in London.