It is a recipe book that only Ruthie Rogers could pull off. The River Cafe co-founder, one of the best-connected chefs in Britain, assembled quite the cast for her new book, Squeeze Me.
It features photographs by the Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha, design by Sir Jony Ive—the man behind the iPhone, Apple Watch and iMac—and contributions from his wife, Heather, a poet. Even Drew Barrymore’s daughter Frankie appears in its pages eating a lemon.
Every one of the recipes revolves around a single ingredient: lemons. This includes spaghetti with lemon, lemon ricotta and pine nut cake, and marinated grilled lamb with lemon and rosemary.
Rogers, 77, said: “I always said: ‘Ed, when can we do a book?’ He said: ‘OK, I’ll do it on two conditions. One is that the book has one ingredient.’” The other was that it was a fairly concise book with not too many recipes (it has 47).
The inspiration came from the lemon tree in the garden of Ruscha’s Culver City studio in Los Angeles—and from the River Cafe, which overlooks the River Thames in Hammersmith, West London, and gets through about 300 Amalfi lemons a day.
The result is a deliberately unconventional cookbook: no glossy pictures of finished dishes, only Ruscha’s images of lemons and short, comical lines of text by Heather Ive—“When life throws lemons, be the ultimate lemon juggler.”
Rogers is not concerned that the lack of photos of the recipes will annoy readers, who are used to most recipes being accompanied by a picture of the finished dish.
“I always say that a recipe is half science and half poetry. And I think that this one is probably more like the poetry, you know, with the words about lemons and then the recipes,” she said.
“Whether somebody will actually take this book in the kitchen and put it next to their saucepan, I’m not sure. They might read it in bed and you might read it like an art book.” The book is being sold in Zara Home with a matching tote bag.
Rogers’s favorite recipe is one she learned from her mother-in-law, Dada Rogers, which is pork cooked in milk with lemon peel. Rogers was married to the architect Lord Rogers of Riverside, best known for designing the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Lloyd’s building in London, for nearly 50 years until his death aged 88 in December 2021.
“You cannot make it without lemon. Because when you put the lemon and the milk, you brown the pork and then you put the lemon in the milk. It curdles … and that forms this kind of nutty, dark sauce that you put on the pork.”
There are also cakes including a lemon, ricotta and almond cake. “We don’t do very complicated ones … I think this was a cake that Rose and I discovered actually when we were in Padua. And we just loved it.”
Rose Gray co-founded the River Cafe, which overlooks the Thames in Hammersmith, West London, with Rogers in 1987. She died of cancer in 2010.
Rogers first met Jony Ive at the White House during a state dinner when Barack Obama was president. She has previously described how they bonded at this dinner: “We were like orphans—neither my husband, Richard, nor Jony’s wife, Heather, could come and we had both recently lost our best friends and work partners, for him Steve Jobs and for me Rose Gray.”
Originally set up as the canteen for the employees at Richard Rogers’s architectural practice next door, the River Cafe has one Michelin star, is hugely popular with a long list of celebrities from actors, musicians and politicians, and was the springboard for chefs such as Jamie Oliver.
Her podcast, Ruthie’s Table 4, has featured Paul McCartney, Elton John, Sarah Jessica Parker and both David and Victoria Beckham among many others.
The podcast always ends with the same question—“What is your comfort food?”—on the advice of Kirsty Young, who used to present BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, that it is “a really good idea to have one question that you ask everybody”. Victoria Beckham chose wholegrain toast with salt.
Rogers’s own comfort food is “probably pasta, the zucchini one, which I love, and it also reminds me of being with my friends, actually the Ives in the Amalfi.”
Emily Prescott is the arts-and-entertainment correspondent at The Sunday Times of London
