Cafe Cookbook: Recipes from London's River Cafe FROM OUR EDITORS
A Cooking Class with Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers
When Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers founded London's River Café ten years ago, it didn't take long before their impeccably simple Italian country food took the city by storm. Today, the River Café is one of the most influential and popular restaurants not only in England but arguably in all of Europe.
The two chefs began as home cooks, friends who shared a love for Italy and a dream of opening a restaurant in which they could "cook the kind of food we ate in Italian domestic homes," as Ruth Rogers says, "food that couldn't really be found in the Italian restaurants that we knew in London." Their first book, published in the U.S. as Rogers Gray Italian Country Cookbook, was an international bestseller. Now they've followed it with a new book of recipes from the restaurant, The Caf� Cookbook. They came to New York cooking school De Gustibus at Macy's to demonstrate recipes from the book to a large and enthusiastic audience.
About the Book
Ruth Rogers says that what fascinates both her and Rose Gray about Italian food is "the simplicity and the integrity of the ingredients." Finding the absolutely finest ingredients, from vegetables at the height of their season to the most flavorful extra-virgin olive oil, is at the center of the chefs' culinary philosophy: "That shopping discernment is really what we think cooking is all about," Gray says. The food they cook in the restaurant, the recipes they include in the book, and even the design of the book itself also reflect their love of simplicity. This is not a chatty book—the chefs let the recipes and the dozens of color and black-and-white photos speak for themselves, and speak they do. Simple dishes, both traditional and innovative, often use only a few ingredients, cooked in such a way as to bring out their most intense flavors. Since the publication of their first book, Rogers and Gray have become enamored of the wood oven that they've built in the restaurant. In writing the cookbook, they did quite a bit of experimenting to see if they could duplicate the taste of the many wood-roasted foods they serve in the restaurant in the home kitchen using an ordinary oven, and they found that it worked quite well. "It's the technique that matters more than the wood," Gray says, and using their method of coating foods in just a bit of olive oil, salt, pepper, and herbs, and then roasting at a fairly high temperature yields delectable results.
About the Menu
We began with a plate filled with roasted vegetables that simply exploded with flavor. Each type of vegetable had been roasted separately with olive oil, salt, and pepper, tossed with a combination of seasonings suited to it—the asparagus, for instance, was combined with basil and pitted Ni�oise olives and roasted very briefly; sliced eggplant was done with chopped garlic and dried oregano; cherry tomatoes with thyme and garlic; and whole beets with thyme, garlic, and coriander seeds. A slice of grilled bread, swiped lightly with a garlic clove, brushed with good olive oil, and sprinkled with sea salt was offered alongside. Next came a plate of spaghetti coated in a lovely bright green pesto made with both wilted and raw arugula, the sharp flavor contrasting wonderfully with the cool and creamy bits of fresh ricotta studded throughout. Both courses were complemented by a bright, fruity, well-balanced Tuscan white wine made from Sauvignon Blanc grapes, called Poggio alle Gazze.
The main course was sea bass, forthrightly flavored with fresh herbs, olive oil, and lemon and cooked to perfection. Rogers and Gray demonstrated the technique of slashing the skin side of the fish and stuffing the cuts with herbs; the simple recipe works equally well for both fillets and whole fish and for oven-roasting or grilling as well. The Valle del Sole Barbera d'Asti Superiore we drank along with the fish was supremely fruity, mature, and flavorful. And for dessert, Rogers and Gray made a wonderfully simple, hauntingly delicious almond tart, filled with just ground almonds, sugar, eggs, and butter. (See below for their innovative way with tart pastry.)
Tips from Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray
Rogers and Gray both exhibit a strong preference for hands-on cooking and simple, old-fashioned techniques like grilling and wood-roasting. This extends to many of the small kitchen tasks performed in the restaurant every day, and the two chefs think it makes a big difference in the end result of their cooking. They recommend incorporating some of these simple techniques into the home kitchen as well. For instance, they waxed enthusiastic about what Rogers calls "our favorite kitchen utensil"—the mortar and pestle. Fresh whole peppercorns are pounded in the mortar and pestle each day, and they use the utensil for making most seasoning mixtures as well, such as the garlic, salt, and herb paste they toss with vegetables for roasting.
Rose Gray says that she prefers using mostly whole olives in the dishes at the River Cafe, and she offered a tip for pitting them without breaking them up: "We have a really nice way of stoning olives in the River Cafe," she says. "You take a little glass, or custard cup, and you press it down on the olive, and the olive splits and the stone just pops out. It leaves the olives more or less whole."
To avoid overhandling and toughening tart pastry, Rogers and Gray use an unusual trick taught to them by a chef who works at the River Cafe: After refrigerating a ball of tart dough until it's thoroughly cold and firm, they simply grate the dough on the large holes of a box grater right into the tart pan, pressing it lightly onto the sides and bottom. "This way you hardly touch the dough with warm hands," Gray says. They also like the slightly rough edge and rustic texture the technique produces.
The two chefs say that changing their focus to somewhat lighter, healthier food has expanded their horizons in wonderful ways: "We have become much more concerned about what we eat," Gray says, "and that has also made us more imaginative about looking for ingredients that aren't meat-based.... Italy is a fantastic country because they have so many fabulous dried vegetables, like dried chickpeas, lentils, borlotti beans, cannelini beans, and for us they are almost the most exciting and challenging ingredients to cook with." They recommend experimenting with these foods and learning to be as discerning in shopping for them as you would be with more familiar vegetables. "Look for a date on the packaging; these vegetables have a season like any other, and you want to make sure you're getting the product of the most recent harvest," Gray says.
—Kate Murphy Zeman
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Gray and Rogers continue to provide fresh interpretations of Italian cuisine, and in this new book, their enthusiasm for roasting in a wood oven takes center stage. Home cooks can create the same results by roasting meats, fish, vegetables, or fruits at a high temperature on the lowest rack of the oven or by slow roasting over a longer period of time. With these techniques, flavors become more intense, concentrated, and delicious: Pumpkin wedges with thyme. Radicchio wrapped in pancetta. Turbot or monkfish with capers. Baked loin of tuna with coriander. Chicken pan-roasted with milk and marjoram. Crisp, thin-crusted pizza. Rustic, country-style bread. Apricot, nectarine, and plum bruschetta. Baked pears with valpolicella. In addition, favorite recipes from the River Cafe include seasonal fruit drinks, antipasti, pastas, risotto, soups, ice creams, and desserts.
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