Ian McKellen

Published Dec 24, 2024, 12:00 AM

I’m often asked about the inspiration for Ruthie’s Table 4. The answer is easy. Two words — Ian McKellen.

For some years, Richard and I invited actors to perform at our home. Ian ended his performance with a reading of a recipe for Ribollita, a traditional Tuscan soup. Compelling as any sonnet, we were all spellbound.

Ian is known to everyone as different characters — Macbeth, King Lear, Gandalf. I think of him as one character, inspiring, kind and brave. For this podcast, we went to his beautiful house overlooking the Thames. A morning and a conversation I shall always remember.

Ruthie’s Table 4, made in partnership with @me_andem

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I a bride proper confined those rondapots, but it bas a hard bottom. Oh that's the sweetest thing I ever heard.

It's true, it's true. Do you remember those nights? And I have a photograph of you with the cookbook reading it on the steps. I think, right, yes.

What I've been inspired by those experience is to do something similar here what is that? And above the room above where we are now, I can get in seventy chairs and I put them on tears so that everyone gets a good view, and I got a very nice piano. The professionals like to come and play undress. Schiff has played in my room upstairs. Joshua Bell comes and plays the violin. Just the fundraisers for various things. But I don't think I would have done it if I hadn't seen that you could turn your home into a concert all And it's.

The intimacy of performance is something special.

When you can hear the pennis breathing and hear their fingers or their nails on the on the keyboard, it's wonderful.

So what we do is that we ask our guests to read a recipe from one of our books. But you've chosen, oh, that's fine. I can take it and I might learn something because the recipe you're reading is very British, isn't it.

I'm not a cook, but here we are. This is Queen of Puddings and it was what my mother used to make. The ingredients for this are two ounces, and I like aunces rather than drums. I don't understand graunds. So two ounces of soft white breadcrumbs, two eggs, two ounces of caster sugar, jam, trances of stultanas. I don't put sultans in. Ten fluid ounces of milk, an ounce of butter, bit of grated rind of a lemon, and that's it. It says here. You boil the milk with the butter, and you pour on the bread crumbs, and you add the sugar and the rind, and you stir thoroughly. You beat the egg yolks and you beat each into buttered pie dish, and you refrigerate for forty minutes. I don't suppose I'd do that. Then you bake it at a level four and gas middle shelf until delicately springy. I do like that in recipes when there's something really homely means what it says, you whip the egg whites very stiffly. That's to make a meringue. You put the jam on top of the bread crumbs, you pipe or fork the egg whites over the top, and you bake in the oven for ten minutes. Couldn't be easier, and it's absolutely delicious. But it was something you could manage during the war.

Well, let's talk about that. Because you were born in nineteen thirty nine, I was just before the war in Lancas in Lancashire, do you have a first food memory. Do you remember?

Well, we were living in Wigan, which is in Lancashire, a coal mining town. The big towns nearby like Manchester and Liverpool were bombed regularly and the only bombs we ever saw were there was very few that were discarded before the Germans flew back east, so there were only two bombs in the whole of the war in Wigan. So safe it was it that we had evacuee. We had a family.

It was considered a safe place to take children.

Yes, and how my mother managed I don't know, suddenly having to share the tiny kitchen with another woman who had two children. How we all fitted into our house.

I don't know what was the house like to describe your house, It had.

Four bedrooms, but it was a semi detached house in the street and near the center of Wigan, with a lovely aspect in both front over the park and at the back over the cricket club. Bit squeezed inside. I suppose, well, we all shared beds. I can't really remember.

But food, do you remember the kitchen?

We asked the kitchen was that we had a fire which heated the oven, no fridge of course, there was a little little room which we called the pantry, which was relatively cool.

But this would be if you were born in thirty nine, so you're aware your memories of food in your house and the kitchen. You would have been about four or five, which was about nineteen forty four forty five.

I was very aware of the rationing.

What was it like?

My mother liked to bake. In order to bake, you needed sugar, you needed fat, and the rationing was two ounces of butter a week per person and four ounces of margarine and one egg. Now there was dried egg which was the equivalent of three eggs. You had that for a week, so she could bake with that sugar. Again, severely irrations and the way we got round things that's probably illegal. We used to swap our rations for tea and coffee which we didn't drink, and took from those people who desperately needed that fix sugar or fat. And it was always my job. On a Saturday, when the groceries arrived, I would take half a pound of butter, which was for four of us double that amount of margarine, put it in a big bowl, take the top off the milk that was always cream on top of them and put those three bits of fat together and in front of the fire, warmed it and beat it until it was a paste butter.

The butter in mind, that was the.

Butter for the week, and it always ran out on a Thursday.

If your mother would make would she bake, would say, okay, children, we're not having butter on toast. We're going to save the butter. We're not going to fry something in butter. We're going to save it for the cake.

Butter.

Yes, And that went to what year was that.

Right through the wall. But I don't ever remember being hungry.

You weren't hungry, or a sense of denial.

And there was always a pudding.

There was. So you were living in a house with your mother, your father, and your sister and yourself. So there were four of you.

There are four of us, and then three arrived mother and two children. They were just with us for a year. I don't remember any arguments. I remember the lad teaching me how to tie my shoelaces. There was a pattern of life like washing was always done on a Monday. Tuesday was ironing.

Mother was cooking all yeah, your mother was cooking.

She was a cook. I don't remember my father ever cooking anything apart from and you.

Did you go in the kitchen? Would you say the whole time?

Can I have the bowl? Can I have the bowl? And there was a pattern with the food there because we went to church on Sunday and she didn't want to cook on a Sunday. We always had a roast, but we had it on a Saturday, so that was our big meal of the of the week. On Sunday we would have the cold meat. And on Monday always we had the minced meat and turned into shepherd's pie. And then we got to get through Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and that's when it would be baked beans on toast as the main meal, which we called the tea. We might manage a salad with a bit of ham, maybe two ounces a week. And there was probably a Friday or two where we didn't have quite enough to eat, but I didn't really notice that.

Was it a solitary life? Did you feel that you had friend Your mother had friends and you had friends and people. Oh, yes, she was a very social You said that you enjoyed being with people, and so they were all those friends. Was your father a preacher.

He was a lay preacher. So we were very We were very Christian.

You grew up in a house that loved culture as well. That there was piano music, there was, you know, we did think of it as culture.

We thought of it as a lovely pastime. Dad played the piano and my sister learned the piano. I learned the piano for a bit. Visitors, always dropping by, close friends, everything within walking distance, you know, no car bikes we had and once a year or twice a year, close together in the autumn, we'd go BlackBerry. That was a great thrill. You could get food for free off the bushes.

Stra did your mother ever make summer pudding with the black currants?

Summer pudding? I love soup because all you needed in that was a bit of sugar and you could probably use saccharin and some bread crumbs.

Make it in the river cafe. You have to come. We make it with currants raspberries. Now this is not a rationing summer pudding, but in Valpolicella, and we cook it the berries and the currants down, and then we line a beautiful bowl with bread slices of bread, and then you put the fruit in and then you close it with the bread and you press it down and then we leave it and then you demold it, and it is one of my favorite. The British do a lot of puddings with bread, don't they The one the recipe you they like using up the bread.

But you know, there was every thing was rationed. I can remember the first banana.

When was that.

That'd been about nineteen forty four.

Where were you?

I was at home and missus Baron next door came in and she said, I've got something to show you, a banana. When i'd heard about bananas, I knew they weren't straight. And she came in with this four inch banana and we were all allowed to hold it and imagine what it might be like inside, and then it was explained that you peeled up. There was the banana. Missus Baron mashed it up, and the five kids, Jeane and I and the three next door shared a banana sandwich. It was probably quite a healthy diet.

Well, they say that you didn't have sugar, you didn't your teeth, you didn't have sweets, and you had them. People weren't overweight.

You would see sometimes rolling out of a pub. We never went public entrink, some woman with a huge ass, and I was riveted by it. I would follow them down the street. I've never seen anything like. No, you're right. We were all things, but I suppose it's healthy. Sometimes it was very exciting school. We went to school and food parcels arrived from North America think I think Canada, And I remember bringing back I couldn't believe it, a huge two pound bag of cocoa powder, and presented it to my mother. I loved her so much.

What was she like here?

Ah, she was beauty, she was pretty, nature, was very gentle. She had a rather flamboyant younger sister who she was the one who made the jokes. But it was my mother who was all was laughing. But she loved going to the theater and so did that. And she did a little bit of acting when she was a kid in church socials and so on. And I suppose she was crazy about me, her little boy. Long after the war, when we'd moved from Wigan to Bolton, she was only forty four and got breast cats. I wasn't told I was. I was eleven or twelve, and I went off on a school camp for a couple of weeks and she was by that time sleeping downstairs. She couldn't manage to walk upstead. And while I was away she died. And I've not got over it yet. So when she died, I was berefed, really, and I didn't know I was berefed. And my father very generous, not just for his own sake. He remarried and I think party to give me a mother. And my stepmother, Gladys, was very good at that job and the reasonable cook herself. What was she like? She was short, she was from Liverpool, she'd been a secretary I think all her life, and in her early forties finally married handsome Dennis McCallum.

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Oh? I saw. Well. One way in which is certainly effected my life is my parents were teetotal. They'd taken the pledge, which is what people did in the twenties, swore off drink and we didn't drink tea or coffee, so the only thing we drank was water out of the tap, but in life water and I never developed a taste for alcohol. And three years ago all was at four and now I stopped drinking alcohol altogether, So that really stayed with me, I do. I was deeply shocked when I first went to America and saw the size of portions of people at the food will be put on your plate as a kid, and you will eat it whether you enjoy it or not. It's not the point. You must finish everything. Think of the starving children in China, we were told. And the day I knew I was an adult was when I went to Cambridge and on the first day in my little gown, sat with other boys in the dining hall and was waited on by people, and we had venice venison goodness. Say, now, this is way after the war, and cabbage. I think it was on the side, and I had my way through the venice and I didn't much like it, and I decided I wouldn't finish the cabbage, and I left it on the table on the plate. I'd never until I was the age eighteen left anything on my plate, and I knew away from home i'd done that, and that I was now an adult. I apparently spoke in a funny way. I mean, I was mocked for my accent.

What's the accent?

Like? What was it? Something like this? Really it would be a little bit broader than I allow myself to be. But I could never say the word one. I always said one one. Well, horrible little boys from public school would point at me and mock me, and so I tried to speak like they did, rather posh and didn't succeed. Of late, I've let my own accent come back and feel much happier.

Yeah, and so at Cambridge you were exposed to vedicine and meals in the college, but you also did you have enough money to go to restaurants in Cambridge? Would you go out with your friends to a pub and eat well?

What the great discovery at Cambridge was the Indian restaurant And I used to have egg curry was half a hard boiled egg with a curry delicious, So that that's the first time I really went to have as an adult and independent.

So you were acting in Cambridge, we were there, Jacoby and Camber.

I Swift, a lot, a lot of people who went into the businesses. We spent those of us who are really keen spent all our time acting rather than studying. I never learned how to be a good student.

What were you studying? What was the course? You went into?

English literature?

And so we were able to direct? Did you act?

Did you didn't direct?

Do you have any education in acting? Did you have none?

I've just done at school. Yes. Before I went to Cambridge I played him with the fifth Prince hal in the earlier and in the fourth I played girls part. We also had at miniature theater. It was called just down the road from the school, the theater that held about fifty audience members and we did constant programs of one act place all the time, and if you did that you were allowed to miss.

Pt And what was it like when you left Cambridge came you went? Did you have a domestic situation where you had to cook for yourself?

Well? Yes, I went straight off and got a job in a repertory company. Most major cities had a repertory company, the big group of actors who stayed together for a year. It did a different play every two weeks or three weeks. And Coventry was such a place at the Belgrade Theater in company and I was in that company. It was all very post war, an optimistic. Coventry had been appalling the bomb, of course, but the center of the town rebuilt with a theater, a modern theater with little flats attached, and I paid half my weekly salary to pay for this flat. Just across the car park was the Hole in the Wall pub, which is about now in twenty twenty four to close down forever more. But big part of our lives. We always went there after the show you did, and we were allowed to stay there after hours and drink with the policeman.

Is that something you still do now? Do you like to go after a performance?

Do you go out with friends, and now I don't go out to pubs because I don't drink.

So now, but do you go to restaurants after night theater?

Yes, I do, but not as a matter of course. No, I'm happy to get back home and make myself a sandwich, so I'd probably at things on toast all the time. And we we couldn't afford to go to a restaurant.

You didn't go to any local restaurants, No, no, no, yeah no.

But when I first came to live in London in ninety six six four, in the King's Road, the unfashionable end in those days, near World's End, I was living with some friends, sharing flat with three or four other people, and we did sometimes go out to a restaurant. Yes, it was a thrill, felt terribly grown up.

And of course at that time being gay was still illegal, wasn't it.

Yes, yes, oh yes. I went right through Cambridge and right through my twenties in a country where you could be imprisoned for making love, but because it was just what it was, you didn't. I lived with my boyfriend in our own flat in London, and he was a good cook, and that's when I began to start cooking properly, as long as my job to do the roast easy, isn't it a roast? But we lived very perfectly openly. Everybody knew we lived together. We always went out together. We wouldn't hold hands, of course in public, that would be to draw attention. I didn't talk to the family about being gay, but I didn't feel that I was living a repressed life. I had to rather be taught that. It was only when the government wanted to pass a law to restrict how much schools could discuss homosexuality that I realized that I was being treated by the law as a second class citizen, and this particularly law was going to make it worse. That I got annoyed and angry and joined in the fight to stop Section twenty eight, and then and then the other laws that already existed.

And then stonewall Yes.

Which we did through the lobby group Stonewall that.

Brought you into an engaged with your success as an actor and being traveling. Did you travel to other countries? Did you arrive in France or Italy or Germany? And think this is also completely as.

Far as food is concerned, food, food.

Or culture or just being in a foreign country. What did that make you?

Yes, think again, in my childhood, a visit abroad was a very unusual thing.

Did you go abroad with your parents?

My mother never left the country. My father, who liked walking and climbing mountains, was a bit more adventurous, and he did go abroad during my childhood to Germany, where we had connections with German Christians who'd corresponded with during the war. And in nineteen fifty four I went to Germany with my dad and I had my first glass of wine on sailing up the Rhine.

Disgusting.

It was white wine. It was just like sour. It was so sour. Perhaps it was sour, Perhaps it was a bit of old cheap wine.

But now, when you travel for work or when you travel, do you enjoy thinking about a different culture of food? You know, if you go to Italy, where do you go?

You go to France and it's all meat, isn't it? And I don't eat meat except occasional pork pie, occasional sausage.

That's what Richard Air said. I asked Richard Air about you, and he said he's a vegetarian, but a few lapses everyone.

But I'm not a strict vegetarian. It's just I don't have a taste for meat, so I don't feel guilty when I have a little sausage. Christmas is all the trimmings I like, I don't like. I don't want the take.

All those feasts in Shakespeare tell me the Clays with a great feasts you Well, it's a joke.

That the actors in the old days, working these regional companies, not being paid enough money or getting enough to eat, would say, we're doing check off. There's a practical pork high in the third act, so stage management will provide them that you could actually eat free, free food. So that's the eating that I remember as check off, rather than Macbeth, where there's a feast going on. But I don't think macbeths in a fit state looking at the ghost of a man who's killed to be bothered about what's on the table.

If you like listening to Ruthie's Table for would you please make sure to rate and review the podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you tell me about your movie the critic.

It's written by Patrick Marber, who's a wonderful playwriter and screenplay writer. And he rather alluringly he said to me when he sent the script, this is the best part I've ever written, but you thought, oh, I better play it before somebody else gets hold of it. And it's about a critic in the nineteen thirties. It's all set in that dreadful decade. Really, when fascism is around the corner, I won't know, it's on the streets. And my character is a critic, major drama critic, who's gay, living at a time and it was absolutely illegal to be gay. It's when he is in danger of losing his job that his true nature emerges and he turns into a rather a raw school would be too milder term monstrous behavior. It's a thriller, I suppose, but people behaving very badly to each other, but you understand why they're doing it.

What about when you went to New Zealand, when you did Lord of the Rings? What was that?

Oh? Now, Lord of the Rings refilmed nearly twenty five years ago in New Zealand. And I had no great anticipation that New Zealand would be a source of exciting food, but things were beginning to change in New Zealand, and so there was a new sort of cuisine arriving fish often and the Jacksons, Peter Jackson and his wife partner were very alert to providing good food and I looked forward to the lunches there every day. They were wonderful. It was a choice of food and the standard of cooking was amazing, very good puddings.

A lot of directors say they don't like to stop for lunch. What do you feel about it?

Well, they haven't had to get up as early as the actors to go to make up and get to the vacation. The best place to film is in Italy, where everything stops at noon and you take off three hours, three hours to eat and have a rest, and then go back and work till the evening. Food's terribly important on the film, as it is with a fighting army.

And this is my last question. After a really interesting and beautiful conversation about your life and your childhood and your mother and how food connected you through those experiences. I think I'd like to know when you need food, not because you're hungry or because you're sharing, but you want a sense of comfort. Is there something that you would go to Yes.

Two things both involved toast, hot buttered toast, a smear of marmite, oh, fresh sliced tomatoes, salt pepper, mayonnaise, mayonnaise on top of the tomatoes. Do you think that's the wrong thing to do.

As an American? The one thing I have not I've learned very much about your country, and I two things actually I don't really understand. One is cricket and the other is more mite. You don't get marmite, I'm not really Richard did. Richard loved marmite, but I not.

You don't.

But the mayonnaise I've never heard. I know about the butter and the marmite and the tomatoes. But I'm sitting here with three other British.

I promise we should shoot it just livens up the taste buds. But and the textures are interesting. And the other would be hot buttered toast with scrambled eggs. It's how glad. It's my stepmother made. My mother always used to do scrambled eggs if we were likely enough to have them, putting some butter and a drop of milk in the pan and getting that melted before adding the already whisked egg and even then the eggs would sometimes separate at the end and you were left with a lot of curd and horrible. Dad is his recipe from her mother was you put everything in the pan straight away. So in you go with a couple of eggs, if it's one person, a nice dollop of salted butter, some pepper, a drop of milk or cream. Put it on a low heat and just keep stirring and it'll start making stop sigidifying, and you can pick the exact moment when it's ready and put it on the hot buttered toast which you've got waiting. It feels nutritious. It reminds me of my childhood when scrambled eggs was a real treat and it's very easy to do.

Okay, we'll make it. Well, listeners, let's listen to this very easy recipe. We've had in McKellen to ourselves. We've had stories to listen to, and now we have two recipes. So it's been a lucky day. But most of all, it's being with you I and hearing your stories.

It's lovely to see you and I should never forget going with you and Richard to Paris. Oh, you took me there. He was having an exhibition and his pompey Do Center. And when he arrived there and walked into the exhibition space, and there were a lot of Tyro architects that they couldn't believe the great man was there in person, and what a star he was, and he loved you really, and I know that he was so handsome. And if you hadn't already got.

I was watching it. Thank you, Ian, It's lovely, lovely to

Ruthie's Table 4

Welcome to Ruthie's Table 4 hosted by Ruthie Rogers, co-founder and chef of The River Cafe in London 
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