Zucchini Salad. Photography by Matthew Donaldson This River Cafe salad looks great and is fun to make with kids

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.” 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. 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.”

Raspberry Sorbet

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 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. In this new title Rogers, accompanied by the River Cafe’s current co-head chefs Sian Wyn Owen and Joseph Trivelli, set out to educate a new generation of home cooks, with a book that’s equally well suited to children as it is to adult beginners. Immediately put the potatoes through a Mouli grater (food mill) or potato ricer onto a clean work counter.

In the years since I saw them in action first-hand, some of that colour has leached from Ruthie’s world. In 2010, after a long battle, her irrepressible double-act partner at the restaurant Rose Gray died of cancer. The following year Richard and Ruth’s younger son Bo drowned in his bath at the age of 27 following a seizure. And last December Richard himself died, aged 88, after suffering two years of brain damage following a fall. 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.” 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. 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 I ask Rogers about her “restaurant children”, that legion of chefs who have worked and trained at the River Cafe in the last 35 years – Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall among them – and gone on to set up places of their own. Does she always look out for them?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.