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

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Each recipe also includes an equipment list, along with ‘a little bit of a tip’: for broad bean bruschetta, for example, there’s a note on the time of year to make it – ‘because for this recipe, you really need to have little baby broad beans,’ Ruthie explains.

Similarly, the photos in the first half of the book have a reference at the bottom to the appropriate recipe page. As Ruthie says, flicking through the opening pages, ‘I dedicated it to Richard,’ pointing out the inscription to her husband, ‘who taught us to look’. She eventually relented, and that pair of images is undeniably effective, heightening the tactile stimulation of each: a glossy head of dark, reddish hair, ridged with comb marks, opposite a plate of nubbly, cocoa-dusted chocolate truffles. After trying to create step-by-step lessons about how to master kitchen basics (“boil a tomato, peel it carefully, remove the seeds”), Rogers and her team decided there had to be another way forward beyond having “a recipe on the left, a photograph on the right. Add the sauce to the spaghetti, and shake the pan so that each strand of pasta is coated with the cheese mixture.

The River Cafe Look Book’s opening pages reproduce delectable images of the featured dishes, alongside crisp, surprising, inspirational photography. Since then, it has trained many superstar chefs in its kitchens and won multiple awards, including a Michelin star. 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.

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.It might seem peculiar for the chef-founder of the River Cafe—arguably London’s most famous restaurant—to release anything designed for children, but, as Rogers affirms, her dishes are “actually quite simple. Rogers’s own second-generation American parents had roots in Russia and Hungary; food was always an occasion for conversation. Pour the mixture into a freezer-proof container and freeze for about 2 hours, stirring with a spoon to break up the crystals every 30 minutes, until solid.

Created for therapeutic purposes, ‘done by a photographer, a neurologist and an artist, perhaps… for people with autism, for brain dysfunction and damage, for dementia,’ the two volumes contain a series of large, black-and-white photographs, one per page, chosen on the basis of ‘pairing images that would be compelling’.I did a stint working in the kitchen for a week for a story in the millennium year, when Richard Rogers had just been appointed head of a new “urbanism unit” in London, charged with making the city more livable. As it's the River Cafe, the recipes cover all sections of the Italian menu so it's easy to find something everyone likes (including kids!