Table Talk: from Chelsea Flower Show

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2019

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jo Thompson is a prize-winning garden designer, whose upcoming book 'Rhubarb Rhubarb' is a correspondence between a hopeless gardener and a hopeful cook, taking a look at both gardening and cooking. Jo tells Livvy about the fresh buffalo mozzarella in her family home in Italy, her father's Italian restaurant, and the one dish she can make with her eyes closed.

Presented by Olivia Potts.

Table Talk is a series of podcasts where Lara Prendergast and Olivia Potts talk to celebrity guests about their life story, through the food and drink that has come to define it. Listen to past episodes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Spectator Radio, The Spectator's curated podcast collection.
0:09.0	Welcome to Table Talk. I'm Olivia Potts, the Spectator's vintage chef. And today, Table Talk is coming to you live from Chelsea Flower Show. And we are delighted to not only be joined by Joe Thompson, but to be in her Chelsea Flower Show garden today.
0:23.6	Jo, thank you so much for joining us.
0:25.6	Thank you.
0:26.6	Jo Thompson is a garden designer who has won four RHS Chelsea gold medals.
0:30.6	She's known for her commonsensical, no-nonsense, practical approach to gardening,
0:34.6	but looking here today at the gardens, we can see it's also incredibly incredibly beautiful we're going to begin at the very beginning as we always do
0:41.3	you grew up in Rome I spent a lot of time in Rome as a child yes my father is
0:46.3	Italian and he's one of five brothers and they were all in Rome so I spent my
0:53.3	childhood between England and Rome.
0:56.5	And your father was a restaurateur in Italy? That's right. Well, actually he opened restaurants
1:01.5	in England. He started off as a kind of very minor cocktail waiter in the Via Veneto in
1:07.2	the time of the Dolce Vita. So having Marcellollo Mastrohani coming in and having a wonderful time,
1:13.0	but then came to England to set up restaurants.
1:16.2	And that must have influenced your childhood eating, having that kind of food heritage in your family?
1:21.6	It really did. I mean, I didn't see ketchup until I was 18 because he thought it was a complete
1:27.4	aberration. And the same with brown sorts, anything like that, the traditional... didn't see ketchup till I was 18 because he thought it was a complete admiration.
1:28.3	And the same with brown sorts, anything like that. The Italians were just absolutely, you know,
1:33.3	not allowed in the house. The great thing was that my aunts would teach my mother certain
1:40.3	dishes. Your mother was English. Mother is English. She's here today actually which is
1:45.0	lovely. So there were certain dishes that she, you know, there's still in her repertoire and
1:50.2	the real favourites like the chopped up chicken, but we always used to call it, it was basically
	...

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