Table Talk: with Isabel Vincent

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The Spectator

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2019

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Isabel Vincent is an author and Canadian investigative journalist for the New York Post. Her book, 'Dinner with Edward', charts the unlikely friendship she struck up with her recently widowed ninety-something neighbour. Theirs is a friendship struck through mutual grief (Vincent's own marriage was breaking down at the time) and good food. The film adaption, starring David Souchet, is under production.

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	Just before you start listening to this podcast, a reminder that we have a special subscription offer.
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0:10.3	Go to spectator.com.uk, forward slash, voucher, if you'd like to get this offer.
0:17.8	Hello, and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectator's Food and drink podcast. I'm Laura Prendergast.
0:23.9	And I'm Olivia Potts. And we're delighted to be joined by Isabel Vincent, a Canadian investigative journalist who writes for The New York Post.
0:31.7	Her latest book, Dinner with Edward, details her friendship with an elderly man in New York, whose wife had recently died and who found
0:38.1	solace in sharing his culinary secrets with her. Isabel, welcome to a podcast. Thank you so much for
0:43.3	having me. Isabel, we're going to begin where we always do, childhood food. You grew up in Toronto.
0:49.4	Correct. Can you tell us about what food looked like for you when you were young?
0:53.1	So I grew up in um immigrant
0:55.7	household in Toronto both my parents were from Portugal so we spoke Portuguese at home and I grew up
1:02.7	with baccalao which is salted cod and this was you know we had it every week and there's like a million
1:08.5	ways to make salted cod so you can just boil it with
1:11.1	potatoes or you can like do all sorts of crazy things but you know the three basic ingredients are
1:17.5	potatoes olive oil and cod and i have to tell you a funny story that's not from my childhood but
1:23.6	when i first became a correspondent in brazil i was a bureau chief for the globe and mail in latin america for a number of years and i was a bureau of i was a bureau chief for the Globe and Mail in Latin America for a number of years.
1:31.3	And so my first Christmas there, I'm having Christmas dinner with a friend of mine who is a writer
1:38.3	and whose agent in Barcelona, every Christmas sent out salted cod,
1:43.3	because it's such a delicacy and it's hard to get in Brazil to all of her writers in Latin America.
1:50.0	And among the writers she had political friends and among those friends was Fidel Castro.
1:55.0	So that year we got Fidel Castro's package of cod, which we ate for Christmas dinner.
2:04.1	And I've wondered, you know, what's he having?
	...

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