Ed Ruscha and Ruthie Rogers team up on zingy new cookbook

Tucked behind Ed Ruscha’s California studio is an orchard of citrus, figs, pomegranates, cherries, and Bhut Jolokia, a pepper said to be 170 times hotter than tabasco. One afternoon last year, as he walked through the lemon grove with his friend Ruthie Rogers – the chef and River Café co-founder – the two came up with an idea for a cookbook.

‘Ed is an artist, friend, and cook,’ Rogers said on her podcast Ruthie’s Table 4. ‘... but we really bond over words; words as art, words as books, words as recipes, words as love.’

Published by Rizzoli, Squeeze Me: Lemon Recipes & Art gathers 50 ways of cooking and drinking with lemons, from sweet and savoury plates to cocktails and desserts, all prepared with the pared-back simplicity for which the River Café is celebrated. Each is accompanied by an original artwork by Ruscha, who is best known for his word paintings and laconic takes on the American landscape. For the book, he devised images of lemons cut, peeled or halved, overlayed with lemon-inflected quotations and aphorisms in his signature typeface, 'Boy Scout Utility Modern.'

Printed over a photograph of a whisky sour is W.C. Fields’ line: ‘When life hands you lemons make whisky sours,’ facing the cocktail’s recipe. With the lemon basil risotto comes an image of a lemon inscribed with the fact that lemon juice was once used as invisible ink in the American Revolution, the Civil War and both World Wars, revealed only when heated. And with the lemon semifreddo and sorbet appears a curling lemon rind, this one bearing Oscar Wilde’s observation: ‘A grapefruit is just a lemon that saw an opportunity and took advantage of it.’

For Rogers, the project continues a longstanding tradition of collaborating with artists. Over the years, River Café menus have often doubled as artworks, with contributions from friends including Peter Doig, Damien Hirst and Ellsworth Kelly, who are regulars at the Thames-side restaurant alongside many other artists, architects and actors. In 2017, Ruscha created a menu for River Café 30, the cookbook marking the restaurant’s thirtieth anniversary. Across the menu, in his block letters, were the words 'YUM', a design Rogers called on her podcast one of her most cherished possessions.

Her first meeting with Ruscha, however, stretches a little further back. ‘One year, and this may have been about 1989, it was my birthday and [my business partner] Rose Gray got a Cajun band to come over and play,’ speaking to Derek Blasberg in Gagosian Quarterly. ‘That night there was a dinner for Ed Ruscha in the restaurant too, and I thought: ‘We’d better get rid of this band before he arrives.’ But he walked in and said, ‘I love these guys, can we get them to stay all night?’

Pici with lemon and pecorino

• Juice of 2 to 3 lemons
• 3½ cups fresh pecorino, coarsely grated
• ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
• Sea salt
• 12 ounces pici or bucatini
• Leaves of 1 bunch fresh basil
• 2 ounces aged pecorino, finely grated
• Freshly ground black pepper

Method

Cook pici in large pan of boiling salted water until al dente.

In saucepan over low heat, combine lemon juice and fresh pecorino, stirring until cheese melts into juice. Remove from heat. Gradually add ¼ cup olive oil slowly until it has combined, making a thick lumpy sauce. Set sauce aside somewhere warm.

Drain pasta, reserving a little cooking water. Return drained pici to pan and add 2 tablespoons hot cooking water.

Add the sauce and basil leaves; toss until all pici strands are coated. Finally, stir in half the grated aged pecorino. Serve sprinkled with remaining aged pecorino.

Squeeze Me: Lemon Recipes & Art by Ruthie Rogers and Ed Ruscha, published by Rizzoli

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