Even faster than pasta

If you wanted to work in a kitchen (not sure why you would - the pay is bad, the hours long and the customers complain), you would want to work in Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers's kitchen. Jamie Oliver says he wouldn't be doing what he is now, if it hadn't been for the River Cafe, the Michelin-starred Italian restaurant Ruth and Rose opened together in 1987.

He says: "It's Mecca, basically. I really think the River Cafe laid the foundation for sexy, simple, cool food in this country - look at how many great chefs in our restaurants, bars and pubs have worked there."

Sam Clarke, co-owner of Clerkenwell's Moro, worked for Rose and Ruth for five years, while Chelsea defender Graeme Le Saux liked the food so much he swapped the pitch for the kitchen and did shifts to learn the tricks of their trade.

Do they ever feel usurped by their ubiquitous culinary prodigies such as Jamie? "The thing about Jamie is that he zoomed onto another planet after he left the River Cafe," says Rose. "Ruth and I have never wanted to do that. We have our restaurant that we love and nurture. And we've always got our new Jamies that work for us. They come to us for a few years.

"They are like our children in a way, we nurture them and they get better and cleverer and then they go off and do their own thing. We're very proud of them. There is a whole school of River Cafe kids out there changing the way we eat. If you love them, then you have to let them go."

Furthermore, Rose and Ruth aren't cruel to their kitchen staff. "It's so old-fashioned," says Ruth. "Cruelty in our kitchen is telling someone to pod two boxes of peas. That is cruelty," laughs Rose. "From the day we opened we had a family-oriented, domestic-style kitchen.

"The way we work is the way we work at our homes when we are doing dinner parties. Everybody helps," she explains.

When Ruth and Rose set up the River Cafe at the respective ages of 39 and 49 (they had been friends since the early Seventies), they were nothing more than experienced amateur cooks. Despite this, their food soon attracted criticism for being far too complicated, and too reliant on expensive, hard-to-obtain ingredients.

But with the launch of their fifth book, River Cafe Cook Book Easy (Ebury Press, £20), that is all set to change. It was written with the time-pressed domestic novice in mind and means that, in theory, we can all cook the same great food.

At first glance it looks encouraging. Most recipes contain only five or six ingredients, some as few as two and some, allegedly, take as little time to complete as it takes to cook pasta. But from the creators of one of the most difficult-to-get-right recipes in the world, their signature dish, chocolate nemesis, you wonder how easy is easy.

"Basically the book starts with a piece of toast, and that's something we really liked," says Ruth. She is not joking. It kicks off with 24 different ideas for bruschetta, including broad-bean pecorino and ricotta red chillies.

And they were very strict when it came to what to include and what not to include in terms of degree of difficulty. "The rigour was that obviously everything was Italian and delicious but we were rigorous in what we rejected. Rose would look at me and go, 'Ruthie, it's really not that easy, is it?'

"However, easy does not mean unsophisticated. Easy does not mean boring. Easy does not mean thrown together. We're not dumbing down, we're keeping our standards," says Ruth.