Squeeze Me: Lemon Recipes & Art

This is less a cookbook than a visual and culinary meditation on the lemon from two highly regarded figures in their fields. Ruthie Rogers, co-founder of London’s influential River Café, supplies 50 recipes. Ed Ruscha, a giant in the world of contemporary art, surrounds them with photographs that are graphic, dramatic, and often deliberately disorienting.

The recipes themselves reflect Rogers’s distinctive Italian-accented style: risotto with lemon zest, grilled lamb with rosemary and lemon, a lemon mascarpone tart. They’re not complex, but they do assume a cook’s familiarity with ingredients and timing—there’s no handholding here.

Ruscha’s imagery centers around lemons on blue fields: sliced, whole, twisted, or still on the branch. Text overlays sit in various places—sometimes framing the image, sometimes cutting through it. Whether they enhance or distract from the recipes may depend on the reader’s expectations.

This is not a book built for weeknight cooking. But for readers drawn to the intersection of food and art—or those who’ve followed either Rogers or Ruscha through long careers—it’s a notable collaboration worth consideration.

A curiosity, a collectible, and a visual statement more than a kitchen companion.