We wooed each other with food
SOPHIE ELLIS-BEXTOR AND RICHARD JONES TALK TO LAUREN TAYLOR ABOUT THE ROLE OF COOKING IN THEIR RELATIONSHIP AND FEEDING A FAMILY OF SEVEN
THINK Sophie Ellis-Bextor and you probably start humming early-Noughties hit Murder On The Dancefloor, or remember the unadulterated joy she brought during lockdown with her live ‘kitchen discos’ on Instagram – performing tunes in sequinned outfits in her family playroom, often stepping over toys, children and wires.
But you may not know that her talents extend to the kitchen too.
In fact, when she first met her husband Richard Jones (bassist from pop band The Feeling), a mutual love of cooking was one of the things they bonded over.
“We wooed each other with food really,” says Sophie – her ability to cook a great piece of meat even coaxed Richard off the pescatarian wagon on an early date in 2002 (“I gently persuaded him to start eating meat...”).
“She cooked me duck!” Richard interjects.
“Because he already ate fish, I thought maybe we can go to the surface of the water,” says the 43-year-old singer, laughing.
For their first Valentine’s Day, Richard rustled up a lobster casserole. “We like cooking for each other, but if that’s happening, [Sophie] doesn’t like me touching anything she’s cooking,” laughs Richard. Naturally, music is always playing in their kitchen. Definitely not their own though: “That would be like having a mirror opposite you as you cook,” says Sophie. But their debut cookbook – Love. Food. Family. – comes complete with playlists they love to cook to. They got married in Italy in 2005 and became parents shortly after. Now they have five kids – Sonny, 18, Kit, 13, Ray, 10, Jessie, six, and threeyear-old Mickey – so there are many mouths to feed. Therefore, big, generous, easy-tomake family feasts are the running theme of the cookbook.
“I think the more mouths you’re feeding, the less of a cafe you can run – I’m not cooking different things for different people,” says Sophie. “We have one vegetarian, so we always have to make that tweak. Outside of that, we have to do something we think as many people as possible will eat.
“We just try and get them to understand that it doesn’t always have to be in their top five meals of all time. Sometimes it’s going to be, ‘That did the job and that was tasty.’”
The cookbook is a real reflection of how the family eat at home (think easy sausage traybake, chicken stirfry, spag bol). Some recipes are hand-me-downs from family members (Nanny Claire’s Yorkshire pudding and Grandma Janet’s spatchcock chicken), and many are inspired by family holidays abroad (pistachio baklava with honey and orange syrup, or borscht).
Richard recalls trips away with five kids “a logistical nightmare” and holidays haven’t been without small disasters. “On our last trip, we realised when we landed that we’d left not one, but two of the kids’ entire wardrobes at the airport,” Sophie recalls.
“You have to learn to relax when the family gets bigger,” she adds. “You have to let go of being across everything, because it’s not really physically possible. My motto is ‘something will happen’ – so as long as the big headline stuff of everything is happy and healthy is right there, it doesn’t matter.”
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