Food&Drink
Mum and daughter cook up a mix of great food, fun... and song
P.S. talks to the mother and daughter team bringing singing and great food to your living room
Forget Michelin-starred restaurants and the latest street-food pop-up – if you like food, a virtual dinner with singer Jessie Ware and her mum, Lennie, is the most covetable invite going.
The mother-daughter duo launched their wildly successful podcast,Table Manners, back in 2017, combining their inherent nosiness and spectacular appetite for food with great chat, roping in Jessie’s suitably famous friends, including Sam Smith, Annie Mac and Loyle Carner.
Three years on, avid listeners unlikely to get corralled into Lennie’s kitchen in person can now recreate some of the dishes made on the show for everyone from chef Yotam Ottolenghi to London mayor Sadiq Khan.
As well as featuring recipes the pair have whipped up for their celebrity guests,Table Manners:The Cookbook, also features firm Ware family favourites (such as chopped liver, monkfish and rosemary skewers, raspberry trifle) and summery dishes collected on holidays to their beloved Skopelos in Greece (griddled peaches, bouyiourdi eggs, spanakopita).
The blueprint for Table Manners is the Ware family’s Jewish Friday-night dinners, evenings where Jessie would bring too many friends home and Lennie would happily over-cater, with the uproarious lot of them over-sharing, over-eating, and having a grand old time.
“We don’t do them so much now, but the Friday-night dinners were pretty much as they are on the podcast; maybe sometimes more
people and more
raucous,” explained Lennie with a chuckle.
“Usually more alcohol and definitely singing at the end. However, when we had Yannis Philippakis from Foals round, that was very similar as we did drink a lot – we didn’t sing, but we almost did!”
Most at-home chefs would find cooking for famous faces a little intimidating, but Lennie says it’s all part of the fun.
“It’s not so hard to cook for the stars, because people love to have a homecooked meal,” said Lennie, who works as a counsellor and social worker.
“It’s quite rare with our guests’ diaries that they would get a home-cooked meal, as they’re either eating out at restaurants or hotels.
“It’s definitely harder to cook for chefs, that makes me incredibly nervous sometimes.” And they’ve entertained some of the best, including Nigella Lawson, who was treated to a menu that was months in the making.
“For Nigella we talked about the menu for months,” said Lennie.
“We made her a rack of lamb with pistachio and mint crust, along with coco beans and rainbow chard. For pudding we did her a blackberry custard tart – which was divine.”
Table Manners: The Cookbook by Jessie & Lennie Ware, Ebury Press, £22