Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
DISHING UP DELICIOUS FOOD? ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE!
Mary Mccartney on her new vegetarian cookery show honouring her late mother Linda’s legacy – and the joy of her dad popping round for dinner after a hard day’s work...
Family members can be your biggest fans in the kitchen – but also your biggest critics. Mary Mccartney (yes, she’s a member of that Mccartney clan) reveals that her four children haven’t always been complimentary about her food.
‘They’ll say, “How many bites do I have to have?”, but the key is getting them to help with mixing things and chopping stuff,’ she says. ‘If they’re involved they’re much more likely to be satisfying to cook for.’
Fathers, on the other hand, tend to be your biggest fans. Particularly hungry ones who’ve been hard at work all day. Such was the case in lockdown last year for Mary, 51, the eldest daughter of Sir Paul and his late wife Linda, when she found herself playing hostess to her dad.
It may have been a challenging time, but the former Beatle has been keeping busy during the pandemic – and he returned to a hot meal from his daughter every night. ‘Dad recorded an album during the last lockdown. He would spend the day working on a song, then come back and I’d cook dinner and we would eat together. It was brilliant.
‘He’d play the song that he’d been working on, and he also asked me to take pictures for the album. It’s great. He appreciates people cooking for him. Not everyone does, but when it happens it’s wonderful. It makes me want to cook more.’
Of course, the Mccartneys have form as foodies. The four older children (Linda and Paul had Mary, Stella and James together, and Linda also had Heather from a previous marriage) were famously raised as vegetarians, and Linda was a pioneering meat-free campaigner long before veggie diets went mainstream.
Mary not only followed her mother into a photography career, but she also inherited her foodie zeal and has two cookery books under her belt already. Now comes her first cookery series, where she steps in front of the camera for the first time.
Mary Mccartney Serves It Up features her cooking vegetarian meals for famous friends, not her father, alas, but celebs including Liv Tyler, Kate Hudson, Cameron Diaz and Nicole Richie as well as musicians such as Mark Ronson and Dave Grohl. The six-episode series, on the Discovery+ channel, is visually stunning as you’d expect from someone with a background in highend photography, but care has been taken to give it a family feel as Mary and her guests share memories over the meal. Pictures of the Macca clan Mary with siblings James and Stella, and father Sir Paul abound and there are constant references to the family ethos.
‘My style of cooking is definitely inspired by my mum,’ says Mary. ‘She called herself a peasant cook. She’d make recipes up from whatever was in the larder. We were real foodies because she was always experimenting. I think if you’re going to cut meat and fish out of your diet, you don’t want to feel you’re missing out. So it’s a case of, “What am I going to have today? What’s in season? What’s in the fridge?” The best thing is when you make something up, and then someone asks for the recipe. This show is an extension of that.’
Linda died from cancer in 1998, aged just 56, which was devastating for her family. Replicating her meals was a way not just of getting them through difficult times, but of honouring her. Food is the ‘key’ to human connection, says Mary. ‘A lot of my great memories are formed around food in the kitchen, sitting down with friends and family. It just makes everyone happy, the conversation flows. I’m a bit like my mum in that I like the kitchen to be the heart of the home, with everyone wandering through, keeping me company and helping.’
Her guests have been carefully chosen. She shows Liv Tyler how to make nachos with a cheesefree cheese sauce, and they discuss how home-cooking was a treat in their respective homes – mostly because their parents (Liv is the daughter of Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler) were constantly on tour, eating in hotels.
Mary wonders openly if her dad’s enduring gratitude at being cooked for is connected to the fact that he lost his own mother so young. Paul was just 14 when she died, and his daughter Mary bears her name.
There are lighter revelatory moments in the show too, such as when Mark Ronson shares the story of how Paul Mccartney saved his life. Really? Yes, it’s true. The two families were friendly (Mark’s father was a music manager) and would often run into each other on the beach at Long Island. One day the young Mark – aged only about nine – got into difficulty swimming, and Paul waded into the water to pluck him out. Mary and Mark giggle about this while she shows him how to make a meat-less version of the marinara sandwich, which is traditionally meatballs in a tomato sauce. Mary makes her own tomato sauce with garlic and basil, and serves it over a sliced-up beanburger in a sandwich.
If there’s a star of this series though, it’s the sandwich. Who knew, but it is, it seems, a family favourite. ‘We Mccartneys love a sandwich,’ laughs Mary. ‘It probably has something to do with the fact my mum was a New Yorker, so we spent a lot of time in New York delis where they pile sandwiches high. They’re really stuffed.’
Another surprising star is sweetcorn. Again this comes from the heart. When the Mccartney children were young, says Mary, it wasn’t easy to get fresh corn. But one day while driving in Long Island, Paul and Linda noticed a sign for sweetcorn seeds and stopped the car. They bought some and planted them, with the children mucking in.
The legacy continues to this day. ‘We still plant sweetcorn seeds every year at my dad’s place there,’ she reveals. ‘Every May we go and have a seed-planting ceremony and later we go back to see who’s won.’
Sweet, in every sense.
‘We’d eat together and Dad would play a song’