Mary McCartney on her family recipes

From The Times March 4, 2010




Mary McCartney on her family recipes

The scion of our most famous vegetarian dynasty talks about Linda’s cooking, Paul’s favourite dish and what her kids eat

Helen Rumbelow


 The heir to the most famous vegetarian dynasty in the West is telling me what she loves to eat. Lentils? Wheatgrass? Birkenstocks, fried and sliced?



“Mmnnn, white food,” says Mary McCartney, rolling her eyes with pleasure. “I would eat nothing but crisps, and bread, and cheese, if I let myself. Some people say, ‘you’re a vegetarian who doesn’t like a vegetable’.”

And then she laughs at my horrified face, because she is about to fire up her oven and cook us lunch.

Mary is the product of two kinds of anti-royalty. Her father Sir Paul McCartney, the legendary Beatle, wanted her to grow up as unaffected by celebrity as possible. And her late mother Linda McCartney, who remains this country’s face of vegetarianism, but whose cooking was inspired by meat.

So in Mary’s kitchen all this is on show, or rather not at all on show. She opens her door, her third child on hip, and leads me to the heart of her home, modest and unadorned by photographs of the stars, although in her career she has taken portraits of most of them. She’s wary of publicity, but there’s no publicist here to field intrusive questions.

Mary is sharing her recipes to promote the campaign, Meat Free Monday, which she, her siblings and Sir Paul are leading to safeguard Linda’s legacy. But really, in the chopping, and the chatting, and stooping to chide the dog and comfort the baby and the calling upstairs to her man, and the musing about family meals without guilt, in all this, she reminds herself of hanging out with her mother. Values attach themselves to the cookery that gets handed through the generations, whoever you are.

“I started cooking in my twenties. I made my first stew — and I was like, ‘How come my stew is so crap?’ It was just warm vegetable sludge. So the hotpot was one of the first things Mum showed me how to make. She was the cook when we grew up. And she herself grew up in an American household, a meaty household. So a lot of her techniques were from flavouring meat, because even with meat the trick is the flavouring: adding celery to stock, beans and so on. That’s when she started teaching me the recipes. We’d hang out a lot. She’d show me the quiche, the stew.

“Years later, after she died, Stella rang and was like, how do you cook the stew? And I was really lucky I’d sat down with her. It wasn’t like that was hard — she was a great person to hang out with.” While to most of us Linda McCartney’s food brand is a package at a supermarket, for Mary it is a taste of comfort. As she begins talking through the recipes, she casually mentions bunging in some of “Mum’s veggie burgers”, or, if she’s tired, “just heating up one of Mum’s pies”. Linda bequeathed a way to sustain her family.

“The best bit is with the kids. I say, ‘Come on, eat up Grandma Linda’s sausages’. That’s really nice.”

Mary can remember when her parents became vegetarian. First, Paul and Linda gave up red meat after an epiphany: they were enjoying a lamb Sunday roast while gazing at a field of lambs. Next, when Paul was driving them home from holiday they were stuck behind a lorryload of battery- farmed chickens, and decided to give up all meat and fish. Their children accepted it, as Mary’s own children accept it now.

“Kids make the connection — when kids see a chicken, they don’t want to eat the chicken, but adults are like, that’s not a cow, it’s come in a sealed bit of plastic.”

Now, “it’s not that freaky to be a vegetarian”, but then, her mother, was determined that her children were not “like we are the poor relations, poor you, you’ve got to eat that”. Paul liked old-fashioned cooking, with meat. He has talked in the past about finding the “the big hole in the middle of the plate”, so Linda sourced meat substitutes in specialist health food shops that catered for Seventh Day Adventists.

Paul’s signature dish, now and then, was the mash that he made, Liverpool-style, with onions. His favourite Linda dish was the quiche, “big and lusty like a soufflé”, as he has described it. “Dad’s experience of quiche was that flat soggy thing that you’d get in England. Mum converted him — made it with lots of excess pastry, cooked on a high heat to make it more soufflé-ish; it had a wow factor.”

Mary and her siblings were vegetarian at school — “it was embarrassing, but not mortifying” — and now her own children do the same, with the difference that vegetarian meals are now standard fare, no added stigma. As a teenager, Mary ate “a lot of pizza, chips and beans, which I loved, but it wasn’t a very rounded diet”.

Like the rest of her family, Mary has “never been disgusted by the taste of meat”, far from it, and when she was a teenager she did what teenagers do and succumbed to temptation. “I liked the taste. But it wasn’t a rebellion. Mum always said, I don’t cook it, but you’re allowed it. And that’s what I say to my kids. The difference is that then we did it because we didn’t want animals to be mass farmed. Now it’s because meat production puts such pressure on the environment.”

Yet in her twenties, she found herself stuck in cookery ruts. I reminisce about the time in the 1980s when I asked for a vegetarian meal at a restaurant and was given a slab of cheese with gravy — “sickeningly,” she says, “I like the idea of that”. She utterly understands, then, how those who want to eat less meat find thinking of meal ideas “daunting”.

Linda was a free-form cook who “didn’t like following recipes, so she didn’t bake that much”. By contrast, her daughter is quite excited by her oven thermometer, a gadget recommended by Monique, Linda’s French stepmother, who was the one to instruct Mary in the art of baking.

“I’m very influenced by Mum’s cooking style — but I bake more, and I’ve refined it a bit. But recipes — God — Mum found it really hard to get them down for her cookbooks, and if I do something good, I really try to jot it in the book up there.”

It’s a style that succeeded in converting her former husband to vegetarianism, and now the writer Simon Aboud, her partner and the father of her third child. Simon puts the baby down for a nap, and joins us for lunch: delicious eggplant Parmesan, which Mary has lightened up by using low-fat cheese and griddling rather than frying the aubergine. Simon claims never to have sneaked off for a McAttack. But men do seem more resistant than women to giving up the caveman instinct for prey.

“Mum would say to that, ‘gorillas don’t eat meat’. Maybe men feel that it’s a bit feminine, that they have to live without protein or something,” says Mary.
Some people, I say, get quite emotional about the prospect of a meat-free meal. Gordon Ramsay, in his recent television show, went vegetarian for two days, but looked genuinely fearful throughout. Suddenly, Mary’s easygoing manner drops like a plate.

“Gordon Ramsay is on a vendetta not to let people be vegetarians,” she says, of the chef’s own admission that he has concealed meat in the food of unwitting vegetarians. To force them to eat meat, what is that? It’s just rudeness. They’ve made their choice, leave them alone. He gets me angry, and I don’t normally get on my high horse, but . . .” and then she sighs and says unconvincingly, “I suppose he is entertaining.”

Mary is no Gordon. She’s not dogmatic. Paul has urged people just to cut down a bit, for the sake of cutting the methane emissions from livestock. To those who really can’t go a day without meat, she says: “Cut it out of one meal, or if you have to have it on the plate, just a little less of it. The great thing about making a change is that it’s a positive thing.
When you see a film about fish stock, or pollution, you don’t need to freak out. You appreciate your food more.”

She has fiddled for hours to make complicated food for her children and they’ve said, “Mum, we prefer mash”. They love egg and chips, although Mary has to put a few peas on the plate (“white food! It feels so wrong!”). She and Simon always do a (meat-free) Sunday roast together, he on the Yorkshire puddings, she does all the trimmings.

But for the rest of the time, she gets excited by food. Like any natural cook, she can’t resist convincing you that you could whip up a baked beetroot salad or a butterbean soup in an instant, just like her. Like her mother, she is a photographer.

I tell her that she should do a cookbook, like her mother did. Nigella’s too fattening, Jamie too overdone. Elegant, healthy family cooking, from someone with a real passion for it: it would have a big audience. The couple exchange looks.

“I’m always telling her that,” he says.
“I would love to do a cookbook,” she says, “but where’s the time?”

And then the baby and the dog and her phone wake up. Before I leave, she wraps me up a bundle of her latest invention: a low-fat flapjack biscuit, in three different varieties. I wonder if, in focusing on good food over being grand or grandstanding, she has inherited a recipe for happiness.
For details of Meat Free Mondays, visit supportMFM.org