Dad would pick a turnip and slice it through and say, ‘Taste this turnip, it’s so sweet,’ ” she recalled while searing slices of eggplant in a frying pan. “And we’d be like, ‘Oh, Dad, whatever.’ We’d just make fun of him.”
Maybe there is comfort in knowing that even the most famous people on the planet — Ms. McCartney’s proto-locavore father once played the bass in a Liverpool skiffle outfit known as the Beatles — cannot escape the mockery of their offspring. And for parents who worry that teachable moments come and go without anyone paying attention, maybe it’s reassuring to learn that Paul McCartney’s Scottish turnip tutorial did, in the end, manage to sink in.
In fact, Ms. McCartney said, “Now we’ve come around to that ourselves.”
Like her father and her mother, Linda, Mary McCartney is a devoted vegetarian. The same goes for her siblings: Stella, a fashion designer; James, a musician; and Heather, an artist. Her first cookbook, which is rather bluntly and tellingly entitled “Food,” has just been released in the United States.
For the McCartney clan, it seems, there was never any segregated category of “vegetarian food.” After Paul and Linda experienced a couple of epiphanies in the 1970s (including one that involved “a big truck with a bunch of caged chickens in it,” Ms. McCartney said), vegetarian was simply how the family ate.
The recipes in “Food” reflect Ms. McCartney’s upbringing, as well as the way she tends to cook for her brood in London now. An accomplished photographer, she has four sons — two with her husband, the filmmaker Simon Aboud, and two from a previous marriage to Alistair Donald, a television director and producer. As far as she knows, all her sons are vegetarians, too.
“At the moment they’re enjoying it,” she said. “It’s not something that’s imposed.”
Although her recipes for dishes like Lip-Smacking Minestrone, Asparagus Summer Tart, Ice-Cream Celebration Cake and Cauliflower Cheese never involve meat, they don’t necessarily shy away from eggs, butter, sugar or cheese, and dollops of piety are, mercifully, kept to a minimum.
She prefers to sidestep the us-versus-them spats that used to make dining out with carnivores feel like a declaration of war. “I was shocked by how many debates I’d get into when I had dinner,” she recalled of those days. “ ‘Excuse me, I just met you, I’m having dinner — why are you on my case?’ ” She described the mission of her cookbook as “food that’s healthy but doesn’t feel righteous.”
In the kitchen Ms. McCartney, 43, comes across as a charmingly chatty, albeit spontaneously helter-skelter, cook. During a visit to New York, she stood by a stove at a studio on West 31st Street, demonstrating how to make eggplant wraps filled with spinach, pine nuts and sharp Cheddar. She needed soy sauce for a marinade that she intended to brush on the slim slices of eggplant (adding an extra wrinkle to her printed recipe), but a bottle couldn’t be found. After fishing around, an assistant discovered a stash of the little soy-sauce packets that come with Chinese takeout.
“Oh, perfect,” Ms. McCartney said. “That will absolutely do.”
After a brushing, the eggplant slices went into a pan. “So the idea of this is to brown them on both sides,” she said. The pan did not belong to her, though, and she expressed slight concern that chunks of eggplant might adhere to the hot, oiled surface.
“If they start sticking, we’ll have an emergency reassessment,” she said, laughing. Of course, a touch of scorch couldn’t hurt. “It gives it a little flavor; it’s nice that way, that’s what I always say, although not everyone believes me.”
Ms. McCartney also prepared a salad with shallots, roasted tomatoes and toasted walnuts, and if the shallots had ventured a tad beyond the threshold of optimal texture, she didn’t beat herself up about that. “I might have overcooked them a bit,” she mused. “They might be a bit squishy in the salad.”
Well, let it be. Even Julia Child splattered potato pancake batter on the stovetop now and then. Winging it might just be the McCartney way.
“My husband would be like, ‘I really liked that meal,’ but we’re probably never going to have it again, because I never write it down,” she said.
Whatever she lacks in precision, she appears to make up for in spirit. As the preparation of lunch went on, she expressed wistful longing for a glass of wine, admitted that her father’s song “Live and Let Die” remains her favorite of the James Bond movie anthems (“Obviously, I’m biased,” she said), and argued that there was only one correct way to deal with extra pools of olive oil, melted cheese and right-from-the-oven tomatoes.
“You know what would be good is to get a bit of bread and butter and dip it into that,” she said. “It might be our duty to do that.”