Mary McCartney on cooking for A-list pals Gigi and Bella Hadid, Cate Blanchett and Stanley Tucci for Feeding Creativity, her book blending vegetarian recipes, celebrity anecdotes and food photography

Oct 28 , 2023

Self-portrait of Mary McCartney, whose latest book Feeding Creativity pairs her vegetarian recipes with photos of the stars she made them for. Photo: Mary McCartney

A cookbook by Taschen is never really just a cookbook – for example, it’s unlikely that many people bought Dalí’s Les Dîners de Gala book purely to follow the recipes cooked at the surrealist’s legendary dinner parties.

So despite Feeding Creativity seeming like a straightforward tome of vegetarian recipes designed by Mary McCartney for her famous friends, it is in fact much more. For one, it is a series of telling and personal anecdotes that reveal a peek into the homes and lifestyles of the artist and her celebrity subjects. It’s also a series of portraits, and in more than just a photographic sense – each dish was created, as McCartney says, by “contemplating that person, imagining myself going to them and the process, and how I would like to make them feel”.

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So essentially, these are portraits of people manifested in food. You get to contemplate why Beth Ditto is a smoky black-eyed bean stew, or Jeff Koons a rainbow hundreds and thousands cake. (“His art is so bright, joyful and colourful,” McCartney says, “the idea for a hundreds and thousands cake came into my mind.”)

Nile Rodgers with roasted toasted salad at the Abbey Road Studios in London

That includes the stumbles as much as the successes: “At first I started off a little bit neat. Then my husband said, you need to admit to them that you had a hangover when you went to David Hockney, or when you went to Haim, you had a huge rip in your all-in-one.”

In one episode, visiting Cate Blanchett on set, McCartney fears that a tomato soup balanced on the edge of the counter in her make-up trailer could turn into a sloppy soup disaster. In another incident, her peanut, pretzel and chocolate cookies, baked for artist George Condo at just two hours’ notice, received a raised eyebrow from her legendary father Paul – though thankfully a warm response from their intended recipient.

The Haim sisters at their home in LA with globe artichokes with tarragon dijon dressing

Along with her famous family – besides Paul there’s fashion designer sister Stella – Mary McCartney was one of the founders of the Meat Free Monday movement. She also has had her own cooking programme Mary McCartney Serves It Up!, with three series under its belt, so she is well-established as a plant-based chef. This project, though, combines several of McCartney’s talents, as she approached each subjects herself, cooked for them, wrote the stories and recipes, held the camera for all of the portraits – and then eventually decided that she should shoot the food as well, which initially she had thought she’d leave to someone else.

Dancer Francesca Hayward with banoffee cheesecake at the Royal Opera House in London

All of this came about rather organically, as part of the chaos that she likes to think feeds her own creativity. What started out as a blog project became a book when McCartney decided having a publisher give her a deadline would be the best way to motivate her to get things rolling. Then a change of name cemented its purpose. The original title was simply Cooking for Artists, but it became Feeding Creativity, as suggested by McCartney’s husband, writer and director Simon Aboud – a much more fitting heading, as the book feeds more than the tummy.

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Photographer David Bailey at home in London with wife Catherine, eating McCartney’s Towering Berry Trifle

These nourishing recipes and stories aren’t necessarily high-concept achievements – for example, one of the simplest recipes is the Feel Good Smoothie she makes for Stella McCartney and the Hadid sisters, which is literally frozen berries and banana, plant-based milk and a bunch of seeds. And that’s the point, she says.

“Because personally, I don’t like to be preachy and say, this is how you should eat. The purpose of me sharing my recipes is to sort of say, ‘Look, if you want to eat this way more, I’d love to share my recipes and make them simple and easy and packed full of flavour.’”

Stanley Tucci at home in London. Mushroom with his polenta Cavolo Nero

The portraits are as simple and intimate as the dishes. When Stanley Tucci opened his door for McCartney, “He was like, ‘Ah, I’m so glad it’s just you, I thought you might arrive with a film crew and loads of assistants.’ But it literally was me with the bag of food and my camera,” she remembers.

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“A lot of my childhood food memories are based at home around the kitchen. We’re a very foodie family so we’d always make the kitchen the hub of the home. So often, you’d smell something good, and then end up in the kitchen, around the table, chatting with mum [the late Linda McCartney] and helping her. And her style was very much ‘look at what you have, and then make something up from it’. And it’s sort of all based around my mum, because she was very clever, she would make it interesting in the kitchen, so that you would want to be there and that way she was never on her own.”

David Oyelowo and family at home in LA, eating Speedy veggie bolognese

This heart and soul fills Feeding Creativity, with its candid-style photography and the little handwritten notes that McCartney leaves alongside the recipes that make it seem like you’re crowding into her kitchen, peering over her shoulder, trying to get a little taste of what’s on the stove.

Ultimately, while the McCartneys have very much been the poster family for the meat-free movement, each member has done it in their own way, led by his or her own inner compass.

Gilbert and George at their London studio, with a PBLT Sandwich

For Mary, that means bringing together disparate fluencies in cooking and photography, which to her form a fluid narrative – one that is hers alone, whether she is making a cookbook or directing a documentary about Abbey Road Studios, last year’s If These Walls Could Sing.

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“I think I define myself in wanting to share and make a difference and make a connection. So it’s about, what meaning is there to what I do, and what purpose. Why am I doing it? Why do I want to do it?” she muses.

“I like connecting with people, so how will that get me off my sofa, watching TV and eating junk food, and bring me into the world? Everyone presumes I hang out with all these famous people all the time. But often I’m asked to take a portrait of someone and we haven’t met before, but having met them, I feel like we’ve had a connection. And it’s more important than me taking a picture of someone – then [the picture] is for them, too.”

Food and Drinks

Paul McCartney’s daughter used her connections to arrange intimate sit-downs with Nile Rodgers, Jeff Koons, David Oyelowo, David Bailey and the Haim sisters – cooking up a personalised dish for each interviewee
She leads her own show Mary McCartney Serves It Up! and was a founder of Meat-Free Monday along with her Beatle father and sister, fashion designer Stella McCartney