With You in Mind

Though she built a career as a fashion and lifestyle photographer, Mary McCartney has long nurtured a passion for cooking. In 2021, she dovetailed her finesse in the kitchen with her myriad celebrity connections in Mary McCartney Serves It Up!, which ran for three seasons on the Food Network.

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Now Mary McCartney. Feeding Creativity, a new cookbook with Taschen, extends on the format of the series. Each of 60 recipes therein unfurls alongside a famous face with whom McCartney prepared and enjoyed the dish in real life. These interactions are also captured with original portraits snapped by the photographer just before or moments after digging into their meal. Notably, McCartney is an all-vegan chef, in alignment with her own diet and “drive for animal welfare,” a value shared by her little sister, Stella, whose namesake line eschews leather and animal-derived products.

Throughout the volume, McCartney is mindful of the persona-recipe pairings. Meeting George Lucas at his iconic Skywalker Ranch, she readies up a batch of granola bars that she dubs Skywalker Ranch Bars, creating compact, light fare they enjoy by his pool (though could also perhaps be easily stowed away for a voyage at light speed). For the Hadid sisters, she presents her Feel-Good Smoothie, a frozen berry and seed mixture—which, she adds, additionally takes inspiration from Stella, bearing in mind on-the-go nourishment for her high-pressure job in fashion. Then there’s her rendezvous with Stanley Tucci, who, much like the author, has used his celebrity status to cultivate a parallel profile in the culinary arts through his own cookbook and TV series. McCartney admits wanting to “impress” the connoisseur of Italian food with something she calls “simple and comforting,” ultimately settling on polenta with mushrooms and cavolo nero (aka “lacinto kale”).

Fitting for the saccharine-natured, brightly-colored hues of his artistic oeuvre, Jeff Koons receives a tray of “Rainbow Sprinkles Cake,” sporting flamboyant sprinkles both on top of white frosting and hidden within the vanilla loaf. As McCartney observes at his studio upon gifting him the dessert: “I was pleased to notice a Pantone color chart left out on his desk with reference colors for the painting he was working on, which coincidentally perfectly matched the sprinkles on the cake I had brought him.” Why not have it so the meal you’re savoring could almost seem to admire you right back?

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Mary McCartney. Feeding Creativity is available online now.