Guess who's coming to dinner? One A-lister smoked all the way through MARY MCCARTNEY'S meal - and another made a monumental faux pas. The daughter of Paul reveals the secrets of cooking for the A list

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I'm sitting alone in my kitchen waiting for Mary McCartney, 54 – the first-born daughter of Paul and Linda McCartney – to arrive and cook me lunch. It's not every day that a bona fide member of rock royalty pops by to do this, but McCartney has a new book called Feeding Creativity to promote. In it, she visits a galaxy of A-list actors, artists, pop stars, models, friends and family and gives them one of her special vegetarian dishes and takes their picture.

And now it's my turn.

I confess I'm a little anxious. She'll probably turn up late – famous people always do – and without an apology. She and her entourage of sycophants will march into my small, grimy kitchen which currently whiffs of drains and react with bug-eyed disbelief.

And when she discovers that no, I don't have an R402 food processor, a collection of Sakuto knives or a Mauviel nonstick frying pan – I don't even have a garlic crusher – she will declare with haughty indignation, 'I can't possibly cook under these conditions!' and flounce out. And I will follow her down to her limo and cry out, 'I'm off to McDonald's for my lunch, you privileged-nepo-baby-vegetarian-fascist!' – or something like that.

But my doorbell rings exactly on time. It's McCartney. On her own, with nothing more than a shoulder bag and a big warm smile. She is wearing Nudie jeans and a blue sweatshirt. She has Stella McCartney high-top trainers on her feet, Linda McCartney veggie burgers in her bag – and probably an old hit by Wings in her head.

One A-lister smoked all the way through MARY MCCARTNEY'S meal - and another made a monumental faux pas

Shirt, trousers and shoes, Stella McCartney. Earrings, Elhanati. Ring, Pomellato. Other jewellery, Mary’s own

McCartney follows me up the stairs and bounces into my kitchen. 'I love poking around people's kitchens,' she tells me, and starts rummaging in my cupboards, cutlery drawers and fridge. If she is horrified by what she sees, she hides it well. And no, she doesn't faint when she sees the state of my frying pans. However, she does spot an ancient bottle of cheap vegetable oil by the stove that looks like a large forgotten urine sample and asks nervously, 'Is this the only oil you have?'

'Whose home had you peeped around before mine?' I ask.

'Let me think,' says McCartney, sleeves rolled up, grabbing a chopping board and a knife. 'Dame Judi Dench's home in Surrey.' By which she means Dame Judi's £8 million-period-farmhouse-with-sprawling-gardens-and-a-swimming-pool home in Surrey.

And before Dame Judi there were pancakes with Cameron Diaz in Los Angeles, brownies with Star Wars creator George Lucas on his ranch in California, creamy green pasta with Dad (Paul) and Ringo, cream of tomato soup with Cate Blanchett on a film set and now she's preparing speedy veggie bolognese – adapted from a recipe by Foo Fighters front man Dave Grohl – for me in my gaff. Do you see why I was nervous before she arrived?

McCartney is a chatterbox, driven by curiosity and nerves. She bombards me with questions about myself – something that the famous never do – and says, 'Seriously, it's lovely to meet you and thanks for letting me in your home.' Crikey, I feel like one of the celebrity guests on her TV show Mary McCartney Serves It Up! on Discovery Plus.

Feeding Creativity is McCartney's third solo book of vegetarian recipes; she did one with her dad and her fashion designer sister Stella. Vegetarianism was once the beloved cause of cranks and sandal-wearing lefties – it's long since gone mainstream, and veggie cookbooks are in the bestseller list. But it doesn't have a visible and vocal leader. I tell McCartney, 'You could be the Nigella of vegetarianism!' 

OK, she doesn't have the va-va-voom of Nigella, but she's very pretty in the flesh, with those big beautiful bluey-green eyes, and she's a lot warmer than the Domestic Goddess. But she looks horrified by my suggestion, as if I've just offered her a bite of a Big Mac.

'No thanks. We're very different cooks. Nigella is more of a raconteur than me.'

Dress, Stella McCartney. Shoes, Loeffler Randall. Ring, Pomellato

Shirt and trousers, Stella McCartney. Earring, Otiumberg. Other jewellery, Mary’s own

It's odd watching this Beatle baby at my stove. My dad once had dinner with her dad in 1964 at the home of writer and comedian Peter Cook. In those days, to dine with a Beatle was like having a cup of tea with God. I told all my friends at school about it – and nobody believed me.

And here she is opening a packet of Linda McCartney veggie burgers, crushing them up for the spaghetti sauce. There's an evocative line drawing of her mum on the packet. It was from Linda, she tells me, that she got her love of cooking, animals, vegetarianism and passion for photography. It's Linda – not Paul – who has been the guiding light in her life.

Twenty-five years ago this year, that light went out when Linda died of breast cancer. There followed a tough time for her daughter, who went on to divorce her first husband, TV producer Alistair Donald, by whom she had two children, Arthur, now 23, and Elliot, 21.

In interviews and in person, she talks a lot about Linda's life, but rarely about her death. She told a journalist in 2020 that her mother's death was a 'big trauma' for her and 'all the family because Linda was at the heart of the family'. Today she tells me that she went into therapy to deal with her grief. She still does a bit of 'dream therapy' and says, 'I'm not embarrassed to go and sit for an hour and talk to someone. It helps me to stay calm.'

McCartney was 28 when Linda died, and I suspect she is still dealing with that loss. It might seem that she is following in her mother's footsteps just to keep her legacy alive, but it connects the lives of mother and daughter on a daily basis.

It's not easy cooking in a stranger's kitchen but McCartney seems right at home. I watch her chop this, add a pinch of that, pour a splash of red wine, drain the pasta and hey presto: lunch is served. I tuck in and she goes silent and waits for the verdict. When I declare it 'delicious', she looks relieved.

As we eat, she flicks through her book of famous faces. There's David Hockney: 'he smoked nonstop even through the meal!'; here's Woody Harrelson, who was 'busy testing new cannabis samples'; there's Stanley Tucci at home – 'he's such a good cook it was intimidating', and here's Jamie Dornan – 'yes, he's just as sexy in real life!'

It's quite a challenge to serve up something tasty and take a photo when you have an A-lister like Cate Blanchett who has to get back to filming in just a few minutes. And it wasn't all smooth sailing. 'I've had a few disasters on the way,' she says. 'I arrived at the band Haim's home in LA when I discovered a split in my dress and my bum hanging out. I managed to burn the first round of pancakes for Cameron Diaz and I gave carrot-hating Dame Judi carrots!'

Then there was the monumental faux pas when the artist George – of Gilbert and… fame – asked her, 'How is your mother?'

'I had to explain to them that Mum had passed away. They weren't embarrassed at all.' And for her? 'No. It wasn't a horrible moment. It was kind of amusing because they live in a world of their own.'

It might seem that she has an incredibly glamorous globetrotting life, hanging out with all these A-list people. 'Yes, there is the occasional glamorous event,' she says, and she's often been to see her 81-year-old dad Paul's concerts, 'but my life really revolves around cooking for my family.'

For the past 13 years she has been married to film maker Simon Aboud, with whom she has two children, Sam, 15, and Sid, 11. She speaks fondly of her husband. 'He makes me laugh!' And McCartney has four siblings – Stella, 52, brother James, 46, her half-sister Beatrice, 20, from her dad's marriage to model Heather Mills, and Heather, 60, from her mother's first marriage. They're all 'very close', she says, and have dinner together when their work schedules allow. All the McCartneys are vegetarians and they're a supportive clan. Whatever the new product – Dad's music, Stella's shoes, her book – they're all out there promoting each other.

I'm not entirely sure about McCartney's latest one, though. The recipes are mouthwatering and look easy to make. But I don't understand why she needs all these pictures of famous people stuffing their faces. Do I really want to look at Elvis Costello clutching a chickpea tuna salad sandwich? Simone Ashley sucking in a mouthful of smoked tofu pad Thai?

MARY'S DINNER-TABLE TALES

DAD AND RINGO 

'Dad and Ringo live miles apart, so don't get together that often, but when they do it's magical. They pick up where they left off – it's great to hear their banter.'

Jann Wenner, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr pictured together in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2015

JUDI DENCH 

'Judi opened a chilled bottle of champagne. She said: "Do you feel that fizz feeling here?" touching both sides of her face. "It's wonderful".'

Judi Dench, pictured, told Mary just how much she enjoyed 'the fizz feeling' from a bottle of champagne

DAVID HOCKNEY 

'We had a poignant conversation about his mother and the inventive ways in which she'd fed the family during rationing in the Second World War.'

Mary and David Hockney had a poignant conversation about his mother and the inventive ways in which she'd fed the family during rationing in the Second World War

CATE BLANCHETT 

'I had a sudden panic attack as I realised maybe it wasn't the cleverest thing to bring this leading lady bright red soup with its spill-on-costume potential.'

Mary said she felt nervous after serving Cate Blanchett, pictured, a bright red bowl of soup

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And there's a particularly irritating portrait of George Lucas with a self-satisfied grin on his face that says, 'Hi! I'm the genius who created Star Wars and I'm just crazy about McCartney's granola crunch bars!' These portraits make Feeding Creativity more of an expensive coffee-table book – it costs £40 – than a cookbook.

To her credit McCartney kind of agrees with me. 'It's a bit pricey,' she concedes, and, 'yes, the recipes don't really need the photographs'. I suggest that she try taking her veggie food to ordinary people who eat meat and see how they like it. 'I once tried that with Mum,' she tells me, 'We'd bring veggie burgers to lorry drivers on the M6.'

The results were mixed.

As if by magic, McCartney takes her No Cook Chocolate and Raspberry Tart from my fridge. Made with no dairy, it has a crisp cookie base, chocolate mousse interior and is decorated with raspberries. It tastes like heaven. We start sharing childhood food memories. To my surprise, despite our vast difference in age – I'm 15 years her elder – we have a lot in common.

It was her mother who led the family into the vegetarian way of life when McCartney was a child; it was my father Jay who in the 1970s decided that the family would go macrobiotic – that's a meat and dairy-free diet, much like the veganism of today.

I tell her about the time my dad threatened to divorce my mum when he caught her eating a hamburger! She gasps in horror. Things were more relaxed in the McCartney household: 'Mum never lectured us or forced us to not eat meat.' Lucky her.

And like me, McCartney admits that there was a time when she was highly embarrassed by her parents' unconventional appearance. 'They would turn up at school in a rainbow Mini and Mum was wearing odd socks,' she says.

'You're lucky,' I tell her. 'My dad would turn up to school with no socks so everyone could see his purple toenails!'

You may think that growing up a Beatle baby might have been hard on her, but the band had split up by the time she arrived in August 1969. (Paul is on record as saying that her birth helped save his sanity.) She says she was 'an awkward and shy teenager' who did her best to stay out of the limelight. That said, her early life sounds pretty idyllic. She grew up in London and spent the summers at Paul's farm in Scotland with 'the six of us, the dogs and horses, chickens and geese'. The McCartney kids would be taken on tour with Wings, but there was no 'sex, drugs and rock'n'roll' – more veggies, tofu and strict bedtimes for her.

She talks about her dad with great love. They often hang out together when he is in town from his quiet East Sussex farm – she makes dinner, he mixes drinks. Paul will play her his latest song or she will show him her photographs. Dad and daughter having a lovely, quiet night in together. I feel a little sliver of envy at such a close parental bond.

I ask about Paul. 'Was he a great dad?'

Without hesitation she says, 'Yes. Really great!'

'What makes someone a great dad? I've been trying to figure that out for years.'

'He's always been so supportive of his children and took an interest in what we did and encouraged us. He did his best to give us a normal and happy childhood.'

With the dessert finished, I felt it was time to tackle the elephant in the room – or should I say, the nepo baby in the room; how can I phrase this so that it doesn't cause offence? 'Do you think you would have got where you were if it weren't for your famous name?' Ouch!

But McCartney is cool and takes the suggestion in her stride. 'I never shied away from the family name and never used it. Nobody ever booked me to take a photograph based on my family name.'

Photography, she has said, is in her DNA.

'One of my earliest memories was my mum taking me to her little darkroom in Soho. The sight of an image developing on paper in front of my eyes was magical.'

It was when McCartney was in her early 20s and was living on her own in London that she got into photography seriously and soon found work with fashion magazines and newspapers.

Her big scoop was in May 2000, taking the first picture of Tony and Cherie Blair's newborn son Leo. In 2010 she published her first collection of photographs in From Where I Stand

The book features just about every famous person – from Madonna to Dennis Hopper – you've ever heard of.

In 2015 she was commissioned to photograph the Queen to mark her becoming the longest-reigning British monarch. You don't get asked to do that just because your last name is McCartney. On the other hand, would she have been commissioned to do her 2022 documentary on Abbey Road recording studios – If These Walls Could Sing – without it? I doubt it and I tell her so.

'Yes, it has sometimes opened doors so I could meet people and show them my work. For a long while I shied away from sharing family photos. I was anxious to do my own thing. Now I'm more relaxed. And I never use the family name to book restaurants – never have I said, 'Do you know who am I?''

There is something about McCartney that is so likeable. She is sweet without being icky. With those big eyes goes a big heart. The thing about her is that English is her second language; her first is food. She speaks fluent yummy. Cooking food for people is her way to get people to love her.

And, when she offers to do the dishes before she leaves, I think I love her, too!

Feeding Creativity by Mary McCartney is published by Taschen, £40*. 

Mary will be in conversation with Stanley Tucci and Ruthie Rogers on the book at London’s Cadogan Hall on 1 November; cadoganhall.com

*TO ORDER A COPY FOR £34, WITH FREE UK DELIVERY, UNTIL 12 NOVEMBER, GO TO MAILSHOP.CO.UK/BOOKS OR CALL 020 3176 2937