For Christmas With the McCartneys, a Vegan Yorkshire Pudding
The New York Times
A recipe that evokes the traditional holiday fare of Paul McCartney’s youth via the plant-based cooking of his daughter Mary.
The way Paul McCartney remembers it, the centerpiece of his family’s first vegetarian Christmas dinner, in the late 1970s, was a slab of macaroni and cheese.
“I wanted something to carve,” he said in a phone interview last week. Mary McCartney, his daughter, said the “macaroni turkey” was an early success: cooked in advance, shaped into a roll and ceremonially turned out onto a platter.
Mr. McCartney was raised in Liverpool in the 1950s on a traditional meat-and-two-veg diet. But as young parents, he and his American wife Linda McCartney famously came to believe that eating animals was unethical — then a fringe belief in Britain, in the same counterculture bucket as mindfulness, yogurt and pacifism. Still, a Christmas feast without its meaty centerpiece of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding seemed a little absurd.
