‘It’s a bit like being on a country road.’ While only spitting distance from Brick Lane in east London, Jago Rackham’s flat in an old warehouse in a quiet cul-de-sac reminds him of his childhood. ‘I grew up in Devon in a very rural village, and you used to be able to hear when someone came down the road. It feels a bit like that. I’m always listening out for people.’
The first-floor flat itself, which Rackham rents with the artist Lowena Hearn and the curator Tosia Leniarska, is small in size and rustic in its outfitting. ‘We think a lot about interiors as renters,’ he tells me from his kitchen table, over a milky and strong cup of tea. ‘About how to make places feel lived in, and ways of collaborating with your landlord. There’s a lot you can do that is completely reversible.’
Reversible landlord collaborations have included installing a fireplace over the original hearth. A sculpture by Hearn, which looks as if Antoni Gaudí got hold of some royal icing, merges sculpturally into the white brick wall behind. ‘It’s the perfect example – it exists firmly in space, but has no lasting impact,’ says Rackham. In a similar spirit, a curved arch of white fabric softens a rectangular doorway. The couple have installed bookshelves in the rafters, and Rackham has rebuilt the counter that sits over the washing machine. ‘I like when something’s a bit shoddy, because it gives you the liberty to mess around with things.’
Certain details in the kitchen lend a quasi-Medieval air: a lowly wooden bench, a large basket filled with white sheets, a row of cleavers of various shapes and sizes. Rackham is currently most excited, however, about the imminent arrival of a dishwasher. And for good reason. With his work as a cook, which involves catering for brands and individuals (recent briefs: a trifle that reminds someone of their childhood and a perfume-infused spread for a fragrance brand), he is in the kitchen a lot. Added to that, at least once a week he hosts a dinner party for eight to ten people, a rotating cast of old friends and new acquaintances. ‘We’re all sitting at this table and it’s a bit too small and everyone’s crowded in.’
I have glimpsed these gastronomical ventures – the preparation, presentation and aftermath – on Rackham’s Instagram and I have read his musings about them in his newsletter (his Substack is called ‘Greed’). With big vats of custard, a star of anchovies crossed over ricotta, luminescent cottage pies and petrol-black Guinness cake, his culinary aesthetic is ‘as if a kind of quite clever bear was trying to cook’. His dinner-hosting formula is also comforting in its simplicity. ‘I’ll put some crisps on the table, then I make pasta or roast a chicken. Then I’ll make some custard and poached fruit. It’s pretty much the same every week.’
Rackham is soon to publish To Entertain (Cartouche Press), a how-to that aims to demystify the process. ‘It’s for people who are afraid of hosting – I’m trying to show that it’s a calm, fun thing to do and you don’t need a lot of money to do it,’ he says. The book also has a philosophical edge, a ‘celebration of togetherness and of the almost utopian spaces that the dinner party can create’. The illustrations are by his friend, the artist Faye Wei Wei. Rackham would invite her over, cook for her and ask her to draw.
While cooking provides escape from the painstaking process of writing, ‘it’s nice to deal with weighty, heavy, real, things after thinking in concepts and words’, says Rackham. Yet his culinary imperfectionism has changed the way he writes. ‘With cooking I would feel nervous about things not being perfect, but then you realise that no one knows what you wanted something to look like. This way of thinking spread into my writing. It was really liberating.’
There is a small desk next to the kitchen, but Rackham tells me he doesn’t write at home: ‘I will just wash up or make jam or do the laundry.’ The flat, however, is filled with writerly details, the kind that might be found in a story book. Andromeda – Rackham and Hearn’s confident white cat – hides herself within a white sheet. The London Review of Books is drying out on the towel rack (a bath-related accident). A pyramid of jars filled with said jam sits defeatedly on the floor. (‘It was a disaster,’ says Rackham. ‘I’m too sad to throw it away.’) A gold chandelier with candles hangs from a scribble of inky black ribbon, which also decorates the wall above the bed.
But it’s Hearn and Rackham’s objects and artworks that are the main attraction, the result of a decade of collecting (Spitalfields antiques market is a regular haunt). ‘Not with a purpose of getting specifically valuable things,’ says Rackham, ‘but buying things that we like.’ He points out their oldest purchase – an Egyptian vase. ‘I think it’s about 3,000 years old, and I smashed it.’ The second oldest thing – a knobbled 18th-century ladle – has been ‘bashed through time’. Rackham has many stories to tell about the objects in his possession, from a selection of Welsh cups stolen from his parents to a bowl found in a charity shop for 35p that he thinks may have belonged to the painter Roger Hilton.
That sense of mixture and collection also applies to his cooking. ‘I want to make things that reflect London, which would be a blend of Englishness in the food, but also reflective of the many different food cultures that weave into my cooking just from shopping in a multicultural city,’ he says. A recent meal, made for some friends from Barcelona, consisted of a leg of lamb with prunes followed by a thyme-infused cake.
The hope is that To Entertain will encourage others to bring similar playfulness and personality to their own cooking – and not to take it too seriously. ‘People don’t remember what you give them to eat, but they do remember if you are unhappy,’ says Rackham. ‘I get sad that I am so rarely invited for dinner – people don’t want to cook for me. That’s part of why I wrote the book, so they don’t feel nervous and invite me over.’
For more about Jago Rackham, visit Instagram @ecstasy_cookbook
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