I once touched Michael Fassbender’s chest — and I’m still a lesbian
Austerity blogger Jack Monroe and chef Allegra McEvedy have a shared passion for food — and each other. They tell Rosamund Urwin about falling in love, their political ambitions and raising a family
WHEN Jack Monroe and Allegra McEvedy started “courting ” (their word), Monroe would sit at the bar of McEvedy’s Blackfoot restaurant. “She would send me clams from the kitchen that looked like clitorises,” rec alls Monroe. “It was like in the L Word [when] the chef Lara seduces Dana with food.”
I’ve met the culinary couple (now engaged) at the same spot — a converted pie and mash shop in Exmouth Market. Although Black foot was McEvedy’s creation, it has become a joint enterprise. Monroe has done shifts in the kitchen (her cassoulet — using leftover Porchetta — was a bests el l er) . She invented some of the puddings. The pair even chose the teal tiles on the bar counter together on Monroe’s Birthday. “That’s what we do, west London lesbians: we celebrate our birthdays in tile shops.”
They are an exuberant pair. Monroe is doe-eyed and idealistic, like a sweary, tattooed Audrey Hepburn, while McEvedy is a total hoot — her most-used phrase is “please don’t print that”. They met on Twitter last year after Monroe named a goldfish after her favourite chefs, and McEvedy took that as a come-on.
“I looked at Jack’s Twitter photo, thought ‘holy shit, she’s hot!’ so I made a totally inappropriate comment about vaginas and goldfish, and it grew from there,” says McEvedy.
It would be easy to talk up their differences. Monroe became famous as an “austerity blogger”, showing how to make healthy meals on the tightest o f bu d ge ts (agirlcalledjack.com), before morphing into an activist who forced a parliamentary debate on foodbanks; McEvedy ran the kitchen at Robert De Niro’s New York restaurant Tribeca Grill before becoming a TV chef and co-founding the Leon chain. Monroe is 27, McEvedy 44. But they’re the kind of couple so clearly — and demonstrably — in love that they make everyone else doubt their own relationship. McEvedy later tells me that Monroe is “worldly wise”: “That’s why this works.”
Monroe is also a trooper. The night before we meet she was so ill she was “wailing like a banshee”. McEvedy made her scrambled eggs for breakfast as a stomach-settler.
“We’re both really crap at being ill,” Monroe says. “Neither of us is very patient. We drive each other mad because we both want to look after each other. So it’s like: ‘ do you need anything love?’ ‘No. Go away!’”
McEvedy is a feeder. She orders a “shitload” of food and stuffs king prawns ( fat, glorious things ) a nd whipped lardo on toast (so good, you’d lick it off Nigel Farage) into my mouth. She’s showing off the freshly made-over Blackfoot menu. There’s now more small plates and a new cocktail list, and the menu is “less piggy-centric”.
The pair eat together there once a week. Other favourite haunts include the Brackenbury in Hammersmith, and the River Café, where Monroe reveals Michael Fassbender also dines. “I touched his chest and I’m still a lesbian,” she laughs. “Allegra introduced us, and I laid my filthy hands on him!”
Most of the time, though, they cook together at home. What’s a dinner party like? “Allegra will do the meat and I do desserts and sides. People can’t guess who made what. We do influence each other.” McEvedy jokingly shakes her head at this point. Monroe carries on valiantly. “I now use a lot more olive oil and salt. I wrote my first cookbook with no salt in it whatsoever. Then I moved in with Allegra.”
McEvedy has seven kinds of salt, and 31 types of vinegar. “I’m not a cooking ponce — but I like range,” she explains. “[ Jack’s] been at it for four years, and I’ve been it at for 24.”
Their contrasting cooking styles also reflec t how they learned. Monroe taught herself, once walking around
‘I looked at Jack’s Twitter photo and thought ‘holy shit, she’s hot’ — and it grew from there’
the supermarket with a Loyd Grossman Thai green curry jar in her hand, buying the ingredients listed on the back. McEvedy graduated from the Cordon Bleu school but ended up rejecting haute cuisine. She says she was probably happiest as chef in a community centre, the Good Cook. “One day the veg didn’t turn up, so I did antipasto and the main course was a kiss on the cheek. Everyone loved it.”
McEVEDY, a doctor’s daughter, was educated at St Paul’s but got expelled. She had started acting up after her mother died when she was 17, and she struggled with the stress of coming out. She has always been open about her sexuality. “At the time, there were lots of Greenham Common, diesel dykes. I felt I had a responsibility to show we’re not all like that image.”
Monroe came out before London Pride in 2013. “I was terrified. I was honest with my readers about everything, but I hadn’t told them I was gay. They were all like: ‘We know. It’s the Doc Martens, the boy’s name, and you flirt with girls on Twitter’.” She notes the “chilled out” response to her friend and fellow food writer Ruby Tandoh recently coming out: “Most of the comments under the article were ‘so what?’”
But both agree there is some way still to go towards equality. “Kids in the playground are still saying ‘you’re so gay’, reinforcing to the next generation that being gay is something to be teased about when it’s not,” notes Monroe.
The couple live with their two children: Monroe’s son Jonny, five, and McEvedy’s daughter Delilah, four, who go to the same school. How do they get their children to be adventurous about food? “Cover things in cheese and
‘I’d like to give politics a go. And Allegra has a bit of a fancy about being a Prime Minister’s wife’
bacon,” reckons Monroe. “What they say they don’t like today, they’ll like tomorrow,” McEvedy adds, before revealing that Delilah “flings peas out of the window”.
Pudding arrives and the conversation turns to politics. Monroe campaigned for the Green Party at the election, having previously been a Labour supporter, yet she won’t commit to saying she voted Green. “People have been going ‘so when you vote Green...’ You don’t know that I’m voting Green. The Tory candidate sent me four personalised letters, though — barking up the wrong tree there.”
They l ive in the ( th e o re ti c a l ly ) L abour/ Conser vative marginal of H a mme r s mi t h . Mc Ev e d y ba c k e d Labour’s Andy Slaughter who was comfortably re-elected. Might Monroe have done the same? She picks her words carefully: “I cast my vote for what i s best for my borough.” So Slaughter? “In your opinion.” I’d bet that’s a yes.
Ma ny pe o p l e wou l d l i ke to see Monroe go into politics. “Labour were chewing my arm off when I was backing them. At the moment I wouldn’t be able to commit to a constituency as much as they’d need it. I’m up and down the country doing literary festivals and political stuff, and I like dropping the children off.”
Next election, then? “The kids will still be a bit young. I’d like to give it a go — you need to change a system, rather than just continually complain about it — but it’s something in the future. I’m not going to commit to ‘in 2020’. I think I’ll do the local council first.”
Her principal supporter would be McEvedy. “She’s got a bit of a fancy about being a Prime Minister’s wife,” says Monroe. “But she needs...” “Better hair,” McEvedy interjects, laughing.
Monroe has just lost her Guardian column when we meet, and admits that she has struggled with the criticism she was getting below-the-line. “It was giving me a mental breakdown, the shit I would get from people: ‘She doesn’t know how to cook’... I cooked a private dinner for Mary Port as, for f **k’s sake.”
She has also been criticised for her tweeting once too, when she said David Cameron “uses stories about his dead son as misty-eyed rhetoric” to legitimise NHS privatisation. “I regret using Twitter as a platform to try to express what was actually a fairly widely-held but divisive view,” she says now. “If I was going to do it again, I’d have rephrased it. I did write the Camerons a personal apology letter. It took me three days to write, because I wanted to get it right. I never received any acknowledgement. I never meant to cause them any upset.”
She has received viler comments herself, including rape and death threats. “I’m a Left-wing, heavily tattooed, lesbian with opinions who says ‘f **k’ a lot — I tick a lot of boxes for white, middle-class men to hate.”
The threats became so frightening last month that Monroe has taken to going running with a penknife. “I’m not advocating carrying knives but I do always carry a knife.”
She also briefly quit Twitter but has now rejoined. “A lot of the threats were about corrective rape — men saying ‘I’ll turn you’. I’ve touched Michael Fassbender’s bare chest and it didn’t even give me a quiver. You are highly unlikely to ‘rectify ’ my sexualit y. I f **king love women. So thanks but no thanks.”