At The Table: Jago Rackham

I first came across Jago Rackham when I stumbled across a piece of his writing extolling, in fantastic minutiae, the joys of the martini. It was the kind of exhilarating writing about epicureanism that makes you want to immediately pull a bottle each of gin and vermouth out of the cupboard and put a glass in the freezer to cool and make yourself something to drink.

This was about four years ago, and he laughs recalling that literary hymn to the booziest of cocktails. In the intervening years he’s given up drinking, but it’s a piece of writing that summons up the mood that runs through Jago’s debut book, To Entertain. He gives me a copy when we meet at Italia Uno, a little Italian deli tucked away behind Goodge Street. We order a plate of cannoli full of heavy chocolate and pistachio, some thick slices of pannetone, and a panino. It’s the ideal sort of lunch from an increasingly, sadly, disappearing sort of cafe. Italia Uno is still just about here, lined with Napoli scarves and playing Serie A highlights full volume on a TV at the back, a little oasis of communality in the centre of the metropolis. Like Jago it’s a generous place, full of delight, one full of easy pleasures.

To Entertain is a very enjoyable book and does two things very well. Firstly, and most straightforwardly, it’s a collection of instructions and recipes suited for dinner parties. Whether that is long-planned large gathering of friends, an impromptu feast, or just the simple pleasure of cooking something easy for a few people you like.

“I wish more people would cook for me. It’s one of my favourite things, and hopefully this book encourages people to invite me round to dinner.”

It is also a sort of Bildungsroman. An autobiography told through food and friends, through cooking for them, and what that act reveals about them and you. It’s about our first experiences of food, of how cooking for others turns us into adults, first through mimicry of other adults at your parents’ parties — the game of pretending to be a grown-up at a table full of grown-ups while still young — and then about working out how we would like to host and what kind of people that makes. It’s a book about family and our memories of food and the ritualistic punctuation it gives our lives. It’s about the people we cook for and the people who cook for us. It’s, and this is very important, about being a good host. “I wish more people would cook for me,” Jago begins with a laugh, “It’s one of my favourite things, and hopefully this book encourages them to invite me round to dinner.”

“My father cooked,” Jago says, our snacks dispensed with, and a delightfully frothy cappuccino ordered. “He's a doctor, and when he got home from work he would cook us all dinner. I think for him it was a way of moving from one place to another, of being at home. Seeing him cooking was very influential because it was so joyful.”

“I moved to London from Devon with my girlfriend when we were eighteen. I really started cooking just for her. We didn’t have any money, so having people to dinner was the cheapest way of seeing our friends and eating well. I didn't really go to restaurants then, I write about restaurants now, but it was quite late in my twenties that I went to restaurants with any regularity. Which I think is proper, you shouldn't have that much money when you’re a student.”

“It was quite late in my twenties that I went to restaurants with any regularity. Which I think is proper, you shouldn't have that much money when you’re a student, I think.”

These formative strains run through the book, cooking as something joyful, but also that the joyful element of cooking for people is necessary. Cooking and living are indivisible within the pages of To Entertain. “I wanted it to be a book about community. It has silly parts to it, but I think eating together and being together is really important, and I'm very practical about it. I say this at the beginning: lots of people seem to be anxious about the idea of having people to dinner. You shouldn't be.”

To Entertain is also a book that comes from writing as much as recipe making. Jago studied politics at SOAS when he moved to London, and had always wanted to be a writer; like many of us, he still dreams of being a foreign correspondent for a newspaper and travelling the world. Alongside food, books were held in equally high esteem in his house growing up.

“The idea of being a writer was almost an unthinking thing. I just had to write a book. In my twenties I was like, I'll get it out before I'm thirty. I didn't quite make that. But for a long time I didn't know exactly what I was going to write a book about. When I first left university I was trying to make enough money to live through writing, and I really burnt out.” Jago moved back to Devon and back to his parents — “I think that humbling experience is a very healthy one to go through,” he says — and he started to write about food, just for himself really, first on Instagram and Substack, and documenting the dinners he’s host for his friends. It all grew from there.

He does now cook and writes about food for a living, and although he never worked in a professional kitchen before, he’s expanded in recent years into event cooking and hosting pop-ups in restaurants like Sessions Art Club and the Plimsoll. If there’s something that unites the food he cooks at these events, and also at home, it’s a sense of conviviality and drama and celebration.

“When I began doing the actual cooking in restaurants and for events it was completely chaotic and often a disaster. I'd have to stay up the whole night before an event trying to finish everything. I had to be explained to, very calmly, how a professional kitchen works. So when I go into restaurants to cook now I always say: I'm not a proper chef. I'm here for the reason I'm here, but it's not to tell you what to do. I really respect people who work in restaurants, because they do a job which is incredibly hard and physical and demanding, and not one that I do. But now, when I go in, I understand the rhythm a little bit more. And it is kind of intuitive, because it's a system that has to work.”

It’s a very different process from cooking at home for friends, which is what the book really focusses on. But it also celebrates and foregrounds writing; the recipes are straight forward, communicated without ego but with flourish, and designed to be cooked and eaten, and with the flexibility of cooking while also hosting: it’s a book about a slow-cooked lamb, roasted chicken (and what to do with the leftovers), a quick dish for unexpected guests, what to serve while you’re cooking, how to cook and still be present in the room with your guests, the practicalities of what to drink, whether you should plate up at the table or not, how to craft an enjoyable evening, how to make people relax.

“I primarily think of myself as a writer, and I want to be someone who writes about food where the writing comes first.”

There are no photographs of food; instead illustrations are provided by Faye Wei Wei, many taken from photographs of various dinner parties Jago has hosted over the years, summon up the mood, it also helps it feel more like literature than a collection of recipes — “And I’m not famous enough to be like, here are my recipes,” Jago says laughing.

“I always think of Nigella Lawson's first book as kind of the last great cookery book that is also a piece of literature,” he says. “And I think the reasons they qualify as literature are partly to do with the lack of images, and the culture around recipes. But I also think it was a lot of women who weren't given the opportunity to write other things, so that was the way they could find their way into writing. So some of my favourites were writers first, who also just happen to cook. I think that’s much less the case now. Which means you might get fewer cookbooks that have this kind of astonishingly brilliant writing, like Elizabeth David, for instance, after she'd written all her famous cookbooks, she started writing these very expansive histories. That is what inspires me. I primarily think of myself as a writer, and I want to be someone who writes about food where the writing comes first.”

It is also a successful book in its summation of a very specific, if not so exotic cultural milieu. “It's a portrait of a certain type of London life, of being an artist, of not having much money, of wanting to do beautiful things with people you like to spend time with.”