Food really is my happy place. Ask anyone I know, they’ll say a) I’m always hungry, and b) I’m very disappointed if food is not good. Because I feel like life is too short. And I don’t mean it always needs to be super bougie; it’s not even about that. But if it’s exactly what you want at the right time, there’s nothing better.
At home, growing up, it was me and my mum. She was veggie for most of my life and that meant so was I for the first 12 years, I think. There was a lot of pasta: that’s my mum’s one dish. I don’t feel I’m offending her by saying that. She was a single mum, she worked hard. Cooking didn’t bring her joy. Whereas I love cooking; it genuinely brings me so much joy.
When you’re working on a TV set, some caterers are better than others. I didn’t like the catering on Doctor Who.
My school bus stopped right outside McDonald’s in Tooting Broadway. We would go in the morning and get a sausage and egg McMuffin most days. Some days we’d go twice. I just marvel at how my teenage metabolism handled that, because if I tried to look at a McDonald’s twice in a day these days …
We used to go to friends in the south of France in the summer. I’d get really very excited by the massive prawns when you went to the beach. And I feel like I’ve eaten so many of them that that’s how I became allergic to them. My body just went: “You’ve had your fill, you need to leave some for someone else.” Because when I was 21, I became really quite severely allergic to shellfish, which is still very sad for me to this day.
Me and my fiancee love Mexican food, so for our engagement party we were like: “We’ve got to make tacos!” So my fiancee borrowed a taco press and we had handmade corn tortillas with pulled pork and sweet potato for 100 people. We had all our neighbours squeezing limes. It was crazy, but actually it was delicious.
For [ITV drama] Tom Jones, I had to eat in a corset. For the first couple of days, I would eat three mouthfuls and feel full. It’s because it can’t go down to your stomach. I think that was entirely the point: to keep women physically subservient. It’s weird as well, because you can’t really get a proper breath in a corset either. You can totally see how women were fainting all the time. And that allowed people to be, like: “Oh, women are so silly and emotional.” Because if you’re breathing shallow breaths all the time, you do feel much more emotional.
I love The Chef Show [on Netflix] with Jon Favreau and Roy Choi. It doesn’t feel as presentational as some cooking shows can. And there are always little nuggets of gold. Like when they were making a lasagne or something he was like: “We always try to keep a bit of a tomato sauce, and then put that into the next one, so it gets richer and richer and richer every time.” And I was like: “That’s genius!”
I hope our family will be a household where there’s always food on the table, however many friends our kids bring home. I love nothing more than cramming too many people around the table and figuring out how to feed them: “I don’t know how we’re going to do this, but let’s do it!” To me, that’s what food is. That’s what it does.
My favourite things
Food
Tacos al pastor with a little bit of griddled pineapple. There’s one specific taco stand in Roma in Mexico City that does them incredibly. I’ve never tasted anything better than that.
Drink
A spicy mezcal margarita. The key is putting the chilli salt around the rim, so you get the taste of chilli in every mouthful.
Place to eat
I’m going to big up somebody that’s local to me: the Camberwell Arms [in south-east London]. It’s not your typical pub fare at all and it does small plates really well, so you basically get to eat the whole menu.
Dish to make
My go-to for a really long time now, probably 15 years, is teriyaki salmon with greens, like pak choi and kale, cooked with ginger, garlic and a little bit of chilli. You can make it with brown rice and a brothy sauce in the winter, and in the summer, we make it more like a salad.
Pearl Mackie appears in Grenfell: In The Words Of Survivors at the National Theatre’s Dorfman Theatre from 13 July-26 August
