Duchess cooks up secret treat with women of Grenfell
THE actress Meghan Markle was in Canada in June last year as she watched, along with millions of others, in mounting horror as the Grenfell Tower tragedy unfolded on television screens.
More than 3,000 miles away, survivors in London would gradually pick up the pieces of their fractured lives as proud women who had lost their homes gathered in a community kitchen to feed their families.
Months on, after a royal engagement and a new Kensington home for Ms Markle, those women made an unlikely connection.
The Duchess of Sussex, it can now be disclosed, made a “quiet” trip to the Hubb Community Kitchen close to Grenfell in January, donning an apron and washing rice on her first day.
She returned for a series of clandestine visits to learn how she could act on her sense of “deeply wanting to help”.
Yesterday, she launched her first solo project as a member of the Royal family: a charity cookbook to help keep their community kitchen open.
The Duchess, who contributed a lengthy foreword to the book, hailed the displaced matriarchs building a new life from the Al Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre, as she shared her own memories of family meals.
Combining more than 50 recipes from women affected by the fire, the book is aimed at raising £250,000 to keep the kitchen open full time, as well as encouraging others to find solace in “the universal need to connect, nurture, and commune through food”.
Founded in the aftermath of the disaster, the centre allows women without their own cooking facilities to prepare fresh food for families, friends and neighbours, gathering each day “to laugh, grieve, cry and cook together”.
At least two of the book’s contributors, Hiwot Dagnachew and Munira Mahmud, escaped the Grenfell Tower fire, while others live and work nearby.
The book will be launched by the Duchess at Kensington Palace on Thursday when guests, including her husband, will gather to eat food from the women of Hubb, which means “love” in Arabic.
It marks a new phase for the Royal Foundation, which has added “women and girls” to its list of key campaigning areas along with the causes of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke of Sussex.
The idea for the recipe book came from the Duchess after she asked coordinator Zahira Ghaswala how often the kitchen was open and was surprised to learn it could only stretch to two days a week due to a lack of funds. “We can do a cookbook,” she replied. Describing how it takes visitors 15 minutes to enter the Hubb kitchen “joyfully greeted by kisses by each of the incredible women there”, the Duchess said of her visits: “You should undoubtedly arrive on an empty stomach because upon departure you will have been stuffed to the gills with samosas flecked with cinnamon, chapatis flavoured with carrots and onion, Russian semolina cake and my very favourite avocado dip that I now make at home.” The book – published on Thursday – sees the Duchess write of her own food memories, praising “the power of a meal to take you to places you’ve never been, or transport you right back to where you came from”.
There are collard greens, black-eyed peas and cornbread made from produce in her grandmother’s garden and her mother’s gumbo recipe. She also reminisces about fish tacos and Mexican-influenced dishes that transport her between university in Chicago, her adopted home of Toronto and her birthplace in California.
The Royal Foundation is administering the transfer of funds from the sale of Together: Our Community Cookbook to the Hubb Community Kitchen and related projects. By last night, the book had reached the No 1 position on the Amazon bestseller chart.