Duchess backs cookbook in aid of fire victims
The Duchess of Sussex is giving her backing to a cookbook from a community kitchen set up in the aftermath of London’s deadly Grenfell Tower fire.
The former Meghan Markle has written a foreword to a volume of recipes from the Hubb Community Kitchen. It was set up by women displaced when fire destroyed the west London highrise in June 2017, killing 72 people.
Kensington Palace said this week that proceeds from Together: Our Community Cookbook will go toward keeping the kitchen open and helping it expand. The Duchess will host a book party at the palace on Thursday to launch the book.
The recipes from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and beyond reflect the diversity of the local community: Homemade coconut chicken curry, aubergine masala and a range of chapatis and sharing dips, plus caramelized plum upside-down cake and spiced mint tea.
A cookbook is an apt charity project for Meghan: Food and cooking are mostly non-controversial topics for royals, and Meghan is a known lover of both, judging from her social media activity prior to marrying Harry in May. (She had to close down her accounts, like her lifestyle blog, The Tig, which was named for her favourite wine.)
Plus, supporting and raising money to help those displaced and hurting from the horrifying Grenfell Tower fire in London last year has become a new cause for the royal family in general.
To that end, Meghan has written the foreword for the cookbook, which features 50 recipes from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean.
The recipes were compiled by a group of women affected by the fire who organized a community kitchen at the Al Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre in West London to gather and prepare fresh food for their families and neighbours as a way of helping their community connect, convene and heal through communal eating.
Meghan first visited the kitchen in January 2018, before her May wedding, and has continued to make regular low-key private visits, according to the palace, which issued several never-seen pictures of Meghan cooking with the women at the centre.
Meghan liked how the communal kitchen project empowered women at a grassroots level, according to her foreword.
“I immediately felt connected to this community kitchen; it is a place for women to laugh, grieve, cry and cook together,” she wrote in her foreword.
“Melding cultural identities under a shared roof, it creates a space to feel a sense of normalcy — in its simplest form, the universal need to connect, nurture, and commune through food, through crisis or joy — something we can all relate to.”
The Hubb Community Kitchen — hubb means love in Arabic — will be the beneficiary of proceeds from sales of the book, to be released on Thursday in Britain. The idea is to help the kitchen stay open and thrive, to widen its reach and “keep the global spirit of community alive,” Meghan said in her foreword.
Meghan and Harry have several times said publicly that cooking meals together is a favourite pastime. After announcing their engagement in November 2017, he said he proposed to her while they were making a roast chicken in his Nottingham Cottage digs at Kensington Palace.