Meghan cooks for Grenfell: Duchess announces support for charity cookbook
VIDEO: Meghan rolls up sleeves to help Grenfell
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(CNN)In
her first solo project as a member of the royal family, the Duchess of Sussex
is supporting a new charity cookbook showcasing recipes from women whose
community was affected by the Grenfell Tower fire, Kensington Palace said in a statement on Monday.
In January 2018, as she was settling into London, Meghan
Markle met the group of women who gathered to cook twice a week in a communal
kitchen at the Al Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre.
"I immediately felt
connected to this community kitchen; it is a place for women to laugh, grieve,
cry and cook together," Markle, who has continued to make regular private
visits to the kitchen, said in a statement.
She championed the cookbook
project as a way of ensuring the kitchen could operate more regularly, and it
is hoped that profits from the sales will help keep the kitchen open up to
seven days a week.
The kitchen originally
provided a place for the women to cook fresh food for their families and
neighbors, who were living out of hotel rooms after the fire, but more than a
year later it has also become a support network. The women who gather there
call it the Hubb Community Kitchen -- in Arabic "hubb" means
"love."
"I immediately felt
connected to this community kitchen; it is a place for women to laugh, grieve,
cry and cook together," said the Duchess, who has written the foreword for
the book.
Supported by The Royal
Foundation, "Together: Our Community Cookbook" features over 50
recipes from across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the Eastern
Mediterranean, and celebrates "the power of cooking to bring communities
together."
"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,"
she said.
The Duchess, who is quite a
foodie herself, would often share recipes from her kitchen on her now defunct
lifestyle blog The Tig.
