Meghan Markle Is Releasing a Charity Cookbook for Grenfell Fire Victims

Meghan Markle: Duchess of Sussex, and queen of the kitchen. Long before she married into England’s royal family, the former actress scooped frozen yogurt, kept a lifestyle blog, and made three-ingredient pasta sauce. Now, she’s using her pull to help publish a cookbook to support a community ravaged by tragedy.

Together: Our Community Cookbook features a foreword by the Duchess and recipes from cooks involved with the Hubb Community Kitchen, which is led by women affected by the Grenfell Tower fire. “I’m passionate about food and cooking as a way of strengthening communities,” Markle explains in a video released by Kensington Palace.

The Grenfell Tower fire, which killed 72 people and injured nearly as many in West London in June of 2017, left a community devastated and many people living in hotels without cooking facilities. Hubb, which means “love” in Arabic, sprung up to let the victims cook their own food and share with their neighbors going through similar experiences. Markle has been volunteering regularly at the kitchen since the beginning of the year, but learned that it only operated two days a week because of funding. To expand the services to every day, she proposed the cookbook and has ushered it out as her first solo charitable act as a member of the royal family.

The 55 recipes in the book include dishes like green chile and avocado dip, coconut chicken curry, and caramelized plum upside-down cake — each of which you can find in a preview on the Penguin website. The food featured comes from Algeria, Iran, Tanzania, and more. Some are family recipes, while others are creative inventions of the women involved.

Pre-Order the Book: Together: Our Community Cookbook, $17

The book is available now for pre-order (it releases September 25) on Amazon, and the profits of the sale go to the Duchess’s charity for the benefit of the Hubb Community Kitchen and towards the creation of other projects aimed at improving people’s lives through cooking together. In fact, the hashtag for the book is #CookTogether, and the project encourages people to use that to talk about how cooking or sharing food helped you through a time of adversity. “It’s not just about cooking to fill stomachs,” the video from the Palace says. “It’s about bringing people together.”