I’ve always been able to get on board with Meghan. She stands for things, and the fact that she likes to cook just endears her to me more. I’m interested, though, in people’s sense of her “inauthenticity”, which one comment goes so far as to call “her brand.” Her interest in food and drink is well-documented, and was a major feature of her one-time lifestyle blog, The Tig (itself named after her favorite wine), where she shared recipes and chef interviews. And it was food that helped her put her stamp on royal life; she enlisted, for example, the London-based Californian pastry chef Claire Ptak to make the cake for her wedding to Prince Harry, pairing lemon with seasonal elderflower from Sandringham, a step change from the fruitcakes of royal weddings past. In 2018, her first project as an official member of the royal family was the foreword to a recipe book with west London’s Hubb Community Kitchen, a group of women displaced by the Grenfell fire, enabling them to continue cooking together for survivors twice a week in the aftermath of the tragedy. Irrespective of her cooking credentials, Meghan has a track record with food.
“Not her house, not her garden, not her recipe”, says one comment, exposing not only that familiar resentment of Meghan’s insistence on a right to privacy, but also the idea that she is somehow cheating. I wonder if audiences realize the extent to which much food television is staged. Do they think celebrity chefs film in their real home kitchens? Natural light, space, and configuration are all major considerations for shooting food content, and it is rare to see a star cooking in their natural habitat. Moreover, the people you see cooking on screen will usually have a team of recipe developers as well as food and prop stylists. None of this detracts from their talent or authenticity, but it’s important to recognize that even if the setting is ostensibly domestic, these are still productions.
From baked fish with roast vine tomatoes to crostini and what look like little iced doughnuts, it’s unlikely that the recipes in this series will show us anything new. But it is notoriously difficult to do anything truly innovative in cooking; I’ve commissioned and edited enough recipes to know that they are seldom without precedent elsewhere. That doesn’t make them unoriginal. In fact, I think that’s the beauty of cooking; a dish can be adapted and respun indefinitely, and is as much about the person who makes it as the recipe, literally and figuratively shaped by their hands. With Love, Meghan might be a saccharine series title, but it embraces the romance of cookery.
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