"Together is a cookbook, but it’s also the story of a West London community who gathered together in a kitchen and discovered the healing power of sharing food."
This is how the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan (née Markle), describes her new charity cookbook, Together: Our Community Cookbook, which releases much sooner than you’d think.
Showcasing over 50 recipes from women whose community was affected by the June 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, Together hits stands on Thursday.
According to Bustle, who spoke to a Penguin Random House representative, the cookbook will be available at "all good bookshops and online retailers."
In a video recently released by Kensington Palace, Meghan said she visited the Al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre and met a group of women whose community was affected by the apartment building fire, which took the lives of 72 people.
"For two days every week, these women were able to cook and share their delicious recipes together," Meghan said.
The best part is the cookbook raises money for survivors of the fire and will allow the kitchen to stay open for up to seven days a week.
"The proceeds will allow the [Hubb Community Kitchen] to stay open and thrive so it can continue transforming lives and communities through cooking," Meghan says.
"We’ve called the kitchen the Hubb Community Kitchen because in Arabic, hubb means ‘love,’ and we share love in here," one of the women explained in the video.
"We were instantly caught up by the extraordinary vision for this project with the women of the Hubb Community Kitchen," Baroness Gail Rebuck, chair of Penguin Random House, told the Royal Foundation. "Every woman who has contributed a recipe to this book has also contributed a fragment of their lives and memories. Each dish tells a story of culture, family and a sense of home.
Meghan wrote the foreword to the book. According to the Royal Foundation, it reads:
"I immediately felt connected to this community kitchen; it is a place for women to laugh, grieve, cry and cook 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… Through this charitable endeavor, the proceeds will allow the kitchen to thrive and keep the global spirit of community alive."
On the Royal Foundation’s website, the goal is to sell 50,000 copies to make over £250,000 (about $328,755 USD) for the Hubb Community Kitchen.
"But most of all, Together is an homage to life and friendship and we hope it will act as a symbol to all communities and encourage cooking together for life and joy," Rebuck says.
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