Meghan Markle celebrated the launch of a cookbook she helped create on Thursday, and was joined by a special surprise guest: her mom, Doria Ragland.
Sitting in the front seat of a Land Rover Discovery with her daughter and son-in-law, Prince Harry, in the back, Ragland stepped out to greet waiting guests at Kensington Palace for the launch of Together: Our Community Cookbook.
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“Hi, I’m Meg’s mom,” Ragland said.
The Daily Mail reports that inviting a family member to an official royal event is unprecedented, meaning Ragland’s appearance was very significant. When Baroness Gail Rebuck, chair of publisher Penguin Random House, told Ragland she must feel “very proud” of Markle’s work on the cookbook, Ragland replied, “Head over heels.”
Markle wrote the foreword for the cookbook, which features recipes from a group of women whose community was affected by the Grenfell Tower fire in which more than 70 people died.
Markle joined the women from the Hubb Community Kitchen to cook a meal of coconut chicken curry, aubergine masala and chapatis beneath a tent set up near Kensington Palace. The Duchess of Sussex stood behind a tabletop grill and helped cook while her mother and husband watched on proudly.
Upon seeing an enormous bowl of green rice, Ragland said, “Oh I love that. That was the first thing I asked about [after learning of the cookbook.”
As Markle, Harry and Ragland made their way through tables of salad, chapatis and kofta kebabs, Ragland asked each cook about the ingredients.
After lunch, the trio took a group photo with the women of the Hubb and their children before sticking around to chat. Ragland gave each woman a hug and said, “It’s amazing. I’m just as excited as you are.”
“I’m so glad I can put the face with the recipes. I’m going to tell everyone, ‘I met her!’ I’m going to make everything. I’m serious,” she told the women, adding that Markle “felt very much at home” while working in the kitchen.
Markle showed gratitude to the women for embracing her into their kitchens and for partaking in the cookbook, which she called a “tremendous labor of love.”
“I had just recently moved to London and I felt so immediately embraced by the women of the kitchen,” she said. “Your warmth and your kindness, and also to be in this city and see in this one small room how multicultural it was.”
“I felt, on a personal level, so proud to live in a city that can have so much diversity. That there are 12 countries represented in this one small room, is pretty outstanding,” she continued.
In her foreword, she wrote that the Hubb (which means “love” in Arabic) “is a place for women to laugh, grieve, cry and cook together. Melding cultural identities under a shared roof… 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.”
