cook together

Mom, how surprised and delighted and then again surprised i was upon the release last month of HRH The Duchess of Sussex Meghan's community cookbook, a collaboration with the Hubb Community Kitchen and  women affected by the Grenfell Tower tragedy in West London.

photo credit, TOGETHER
with forward by HRH The Duchess of Susssex

Meghan refers to her book project as a "tremendous labor of love."  Like our family food memoir, it took nine months to create!  In her foreward she speaks to the power of food to tell stories and create meaningful connections: "The cookbook is a celebration of life, community and the impact of coming together." (p.9)

photo credited to TOGETHER cookbook

Aside from gathering your recipes and the reminiscences of family and friends to create Mary Cooks fifteen years ago this month, one of my favorite parts of the process was researching the social history of the fund-raising community cookbook in a scholarly work called Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote (Janet Theophano, 2002). The author's words offered an added dimension to my own endeavor and today lend credence to Meghan's culinary and community driven instincts as well:

"The antecedents of the ubiquitous community fund-raising cookbook with which we are all familiar reach back... at least to the 1600's. Women generated their culinary knowledge collaboratively and wrote their cookbooks cooperatively."

She brought the meaning of community cooking home to me in literal terms,  so much so that i named the first chapter of our project The Community Cooks as a nod to your local women's auxiliary and the food and recipes we kids knew through the TWIG community cookbooks you published to benefit the township hospital.  It seemed the perfect place from which to begin. 

Fast forward to Together: Our Community Cookbook launch party at Kensington Palace in mid September: bouquets of assorted fresh flowers were placed in simple glass vases in the tented area, with perfectly printed luncheon menus featuring highlights from the women's recipes taken from the new book.  The details and care were apparent, from the geometric blue motif on the tent which both echoed the book design and reflected the heritage of The Hubb women, to the warmth of the words on the menus placed on the tables: TO SHARE... TOGETHER.  It was truly a stunning and symbolic celebration of coming together, all lovingly coordinated before Meghan's wedding and official role with the Royal Foundation.

Kensington Palace book launch party,
photos courtesy Simon Pearce, People Magazine, twitter

Flashback. How I remember dashing along Broadway on a perfect October day to buy roses and sunflowers and miscellaneous fall blooms for your 70th surprise birthday party, then having my recipe typist and default party assistant Victoria drive me to New Jersey with the flowers and the party favors in the trunk and your favorite Saint Honore birthday cake on my lap, artfully recreated by my bakery owner neighbor Nacer since importing the confection from San Francisco was out of the question. Before the party, I quickly cut stems, formed bouquets and placed flowers on each table in colorful, hand crafted market baskets.  

The mini jigsaw puzzle party favors assembled from photos of various "signature Mary" cakes and packaged in small white bakery boxes tied with red and white twine were the final touch, with black and white xeroxed images of family, friends and food from the book pages scattered as well on each guest table to suggest the contents of the soon to be published cookbook chapters. 

Abigail and Charlotte, just little girls at the time, had the added surprise of a small "doll-scape" at their places, incorporating my old dollhouse furniture and figures to set a small baking scene before them.  

We had balloons, too but i think they were delivered - i would have remembered driving with them in the car, no?!  

Pam penned the calligraphy place cards (Meghan would approve!) while Eleanor delivered my toast to spare me the stage fright (Meghan would not approve) and Hugh and Dad managed the music,  Neapolitan canzoni, of course, a nod to Grandma Marie...

My mistakes with the book project and party were several. For starters, i should have limited myself to 50 recipes as Meghan did. I realized this at the end of the nine month book "gestation" when i was assembling the final chapter, Next Generation.  

• Had i focused on only the purely authentic Italian family recipes, even just the biscotti, breads and cakes, along with the handwritten and typed letters sharing family tales and cooking tips, perhaps i may have had a more edited version and a sweet story that could have been professionally published as a children's book.  Alas. i did not know this at the start or see how the project would unfold even to me!  (In truth, even before Meghan, Alice Waters sent her daughter off to Yale with a 50 recipe keepsake volume as a gift.  In so doing, she happened to inadvertently launch a sustainable food movement at the University, too!) Lesson learned, scale is everything! 

• Additionally, i should have filmed or recorded your brother Bobby's toast at the party, as in it he shared essential family history about your mother and you -- how Grandma Marie's vision for her own entertaining was big, in a way too big to execute, and that you became her right hand, in the kitchen and at home in general.  He also spoke about how you would hide all the biscotti around the house so that he and Richard and Artie could not find and eat them but that they always managed to do so anyway....  

• And, though the party photos were fun keepsakes and we created a Mary Cooks calendar and notecards post fete, the photographer i hired, probably through Craig's List, was not quite a fit for our intimate gathering and added unwanted anxiety to the event, alas. 

Nonetheless, no regrets! We celebrate your milestone 85 years on October 25th and embrace that i must come by my own "too big" vision honestly, given that the family history chapter plus five recipe volumes managed to be self published with the help of three different graphic artists, leaving about seven subsequent installments still remaining, neatly stacked in their draft formats in the rustic painted pie safe that doubles as storage space in my office.  

Maybe in this ever changing digital age, i will still find a way to get the remaining pages off to press.

In the meantime, Happy Birthday to you!  Let's continue to #cooktogether for years to come! (Meghan would approve!) 

Love,

p.s. see you later today and yes, i will be traveling with yet another cake on my lap!