Food influencers come in many different forms. One might throw on a pair of denim hotpants with a shirt unbuttoned to the bra and lick her fingers suggestively while flipping burgers.
Another might dress in refined cream cashmere and sprinkle edible flowers onto pure white icing while chatting with A-list friends.
The surprise though, is that these two might be one and the same person: Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, whose cooking and entertaining Netflix show – With Love, Meghan – starts streaming on March 4.
Her new lifestyle brand As Ever, formerly American Riviera Orchard, will go live on a website at around the same time.
A dozen years certainly has changed Meghan. The denim phase dates back to a sex-drenched video for the magazine brand Men’s Health, in which the newly-minted star of TV series Suits discussed whether she would have sex outdoors (‘I would say yea,’ she giggled) and shared her food tips, including the rather basic ‘hack’ of adding a dollop of shop-bought hot sriracha sauce to shop-bought ketchup.
Back then, Meghan was prized for her physical perfection. ‘Grilling never looked so hot’ was how the Men’s Health website described her performance in the video which was released in 2013. But maybe that video started something. It was around the same time that she first considered launching a ‘foodie’ website that would help burnish her image.
It was to be called ‘Spoon me, Fork me’ – a vulgar piece of provocation which she thankfully had second thoughts about.
Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, whose cooking and entertaining Netflix show – With Love, Meghan – starts streaming on March 4 and will coincide with her new lifestyle brand As Ever, formerly American Riviera Orchard, which will go live on a website at around the same time
Twelve years ago, Meghan posed in a sex-drenched video for the magazine brand Men’s Health (pictured), in which the newly-minted star of TV series Suits discussed whether she would have sex outdoors (‘I would say yea,’ she giggled) and shared her food tips
Instead, the following year she moved into her fedoras-and-tapas ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ phase with the launch of her blog, The Tig. This was a more sophisticated affair all round, talking about acai bowls and eating salt cod fritters on the Caribbean island of St Barts; the actress Men’s Health droolingly dubbed the ‘ultimate guys’ girl’ had relaunched herself as a stylish, well-connected and cultured feminist. Meghan the budding Instagram influencer shared many recipes over the three years of The Tig.
There was an emphasis on burgers and cheese – and an enthusiasm for ‘motherf***ing fantastic crave-worthy food’ which seems slightly surprising now. For, in her reboot, the Insta-girl who swooned over street food has become the quintessential, sophisticated hostess, who wafts around a well-ordered garden carrying a trug of perfect salad vegetables, and then pours her own candles.
Today, she’s ‘in pursuit of joy’ with other millionaires, or millionaires’ wives, and it’s all about the detail – tiny mint leaves arranged just-so and swirls of fruit in ice cubes.
In the trailer for With Love, Meghan, she says: ‘I’ve always loved taking something pretty ordinary and elevating it. Surprising people with moments that let them know I was really thinking of them.’
According to a source who has seen the Netflix series, it’s not a collection of recipes but leans into the lifestyle and the how-to of hostessing.
As we prepare to get to know Meghan the Foodie part III, the fact is that there is rather more to her culinary journey than many realise.
Despite the eyebrow-raising shoot, Meghan found a calling and decided to launch a food blog – not called Spoon me, Fork me as was the original intention, but The Tig
Meghan’s current venture couldn’t be further from her first blog – gone is the Insta-girl who swooned over street food
Her first solo project on joining the Royal Family was championing a collection of recipes she cooked alongside women made homeless by the Grenfell Tower fire.
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Meghan made an official visit to the Hubb Community Kitchen in January 2018.
Later that year, in a foreword to Together: Our Community Cookbook, featuring recipes from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, she wrote about discovering at the Hubb ‘a place for women to laugh, grieve cry and cook together’.
Reminiscing about her childhood, she added that one of her favourite meals was ‘collard greens, black-eyed peas and cornbread… the smell of yellow onions simmering amongst a slow-cooked pot of greens from my grandma’s back garden’.
Years before she met Prince Harry, Meghan discussed producing a cookbook of her own with a US literary agency. Renowned agent Jonathan Shalit tells me that he remembers discussing a possible cookery and travel show with Meghan, whom he found ‘utterly charming’ when she was visiting London.
Shalit says he doesn’t doubt she could have created the show but her Suits contract didn’t permit time for ideas to develop.
‘We discussed cooking shows among other projects. She was very charming,’ he said.
Meghan returns repeatedly to her love of burgers on The Tig: ‘I am a hamburger loving fool,’ she writes in 2014 and later that year she starts dating Cory Vitiello (the couple are pictured in December 2014 at Harper’s Bazaar’s Laura Brown and Garance Dora for Bazaar in Florida)
So how did Meghan, the kitchen chameleon, end up on a Netflix show wearing Loro Piana cashmere in her trademark neutral colours, dripping in £210,000 worth of jewellery by Cartier and others?
She says she has always been a ‘foodie’. In her early years, she would go on fishing trips with her father Thomas – at that point her beloved North Star – and they would cook the trout or catfish which they caught. Raised in middle-class comfort in LA, where Thomas worked as a lighting director and her mother Doria worked for an airline and had a gift shop, Meghan remembers making salads with her mum and having McDonald’s as a regular treat when they took road trips.
She has also talked about visiting the $4.99 all-you-can-eat salad bar at Sizzler, saying it was all that they could afford. (Thomas, who won $750,000 in the California State lottery in 1990, when Meghan was nine, said that this was a misrepresentation and that she had never wanted for anything.)
Whatever the truth about that, her appreciation of food and eating out seems to have accelerated when she joined Suits in 2011.
As she recalls on The Tig, she lived in New York for a period while making the pilot and developed a great love for the city and its vibrant culinary culture. She enthuses over ramen restaurants and pizza joints in her blog.
By this point, she was dating film producer Trevor Engelson. They married in 2011 but their diverging ambitions and Meghan’s new life in Canada, where Suits was filmed, meant that they split just two years later.
The Tig was launched in 2014, with Meghan by now firmly a star of Suits and based in Toronto.
It reflected her passions for food, fashion and travel and good works, and was named after the red wine, Tiganello.
The blog – a ‘hub for the discerning palate, those with a hunger for food, travel, fashion & beauty’ – disappeared in 2017 after she and Harry got engaged, but some fans have archived it and it makes for fascinating reading (pictured with Prince Archie and Prince Harry in South Africa, September 2019)
The blog – a ‘hub for the discerning palate, those with a hunger for food, travel, fashion & beauty’ – disappeared in 2017 after she and Harry got engaged, but some fans have archived it and it makes for fascinating reading.
Meghan returns repeatedly to her love of burgers. ‘I am a hamburger loving fool,’ she writes in 2014. Later that year she talks about the burger and fries at Harbord restaurant.
‘It remains my most craved meal.’ The chef she at that restaurant, Cory Vitiello, was by this point more than just the man who cooked the best burgers in town – he was her boyfriend. Omid Scobie, whose book about Megxit is thought to be part-authorised by Meghan, said: ‘She was a passionate foodie and cook before meeting him but he opened up her eyes to food on a whole different level.’
She spent Christmas of 2015 with his family, who were convinced that they would soon be engaged but, says Scobie, the romance ended in May 2016 because Vitiello didn’t want to settle down. (He is now happily partnered with singer songwriter Martina Sorbara and they have a son, Barlow.)
The food Meghan champions on the Tig curiously isn’t particularly sophisticated. It tends to be either other people’s recipes or very simple acts of food assembly, like acai berry bowls or a tortilla soup made with leftover turkey.
There appears to be little effort at originality but, like so many influencers of the time, a lot of emphasis on gimmicky, goodlooking dishes.
Hence her 2015 recipe – from cookery writer Ruth Reichl – for pumpkin fondue which is, as she says, ‘fondue that is lit’rally baked in a pumpkin’.
Now, after the wedding, the kids and Megxit, she is returning to the kitchen and to her great skill at presenting an inspirational lifestyle vision
There seems to be a fair bit of cake-making with friends which is a surprise as a few years ago she explained that she didn’t enjoy baking (pictured July 4 at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships)
She adds: ‘I call it the best f***ing thing I’ve ever eaten.’
Another recipe is credited to actor Stanley Tucci’s cookbook.
Meghan suggests serving Cornish game hens for Thanksgiving and says: ‘They are simply small broiler chickens that take very little time to cook, and will delight your guests as you can offer them a serving of one per person (so fun, right?)’
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She is actually quite careful not to make great claims about her cooking skills, and when sharing a recipe for pasta admits that this is the first time she has ever made fresh pasta herself. Meghan writes: ‘I think a “foodie” is really just someone who not only loves but also appreciates the art and skill that goes in to making good food… and to making good food great.
‘And that, for me, can be a Michelin star meal, or as with today’s BestBite, a simple plate of food that makes you close your eyes as you eat it so as to not be distracted by anything else in the world.’
What a foodie is not, according to this description, is someone particularly accomplished at actually cooking.
However, according to Omid Scobie, by 2016 Meghan was confident enough in her vision and in the success of The Tig to talk to a US literary agency about writing a ‘food focused book’.
Fate took a hand that summer, when she stopped off in London and was set up on a blind date with Prince Harry.
Now, after the wedding, the kids and Megxit, she is returning to the kitchen and to her great skill at presenting an inspirational lifestyle vision.
There seems to be a fair bit of cake-making with friends which is a surprise as a few years ago she explained that she didn’t enjoy baking.
‘There’s something about the technicality of it that stifles my inner rebel; no dash of this or extra spoonful of that. There’s a science to baking and the measurements matter ever so much,’ she said.
But, when it comes to this kitchen chameleon, the only rule seems to be that those artfully curated passions and tastes are always subject to change.