Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is already anticipating pushback on her banana pudding.
“I know some people will be upset that I took out the wafers,” she said, crushing Nilla wafers with a rolling pin rather than layering them in with vanilla pudding and sliced bananas. “But I like them crumbled on top.”
On a bright morning last week at her home in Montecito, Calif., Meghan roved between the garden, where Prince Harry stopped by the strawberry patch in Birkenstocks to say he was getting on a work call, and the vast, well-worn kitchen where her mother, Doria Ragland — graceful in jeans, white T-shirt and silver nose ring — rummaged for breakfast in the double-wide refrigerator.
“Grandma Jeanette would have used instant,” Meghan said, referring to Ms. Ragland’s mother, as they tasted a batch of homemade pudding flecked with vanilla. “But she would have loved this.”
Last month, in a new Netflix series, “With Love, Meghan,” the duchess gave the world its first look at the remake of her life from broken royal bride to triumphant domestic goddess. She and Harry fled Britain and its relentless criticism in 2020 to settle as a family in this safe, sunny, affluent enclave. But the show has brought some of that darkness back to her door.
Like Gwyneth Paltrow, Chrissy Teigen and other celebrities who have cooking and lifestyle brands, Meghan doesn’t have professional culinary training. Last week’s visit — the first time a reporter was invited into her kitchen — showed that she is a passionate home cook who knows her way around a vinaigrette, is quick with a lemon zester and deft with a knife. (I was allowed in on the condition that no photographs were taken in, or of, the house.)
At 43, with boundless enthusiasm and big Charlotte York energy, she is still figuring out her public identity, while pitching it to a global audience. Her decision to do so may read to some as entrepreneurial or endearing or narcissistic, but you can’t say it isn’t a big swing.
It’s about to get bigger. On Wednesday, sales go live for As Ever, Meghan’s line of food products priced from $12 to $15, including baking mixes, honeys and internet-famous jams — which, to her dismay, are labeled “fruit spreads” because of F.D.A. regulations. (The brand was initially announced as American Riviera Orchard, but was reportedly changed after trademark challenges.)
Last week, Meghan announced that she would host a new podcast series, “Confessions of a Female Founder,” and started a ShopMy channel where fans can buy the clothing and products they see her in onscreen, from head (Lottabody’s Control Me Edge Gel) to toe (CND Shellac).
“With Love, Meghan” presents her in a series of idyllic scenes (none of which were shot in this kitchen — a nearby house was used as a studio), cooking, crafting and planning tea parties. But anyone who thought that truffle popcorn and balloon arches would be uncontroversial was wrong.
When the show appeared, the millions who have long felt entitled to critique Meghan as a member of the British royal family were free to judge her as a wife, mother, cook, decorator and hostess. And many did, calling her saccharine, inauthentic and uninspiring. She was compared to Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm and other influencers riding the tradwife wave, who glamorize old-fashioned “women’s work,” like feeding chickens and cooking breakfast, that many women have no desire to return to.
The best episodes frame Meghan as a respectful student of chefs like Alice Waters and Roy Choi. In others, she is the teacher, demonstrating recipes like pasta salad and entertaining tips to a series of friends, who are charged with showing enthusiasm while she hands them a raw fish or ties a bow on a gift bag of peanut-butter-stuffed pretzels. Those episodes came in for the most mockery.
Some criticism was more pointed: Social media posts zeroed in on her Le Creuset pots, claiming they were too expensive for many Black women to afford and more ostentatious than traditional cast-iron. In response, Black women began posting photos of their extensive Le Creuset collections online. The journalist Michele Norris came to Meghan’s defense, asking: “Why is anyone surprised or disturbed that she would have beautiful color coordinated cookware? Does anyone drag Ina or Martha for their cookware?”
In an interview, she noted that singling Meghan out for not using her “real” kitchen is also illogical. “Every set is a performative kitchen,” said Ms. Norris, who hosts a podcast about cuisine and culture. “I think she manages to present an authentic version of herself within that artificial space. What’s so bad about someone wanting to share their joy?”
“Everybody has somebody or something they want her to be,” said the chef Carla Hall, who was a model before she was a chef, and whose culinary credentials were also questioned when she started her television career. “There’s no winning that game.”
Which raises a question: Why would someone who has for years endured the worst kind of public attention put herself back under the microscope?
One reason, of course, is money. The production deal Meghan and Harry signed with Netflix in 2020 ends this year, and most of their other recent efforts — documentaries about polo and Harry’s Invictus games — flopped. But Netflix is betting on her: The show has already shot a second season, and the company is an investor in her As Ever brand.
And despite the criticism, in the past month millions of fans have showed up for her. According to Netflix, the show was in the top 10 in 24 countries in the week after the premiere, with 2.6 million views. Many of the clothes on Meghan’s ShopMy page sold out within hours or days. Since Jan. 1, when she started a fresh Instagram account (she deleted the old one shortly before marrying into the royal family), she has gained 2.7 million followers.
The other reason is personal. “I need to work, and I love to work,” she said, pointing out that until she met Harry, she hadn’t been without a job since she was 13. With two young children to raise, she said, “This is a way I can connect my home life and my work.” (Prince Archie is 5 and Princess Lilibet is 3; they are sixth and seventh in line to the throne.)
She’s hoping to do that without feeding the fires of tabloid headlines and online gossip. Befitting a global brand chief, members of her team comb comment sections and social media so she doesn’t have to. When I told her about the Le Creuset controversy, she was baffled. “This is a thing, in 2025?” she said, throwing up her hands and turning to her mother.
“Everyone is coming in hot these days,” Ms. Ragland, 68, said calmly. Then the women moved on to discussing more important business, like whether a person needs an air fryer, why immersion blenders are so good for soup and whether Grandma Jeanette filled her hand pies with dried or fresh apples.
Meghan is upbeat, charming and always on message when fielding questions from a reporter. But she is clearly bothered by accusations that she is unrelatable and out of touch. She may be living a fairy tale, but not all that long ago, she was a not-very-famous actress on a medium-popular TV series. She was divorced, in her mid-30s and unsure where her next job or home would be.
“Don’t they know my life hasn’t always been like this?” she said, gesturing at the sweeping views and sleeping dogs.
A Cook’s Progress
When Meghan was growing up in Los Angeles, her mother worked long hours and had little time for home cooking. But Ms. Ragland was raised with a strong food tradition.
Her father, Alvin, had roots in Tennessee. “My father carried a bottle of Red Rooster hot sauce everywhere he went,” she said.
For her mother, Jeanette, as for many Black women of her time, cooking and gardening skills were a given. At home in the Crenshaw neighborhood, Meghan said, her grandmother grew collard greens and tomatoes in the yard, whipped up hand pies from scratch after dinner and did nearly all her cooking in one cast-iron skillet.
As a self-described latchkey kid, whose parents were divorced, Meghan loved to pick up fast food — Jack in the Box curly fries were a favorite — and go home to watch back-to-back cooking shows on Food Network. “Or I’d go to Grandma Jeanette’s after school,” she said. “She made the best after-school snack: Kraft grilled cheese on white Wonder bread,” Meghan recalled, dreamily. “All that butter.”
Ms. Ragland’s work as a travel agent meant that the two took frequent weekend trips, trying out Oaxacan street food and Jamaican roadside jerk, and sought out Thai restaurants around Los Angeles.
Meghan started cooking for friends as an undergraduate at Northwestern University, with a Rachael Ray recipe for grilled cheese sandwiches upgraded with fontina cheese and sliced pears.
“At 20, in a tiny little apartment in Evanston, serving that sandwich and a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck — that was when Trader Joe’s was getting big — we all thought it was so fancy,” she said.
In the years that followed, she threw dinner parties in Toronto, where the series “Suits” was shooting, started a lifestyle blog called the Tig and taught Prince Harry how to roast a chicken. (Ina Garten’s Perfect Roast Chicken, to be specific, which they were making together when he proposed.)
She used her short-lived royal platform to conceive and publish “Together: Our Community Cookbook,” a collection of recipes by women who lost family members in Grenfell Tower, the West London high-rise that was consumed by a catastrophic fire in 2017. In a Substack newsletter last month, the royal chronicler and Meghan skeptic Tina Brown described the book as a moment “when her culinary and lifestyle interests fused with an authentic charitable initiative” and “a PR slam dunk.”
Chicken Nuggets to Chantilly Cream
A hundred miles north — and a world away — from her grandmother’s kitchen, Meghan rinsed strawberries from the garden, sliced and macerated them in sugar, lemon juice and zest to layer in with the pudding and banana slices.
Unlike the sleek white kitchen in the show, this kitchen — designed and built by the previous owners — has a weathered wooden island (in addition to a marble one), a well-used Viking stove and classic accents of blue-and-white tiles.
There’s an old-fashioned butler’s pantry with cabinets holding glasses and tea sets, and a modern pantry stuffed with carefully organized ingredients and snacks. Shelves hold cookbooks by Giada De Laurentiis, Yotam Ottolenghi and Toni Tipton-Martin, and a well-thumbed copy of “From Seed to Skillet,” the 2010 classic by the celebrity gardener Jimmy Williams about creating and cooking from a home garden. And just outside the door, a framed picture of Harry as a boy with his mother, Princess Diana, holds pride of place.
Meghan is quick to admit she has a lot to learn. The house is equipped with two pizza ovens that are mostly dormant, and she said her first attempt at sourdough bread was both boring and traumatic enough to send her back to bakeries.
“There are professionals who do that better than I ever will,” she said.
When it’s just her and the kids for dinner, she said, she often relies on chicken nuggets, veggie burgers and Tater Tots (the freezer is stuffed with them).
What may help her stand out in the crowded field of food influencing is her eye for detail. Calligraphy and gift-wrapping skills she developed to pick up extra money are now put to work in leveling layer cakes and fluffing salads, just so. She truly cares which direction the radishes are pointing on the charcuterie board, and she really does sometimes transfer takeout food onto serving dishes (I have seen the platters).
To finish the pudding, she got out the hand mixer to make Chantilly cream — the vanilla-spiked, sweetened whipped cream that would give the dessert its name: Chantilly Lili, after the 3-year-old redhead who had just arrived home.
Ms. Ragland said she still wasn’t convinced that she needed a hand mixer of her own; she has a KitchenAid stand mixer at home in Los Angeles. The duchess rolled her eyes at her mother, as daughters do.
“My mom still has Grandma Jeanette’s cast-iron skillet,” she whispered to me. “That’s what I really want.”