Cooking and Commensality after Grenfell

This essay provides a reading of the Hubb Community Kitchen’s Together: Our Community Cookbook, which was produced in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017, as a collection of recipes that speaks of commensality as a shared practice that connects cook-writers to reader-cooks. Its reading of the cookbook is grounded in the literatures on commensality, on community cookbooks, and on activist representation of Grenfell. It provides a close reading of Together, located in the context of the Hubb Community Kitchen set up after the Grenfell fire. The essay is the first in a two-part series of discussions using a cookbook called Together to explore the work of food media in producing and performing forms of commensality.