How Deep Is Your Love?

On "With Love, Meghan" and faking it in the kitchen

When I was seven years old, I started to bake. No grown-up told me to do so, and no one told me not to. My first real venture was a banana bread, from The New York Times Cookbook. The recipe called for “1 teaspoon soda.” We didn’t have soda but we had Hawaiian Punch so I used that. When the recipe said to cool the bread “on a rack,” I walked the baked loaf to the bathroom and balanced it on the towel rack.

Since then, I estimate that I have baked at least 5000 times, hundreds of thousands of cookies and bars and pies and breads and cakes and muffins and shortbreads. I’ve gone on months-long jags perfecting biscuits. I baked every night for two years for the coffee shops my husband owned in Portland. My first job in Los Angeles was as a baker at the Fred Segal cafes, and my life now includes baking every day when there are people around to bake for. There are a few of you here who subscribed as premium members and received quarterly boxes of baked goods from me, a practice I would happily start again but for the postage, which made it a money-losing proposition.

Preferred kitchen counter view

But the baking? That I have never once rued, give me a reason and I am in the kitchen, rarely as fully consumed as when I am watching the elements - the sluice of butter and sugar, the powdery dry ingredients - combine to become something new, usually glorious but not always: batters that have no oomph, cakes that over-rise and essentially commit suicide in the oven, goodbye goodbye.

Many baking accidents, including these homemade cinnamon roles, are nevertheless edible!

Do I also sometimes burn things? Yes, especially in my terrible NYC oven, which runs 50 degrees too hot, requiring all kinds of babying to get things right. While I do sometimes set a timer, it’s always for at least ten minutes less than a recipe suggests - there is nothing you can do about a dry cake or over-baked cookies, and as I tell would-be bakers, the trick to baking is the baking - mostly I know when things are done by touch, the little spring back, the feeling that what you have just made is moist and, without getting too existential about it, alive.

I see nothing living in Meghan Markle’s new show.

What is happening here? Why are we in this woman’s kitchen? Why, when Markle produces a thin slice of dry cake she has ostensibly baked, does Mindy Kaling proclaim, “This is probably one of the most glamorous moments of my life”? Are they all in on the ruse? Is the audience supposed to buy that this is anything but an injectables version of homemaking? And does anyone but me feel bad for the cake?

I stood at a newsstand in late 2008, when publication after publication was biting the dust, and took in as an aggregate what people wanted: to see pretty happy women cooking, and if there were sports on in the background, all the better. I’ll wager 80% of the magazines I surveyed that day no longer exist. But the desire for someone who seems happy to feed you? That will never go away. And so I understand the impetus from Netflix executives to think the formula will work; that they can maybe recoup some of the $100 million they paid in 2020 to Markle and Prince Harry, whom even the casual observer knows have not proved telegenically irresistible. Or maybe Netflix is counting on people hate-watching, a phrase and a pursuit that fills me with little but sorrow.

I shouldn’t care, not really, if people want to watch studio-lit people laughing in million-dollar kitchens and stylized shots of hummus. But I kind of do care because I know of what they are being robbed, and the empty calories they are trying to pass off as “love.” You cannot simulate the communion that is offering to feed people, and the love that generates, and repeat repeat repeat. You can say I am being hyperbolic, that it’s just butter and sugar, and that what Markles et al are trafficking in is something else entirely. Sure. But why?