I mean no slight to the recipes in The Kitchen Book when I say that the reason I love it — and I mean, really love it — is not because of them, but because of the writing. I became a die-hard Ella Risbridger fan from the moment Midnight Chicken came into my life in 2019, and her latest book in many ways feels to me like a companion volume. It, too, at its heart, is a book about insisting on joy and finding giddy moments of enthusiasm and pleasure in a world that is not short on suffering. This comes through in everything she writes (and I must also put in a word here for her ebullient apologia for the romance novel, In Love with Love, which came out last year) and she does so with such charm, such wit, such delight and steadfastness. When I read her I feel that a beam of kindly, warming light is shining on me. This is no small thing. And while words like joy can feel airy-fairy and aspirational, her guidance and her recipes are stoutly practical and inspiringly manageable.
Before I get to the recipes proper, allow me to give you some sentences of hers that made me positively purr. For example, the last line of her recipe for a Manhattan, a cocktail she first came across in Paris when she was 18 while staying with some chic Chicagoans there: “Serve with a crossword, strange jazz, and a door opening onto the future.” Here she is writing about radishes: “The trick with radishes, I learned, incidentally, from a Joan Aiken short story about a little girl and her mother with no money who live in a room in Southampton Row. Hot and dirty London presses up against their front door, but their floor is scrubbed and their curtains are drawn and they have radishes in a blue bowl of water. Their house is an oasis. They can see a fig tree. They have a bed, a box, a table, a stool and a gramophone with six records. They have a blue bowl of radishes. They need nothing else. Nor do you with this.” Finally, I have to bring you four short paragraphs from her introduction:
“I love to be in the kitchen and I love to be eating and I love to be cooking, and I hate that I have to do it every day, and if I have to do it every day it has to be so much better than just eating toast.
I love to cook; I love to eat; I hate to wash up.
I love when dinner is fantastic and I hate when the kitchen is a horrible hole. I love to eat an elaborate meal and I hate the rag that hangs around the sink. I love food and I hate to use more than two pans, tops.
I love to try very hard and I hate when things aren’t worth it. This is a book of things that are worth it.”
Everything about this book is worth it. Like Risbridger, I am “a person with low tolerance for faff, a great love of nice things, and not a huge abundance of spare time or energy” and I suspect this describes a great many of you, too. Frankly, even if you never ever cook, this book is worth it, just for the nourishment of her prose. Even so, I should really let you know some of the recipes in it. So, here goes: No-Knife Potato and Prawn Curry; Yogurt Pot Naan; Turmeric Satay Salmon with Greens; Chicken and Egg Meatballs; Cumin Lamb Noodle Ragù; Brown Butter Cornbread; Green Chickpea Quesadillas; Charred Pineapple and Sesame Salsa; Sticky Lemon Cake; Rhubarb and Custard; Sesame Cheese Straws; Marmite and Rosemary Chicken Broth; Miso and Peanut Burst Aubergine; and Almond and Cherry One-Bowl Cake. The recipe I’m sharing with you now is perhaps not indicative of many of the recipes in the book, in that it takes a long time, but it is full of the punchy robust flavours that very much bear the Risbridger stamp, and might be just the thing for the long weekend ahead: Six-Hour Lamb with Za’atar and Anchovy.
The Kitchen Book by Ella Risbridger, published by Fourth Estate.
Photos by Yuki Sugiura.
