A bird in the hand

Cooking can be truly therapeutic and for one author, it was life-saving

Midnight Chicken & Other Recipes Worth Living For Ella Risbridger

Bloomsbury

One rainy Monday, shortly after her 21st birthday, Ella Risbridger left her London apartment, intent on ending her life.

“I had fallen out of love with the world,” she writes in her book Midnight Chicken. Depressed and anxious, she tried to step in front of a bus. That this plan failed is thankfully evident in the beautiful book she has written about her life before and since.

Midnight Chicken is ostensibly a cookbook — there are more than 80 recipes here, from breakfast to dessert — but it’s more than a list of instructions on how to make a really good roasted chicken.

It’s a candid account of how making these foods can be a profoundly rejuvenating experience. It is also, slyly, a love story that takes a bittersweet turn halfway down the first page of acknowledgments.

A charming, witty coming-of-age-slash-recovery story that’s refreshingly free of saccharine (the ingredient and the sentiment), it’s a cookbook that rewards creativity over rules.

Risbridger has been compared to Nigella Lawson and Sylvia Plath, which she finds both flattering — and alarming. Anyway, she doesn’t want to dwell on her dark moments. “A lot of people, cleverer and more learned than me, have written books about why people try to kill themselves,” Risbridger writes. “I prefer to think of the reasons I didn’t.”

Her book is full of them: ad-hoc recipes that find their way to deliciousness, messy dinner parties that last till morning, meals eaten under the stars with friends.

“The cooking you will find here is the kind of cooking you can do a little bit drunk,” she writes. “It’s the kind of cooking that will forgive you if you forget about it for a while, or if you’re less than precise with your weighing and measuring.”

Midnight chicken, for instance, is made with a 1.6 kg bird and about eight cloves of garlic “or as many as you can muster.” This was one of the first recipes she wrote — on her blog, Eating With My Fingers — the one that sparked her interest in food (and life). It’s the one she cooked with her live-in boyfriend, a man she affectionately refers to in the book only as Tall Man. It was Tall Man — a journalist whose real name is John Underwood — who one day found her lying on the floor, frozen with despair.

Nearby was a chair, on the back of which hung a cloth bag with a chicken inside. The couple cooked that chicken together, and later, after the bus incident, a pie — an adaptation of her grandmother’s that includes 125 grams of lard. “It was like a little map,” she writes. “I will get through this. I will cook something, and I will eat it and I will be alive.”

Could recovery be this simple? Of course not, Risbridger says: “Depression is not logical, anxiety is not logical. If it were, it would be a lot easier to get out of it.” Still, her bird-by-bird approach worked. All these years later, Risbridger exudes good cheer. “I’m amazing,” she said by phone from her home in London recently, where she was putting the finishing touches on her next book, Set Me on Fire: A Poem for Every Feeling.

The recipes are quite basic, comfort foods written by a woman who was seeking comfort — not only because of her own mental health struggles, but also, we learn in that twist in the acknowledgments, because at age 25, Tall Man was diagnosed with late-stage lymphoma.

During some very difficult days, she found her way into the kitchen, notebook in hand, and conjured up not just recipes, but memories, stories, hope.

“My grandfather let me eat apple pie for breakfast. Once we asked him could we have ice cream before breakfast, and he said if we could find any, we were welcome to it ... (He was) a person whose death left no hole in my present, but whose dying made a clear breach with the past: someone I missed not for me, but for who I used to be.

“How do you grieve for someone you no longer know? Me, I grieved with bread. Bread is the staff (stuff?) of grief because it is the staff of life. Tiny microscopic life forms, breathing and bubbling and growing under your hands: It lives.”

That’s the opening of How to Grieve With Challah Bread, a recipe that Risbridger would sadly come to need again. Go out and buy some flour, eggs, salt, sugar, oil and yeast. “Begin with the yeast,” as Risbridger suggests, and feel how “life goes on.”