Midnight Chicken: & Other Recipes Worth Living For

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It’s this last question, of what to do now that Jim is no longer here to make his objections known, that leads Risbridger to some of her most affecting passages. She stops making roast dinners, which Jim loved and she hated, and she indulges in meals with very little meat, such as the Turkish eggs in garlic yogurt.

When I followed her recipe for cardamom buns, I found that she’d left out a few details about how to construct them, so that I couldn’t seal them properly and the spiced butter filling leaked out of the buns as they baked. Unloop the elastic string holding its little legs together, and shove four of the garlic cloves and the less squeezed lemon half up its little bottom. Set the chicken timer (your timer might be different, but mine is shaped like a little red hen) for about one hour and 20 minutes, if your chicken weighs the same as mine, and your oven is temperamental in the same ways as mine. I was madly in love with a handsome man who adored me; I was on the kind of university course I’d dreamed of; and I had a flat full of books.It was marred only by the tragedy tucked away on the back page in the acknowledgments: In the time between Risbridger handing in her manuscript and Midnight Chicken coming out, Underwood had died of a rare form of lymphoma at age 29. With her housemate, she invents “the Self-Esteem Finger: you hold up one finger, to indicate a desire that has no reference or recourse to anyone else, and you say ‘self-esteem! I found myself asking people for dinner when I couldn’t leave the house- and we sat, and we ate, and we talked. Add a hefty teaspoon of mustard, some pepper and chilli salt (just ordinary sea salt will do, if you haven’t got chilli salt). Risbridger gives Underwood, along with the rest of her friends, a pseudonym in The Year of Miracles.

It was very hard, sometimes, but I found something incredibly soothing about running through flavour combinations in my mind; about the neat rows of possibilities with minimal consequences. Perhaps, I thought, lying on the hall floor, I will just stay on the hall floor forever, and sink through the laminate, and into the concrete, and down into the earth. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. My memories of this time are hazy: I think the mind sometimes has a trick of blurring out times in your life that were intolerably hard. This is a book about the power of cooking to provide comfort, a framework for living and loving and recipes to savour and save.Come on,’ he said, and we went into the kitchen together, and I made this, late at night, and we ate it at midnight, with wine, and bread, and our fingers, sopping up the garlicky juices from the baking tray, sucking the bones.

I have never met Ella Risbridger, but for some reason I feel tenderly proud of her for this book, almost maternal. What you’re really reading for here is Risbridger’s sprightly, evocative prose, which is never more compelling than when she’s describing the sheer joy of her food. The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice.

Dinner parties, and Saturday afternoons in the kitchen, and lazy breakfasts, and picnics on the heath; evenings alone with a bowl of soup, or a heavy pot of clams for one. An account of a life laced with grief that wasn’t supposed to be there, and a world that ends over and over and over again and manages to keep its beauty and its charm regardless.