Welcome to Off The Shelf, a new monthly series where we dust off the cookbook shelves and commit to cooking properly from one book every month. Rediscover the joy of flipping through the pages of a well-thumbed cookbook, add some new meals to your repertoire and see what happens when you step away from the endless scroll of online recipes.
Whilst some cookbooks promise an instant dinner, 5 ingredient meal or masterclass in a certain cuisine, Ella Risbridger’s debut cookbook does none of those things, instead gently meandering her readers through a story rich in friendship, love and heartache and the meals which she cherished along the way. There are recipes handed along fractured generations, food to be tucked into pockets on a long winter’s walk or to be cooked late at night with a bottle of wine and a heavy heart. There are recipes where the meal itself is merely the byproduct of a story of connection and bonding, such as the Challah Bread which guided Risbridger through grief, allowing a focus and structure when it was most needed. If Simple (check out last month's cookbook diary here) was about elevating the everyday, Midnight Chicken turned out to be about finding joy in the midst of everything else lift throws at you.
Why Midnight Chicken?
Risbridger’s writing is like having a glass of wine on the sofa with a friend, one who doesn’t mind if you curl up under a blanket and play SATC reruns in the background for four hours. It is a cookbook to sit and read, rather than to mindlessly flip through, weaving together recipes with storytelling and the acts of care that cooking can represent. It isn’t a cookbook that pretends cooking is always joyful, or that we need spotless kitchens and endless time. It acknowledges that sometimes we cook through tears, sometimes we need something that can be made at midnight, and sometimes food is medicine as well as nourishment. It jumps around cultures and techniques, with plenty of comfort food to be made with patience and technique, as well as influence from people who have been important to Risbridger. With recipes named not for what they are, but the story they tell, for example ‘The Tall Man’s Cheese Scones’ and ‘Paris Cookies’, reminding us that cookbooks can be companions, not just instruction manuals.
The Show Stoppers: ‘Marital Harmony Sausage Pasta’ is the sort of recipe where the ingredients list alone beckons one to the kitchen. It promises a tangle of slow cooked, gently caramelised onions and perfectly browned bits of sausage all cooked in a simmering pot of tomatoes and red wine, finished with a good slosh of double cream. It is a radio on, window ajar sort of recipe, which requires little more than a pan, a spoon and a patient cook. The Salted Caramel Brown Butter Brownies require a few fiddly steps which seem superfluous, until the brownies are served and the extra step of chopping in frozen shards of salted caramel reveal themselves to be an indulgently glorious addition.
The New Regulars: Risbridger’s take on the Vietnamese rice dish Chao Xa Ga, aptly named ‘Not Quite Chao Xa Ga’ filled the kitchen with fragrant delights, managing to be both warming and light at the same time. The namesake Midnight Chicken delivers maximum comfort - tender chicken with lemon, garlic and herbs that somehow tastes like everything will be okay.
The Other Side: Not every recipe worked perfectly on the first try - this is a cookbook that welcomes and perhaps benefits from a few notes scribbled in the margins to suit the cook. The Miso Ginger Aubergine lacked any actual miso, so the umami flavour wasn’t as rich as the recipe promises. Allow for nuance, and read the recipes carefully.
What We Actually Learned
Ella Risbridger opens her arms to the reader like a friend, exposing the most difficult times in her life and bringing us on her journey of love, sorrow and joy. It reminds us that cooking is an act of self-preservation, rather than a means to an end. It’s about finding the connection and storytelling in a dish - the loved one who first made it, the time it went horribly wrong, why we keep coming back to it. The illustrations are comforting and evocative of the moment they create, honestly showing imperfections and the mess that is inevitable some days. It takes us back to the basics that people don’t often make any more with the demands of busy lives, inviting us to make pasta, pastry and bread from scratch and rediscover the recipes that our grandmothers once made daily. Perhaps most importantly, this book gave us permission to cook imperfectly. To make substitutions, to embrace the messiness of real-life cooking and remind us that every meal doesn’t have to be perfect - sometimes it just needs to taste like home.
Next Month
As the autumn months approach, it's the perfect time to slow down and relish an afternoon in the kitchen. What shall we cook next? Help us decide. Head to our Instagram page @fivevalleyshamperco and vote now.