Midnight Chicken

April 15, 2019
In this uplifting cookbook debut, British writer Risbridger presents comfort food recipes that changed her life. After struggling with mental illness and attempting suicide, she found stability by cooking recipes that helped her fall back “in love with the world.” Risbridger opens each recipe with an anecdote that explains its origin: before teaching readers how to make burrata salad, she writes, “I first made this in Rome where I had gone... to meet a stranger off the internet.” The recipes themselves are written in a casual tone, as if Risbridger were alongside the reader in the kitchen providing friendly instruction— for the roast tomato and garlic soup, for instance, she writes, “Take your tomatoes and slice them into quarters or eights if you can be bothered; I rarely can.” She provides several comfort classics with fun twists, most notably salted caramel brown butter brownies (which, while baking, reminds her that “things do indeed get better”), butternut squash soup with the addition of amaretto, a kale salad with pomegranate molasses and lime, and the eponymous roasted “midnight chicken” with a garlic-lemon-ginger seasoning (it’s about comfort and “wanting to be alive”). Accompanied by cozy illustrations, this inviting work is one readers will turn to time and again.