Midnight Chicken: & Other Recipes Worth Living For

by Ella Risbridger

Things to Remember This book has three main morals, and I urge you to remember them and apply them liberally. 1. Salt your pasta water. 2. If in doubt, butter. 3. Keep going.

But this is a hopeful story. It’s the story of how I got up off the floor. It’s also the story of how to roast a chicken, and how to eat it. This is a story of eating things, which is, if you think about it, the story of being alive. More importantly, this is a story about wanting to be alive.

The recipes in this book have all been made and written with love. Proper love: you-are-not-alone, and let’s-find-comfort-together-in-this-enormous-pan-of-paella sort of love. Practical, no-nonsense, honest love – that nevertheless makes time to hold your hand, and ask you how you are, and listen to the answer.

The cooking you will find here is the kind of cooking you can do a little bit drunk. It’s the kind of cooking that is probably better if you’ve got a bottle of wine open, and a hunk of bread to dredge in the sauce. It’s the kind of cooking that will forgive you if you forget about it for a little while, or if you’re less than precise with your weighing and measuring. It’s the kind of cooking that’s there for you, when you come home pink-nosed from walking. It’s the kind of cooking that makes everything feel okay. It’s the kind of cooking that saved my life.

Old wives and young nutritionists are united on this one: eat breakfast, and eat breakfast well. Breakfast like a king, the old saying goes. And I do. So should you.

There’s also some really solid kneading to be done here, which is the best cure for a troubled heart: hands in the dough, window wide, something jaunty on the radio.

Having wanted such an espresso pot for years, I recently acquired one, and it is an endless joy to me. I recommend, if you can, fulfilling small dreams like this as often as possible.

Avocado toast is what I eat on days when I need to get things done. Maybe I’m channelling the Avocado Baby himself: I eat it and I feel better and more capable of dealing with the world. And that’s why it’s in this book: everyone needs a meal that makes them feel very capable which is also very easy to do (once you know how). It took me a little while to work out the perfect balance of pepper, salt, chilli and lime above, so you might as well know it right away.

Eggs: The secret to a good fried egg is to get a non-stick frying pan nice and hot. Add a tiny bit of butter, let it foam up, then crack the egg into it. Splash ½ teaspoon of water into the pan, and cover immediately, either with a lid that fits snugly or foil, and cook for 3–3½ minutes. You’re after perfect set whites, and golden, drippy yolks. Sprinkle cracked black pepper over the taut yolk.

flakes. As always, pepper lavishly.

It’s not terribly fashionable any more to like bread. It’s sort of lucky that I’ve never managed to be fashionable, because I’ve always loved bread: I love it wholeheartedly and overwhelmingly. Sometimes I think there is no meal – no matter how thoughtful or beautiful or delicious – that I wouldn’t swap for Marmite toast, or the end bit of a loaf fresh out of the oven.

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. Life goes on.

I’m not much of a one for going out, and my perfect Saturday looks, I think, like this: an afternoon pottering in the kitchen, and an evening curled up on the sofa, with the sharp smell of autumn drifting up from the dark street through the open window, the sweet smell of squash rising from a sturdy clay bowl, and a battered copy of something tried and tested and true, Treasure Island, say, or Jane Eyre.

It sounds obvious, and it is: food tastes better when you’re hungry. And we have mostly forgotten how to be hungry.

The universal sign of love in an Enid Blyton book is giving away sticky buns or a loaf of bread or a jar of jam like you’ve never heard of coupons: you can tell a nice farmer’s wife from a secret smuggleress by how little she worries about the sugar ration.

The world is so hard, and life is so short: you must make things lovely where you can. You have to make mundane things like packed lunches into something glorious and important and worth having. You have to make ordinary days worth having, is the thing – and investing a bit of time in what you eat and where you eat it (which is really investing a bit of time in looking after yourself) is one of the easiest ways to do it.

Nothing else, except hundreds of napkins. Paper napkins. Paper plates. Don’t try and gussy this up. This is what it is: the kind of chicken that makes you want to lick the plate.

They should feel adored that you’ve made them a pie anyway, but the human mind is a funny thing and somehow people are made happier by the little letters on top than the rest of it put together.

I try, now, to marvel at everything, and it is not hard: I believe very truly that my illness has made me better at looking, and at taking nothing for granted. The world is made up of golden moments such as these, and anything can be transformed into a golden moment if you look with the right and eager eyes. The scrubby, grim little kitchen of a Tiny Flat in the East End can be an absolute paradise, and everything in it tinged with glory, because for this minute we are alive, and looking, and that is as much as anyone can ask for.

There is a moral here, maybe: there will always be a time when you want more than toast; there will always come a time when you remember that life had something else in it besides crying. Woman cannot live by toast alone – and although it might feel, at some points in your life, as though the effort to make anything else might kill you, that will not last. There will be another feeling. You will wake up one morning and remember other things: the ripe sharp-sweet burst of a good tomato; the kick of a chilli; the salty, meaty bite of an anchovy. Nutrients. Vitamins. Colours.

I first made this in Rome, where I had gone on a whim to meet a stranger off the internet. I had been having a bad day, and a stranger said: I love your writing. You seem like you’re having a bad day. I’ve got a spare bedroom in Rome. Come and stay.

There’s a line about love in a Laurie Lee essay: ‘Love still has the intimations of immortality to it, if we’re willing to pay it tribute… [it is also the delight] in being content now and then to lie by one’s sleeping love, and to shield her eyes from the sun.’ I would add to this, I think, a mystery novel (something properly ghoulish and precise on human nature, like Ruth Rendell), and a bottle of fiery ginger beer; perhaps also a small dog soundly asleep; and a samosa in the hand that isn’t shielding the eyes of the sleeping love: that’s a little moment of perfect happiness right there, which is all I want from immortality.

Most things in this chapter are made primarily from the pantry, fridge and freezer ingredients listed in the introduction, with a few fresh ingredients, but not many. Obviously, you won’t always have everything for everything, but you’ll probably have everything for something, and if you don’t you can swap it for something else.

Of course, it is really a kind of hearty chicken soup, and an actual doctor once told me that chicken soup has real benefits. That’s why I make this: infinitely adaptable and infinitely delicious, it seethes and bubbles and fills the house with soft steam. It’s more than the sum of its parts, is absurdly comforting and clean-tasting, and you feel better and more lively for having eaten it.

My fridge is full of good intentions. I am such an optimist about myself when I shop: I am rich and bounteous and eat acres of vegetables, and I cook something proper from a book every night of the week. I walk through the supermarket convinced that this time will be the time I live up to my trolley, and it never is, and the fridge is where all those good intentions go to die, where they stay until I fish their grim corpses out of the bottom of the vegetable drawer.

Ladle the soup into bowls, grate over some Parmesan and grind over some pepper. Pour out the wine. Why not? And light a candle, even if it’s just you. You deserve wine and candles, because you made yourself dinner, and it’s good, and it’s nutritious, and it’s hearty, and it will keep you going just as long as you need it to. And you’re brilliant. Completely brilliant.

Whenever I go there with the Tall Man, we sit outside under the heat lamps, growing like weeds, and they bring us olives, and I can’t ever stop myself quoting that line from Rebecca Lindenberg’s poem – ‘the round olives are the green/all green things aspire to be’ – and the Tall Man laughs, because I do it every time.

I used to call this recipe Flatly Suicidal Spaghetti, because that was when I most often made it, but the name was too sad: it was me that was flatly suicidal, not the spaghetti. And so I thought again and called it Uplifting Spaghetti, because that was how it made me feel. To make this, and to eat it, is an entirely satisfying, soul-restoring experience.

Decant into bowls, pour the wine, sit at a table and eat with a fork and a spoon, because you deserve to sit at a table, and you deserve to have a nice supper and be looked after.

Bread; wine; somebody lovely; cheese. What could be nicer? (Nothing, probably.)

I love that her recipe starts with ‘take off your coat’, as all good late-home recipes should.

An egg is protein, and an egg – especially one fried in fat so the edges are lacy – is beautiful.

‘Come and be loved,’ I find myself saying, to my friends, when they are sad, and what I mean is, ‘Come and be fed.’

This is a chapter about enough: about having enough time to do it really properly, and to enjoy every second of it, in the cooking and the eating, while the house fills up with good smells and warm air.

Lasagne can be party food, picnic food or leftovers, but most of all it is proper comfort food. Done well, it’s both a joy to eat and a joy to cook. It’s not like a Sunday roast, to which stress can attach itself like a remora; endlessly flexible, this is lazy, lovely weekend cooking.

They require a level of commitment that is the hallmark of all the best dinners: hands-on murder, hands-in devouring, and plenty of wine. You can’t eat mussels half-heartedly. With mussels, you need to make your peace with eating things that were once alive, and that are now dead, and that you killed to eat; it’s a circle. I like this peace-making – it seems fairer, somehow, than buying lumps of supermarket meat.

I try, now, to fill my life with the kind of evenings I could hang on to if things went south again: the kind of evenings full of laughter and wine, and the salty kick of the sea, the sweetness of onion and the meaty bite of a really good mussel.

The greatest things I learned in therapy are that having compassion for other people is no good unless it is accompanied by compassion for yourself, and you cannot give all of yourself over to another person. Otherwise you become useless and empty, exhausted, broken and brittle. As my mother says, ‘Fasten your own oxygen mask before attending to those of others.’

And when the Tall Man comes home, I will greet him with open arms and real joy, as he deserves. I will have missed him, and I will be better, and I will be happier. I love it when the Tall Man is gone, but I love it most when he comes back. Not least because it’s the Tall Man who does all the washing up.

One recipe is my mother’s: it is fourteen lines long (like a sonnet) and takes twenty minutes. She drains off the fat from the sausages and halves the cream. (In the margin, in little cramped handwriting: ‘22/4/07– Forgot cream – DGR gutted.’) The other is my dad’s: it is three pages long and takes two and a half hours. It has all the fat and all the cream. It wants nutmeg and demands sea salt. It even specifies Chianti. (His marginal note: ‘Great Sunday dish. Only one pan to wash up. Happy sausages, happy Sunday, early to bed. 19/2/06.’)

Onions, like heartbreak or fine wines, only get better with time.

Eat and repeat. Have a glass of wine, and another slice of pizza. That’s how you turn a week around; that’s why some weeks are pizza weeks.

Three Last Things 1. Wash up as you go along. 2. If it smells fine, it’s probably fine. 3. It’s probably all going to be fine (in the end).

but what it really is is an annotated list of things worth living for: a manifesto of moments worth living for. 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. The bright clean song of lime and salt, and the smoky hum of caramel-edged onions. Soft goat’s cheese and crisp pastry. A six-hour ragù simmering on the stove, a glass of wine in your hand. Moments, hours, mornings, afternoons, days. And days worth living for add up to weeks, and weeks worth living for add up to months, and so on and so on, until you’ve unexpectedly built yourself a life worth having: a life worth living.