A Year of Miracles: (recipes about love + grief + growing things)
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When I picked up Midnight Chicken (& Other Recipes Worth Living For) by Ella Risbridger in 2020, well you all know what kind of year that was - I was coming to terms with so many things I did not want to have to come to terms with. I picked it up, at the library or at the bookstore, I don't remember the where, just the feeling when I read this after the dedication.
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. I in doubt, butter.
3. Keep going.
Well, since I agreed with all these things wholeheartedly, I turned the page and read the story of the chicken. The chicken that started this book about finding reasons to want to be alive. This book gave my so much hope and comfort, even though it isn't always easy to read or think about all the things that can go wrong in wanting to keep going no matter what. If you want to know, really know - get yourself to the library or bookstore (or our bookstore!) and get yourself a copy.
When her second book came out in 2020, I had a preordered copy waiting for me at my local bookstore so I didn't have to wait a single second. And it was just as good and just as close to being a manual for surviving and thriving as is a cookbook about food. Risbridger writes about food, about life, about finding hope in the smallest of things. I am grateful that this book and others like it exist.
It is one of the books that inspired the creation of Booklady Cooks - a bookstore that seeks out and finds the kinds of cookbooks that are about life, stories and a little bit of history, too.
The illustrations are gorgeous watercolors by Elisa Cunningham (I adore this kind of illustrations in my cookbooks) and the book is arranged by month. Perfect for a monthly cook along club... click HERE for more about that! I love to start with the first recipe in a book. I don't always, but I did with this one. Since this blog is already longish, click HERE for my own Leftovers Pie story.
Along with her guidelines about what size eggs she used, and the sizes of her baking tins, she includes some basic information about the book:
This is a memoir, which is to say, it's a kind of fiction. It is what happened, as it happened to me; not as it happened to anyone else.
[more information about butter, milk and jam jars, and some final words about life]
But honestly? Do your best with what you have, and it will probably be fine. It will all probably be fine in the end.