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Recipe of life amplified while finds finding solace in cooking

The Year of Miracles Ella Risbridger Bloomsbury

AT the age of 25, while her contemporaries were Instagramming latte foam and downloading dating apps, British author Ella Risbridger lost her long-time boyfriend to cancer. She had a contract to write a “cheerful dinner-party cookbook” but instead handed her forbearing editors The Year of Miracles, a luminous memoir about grieving, renewal and the twin consolations of friendship and cooking.

In The Year of Miracles, she cooks her way through bereavement. The two books are a gift to readers and cooks, although, for Risbridger’s sake, let’s hope there are no additions to the bittersweet series anytime soon.

The year alluded to in the title is 2020 (a tough one for all) and the miracles are the manifold small pleasures we decide to create, or simply acknowledge, in our everyday lives. These homely delights, Risbridger asserts, will sustain us through dark times.

Here’s where Risbridger is as the book begins: sitting glumly amid piles marked “to sell” and “to keep” in the soon-to-be-vacated “aftermath” of the home she had shared with her boyfriend. What she has: the carcass of a chicken. From the scraps of bird she conjures a pie and from the scraps of her shattered world she must conjure a new one.

She does just that over the course of a year, describing her fitful progress month by month, via tales of the dishes she cooked and the people for whom she cooked them.

She moves in with a pal, perfects her focaccia, plants tomatoes, bakes a rhubarb custard cake and decides to paint her kitchen pink. She also falls in love, although she refuses to privilege romance over friendship. The idea “that we’re supposed to save the flowers and the chocolates and the poems and the songs for the One” horrifies her. “What a waste!” she writes. “What a shame!”

Risbridger’s recipes are discursive and poetic. with suggestions for how we can savour even the cooking process more deeply. Her recipe for yuzu meringue bars is fussy, and she wants us to lean into the fuss. “It’s a commitment, and it is worth it,” she writes, arguing each moment you spend on these bars “is a perfect moment: still and calm and interesting”.

Again and again, she asks us to slow down and relish what is at hand, to look closely and lovingly at the beauty and wholeness of the quotidian. A humble corner shop “smells like spices and doughnuts and someone else’s dinner and inside is – well, inside is the world”, she writes. “A world in a corner shop; eternity in an hour.” She doctors instant ramen with cheese and egg, a hack that prompts a lush poetic effusion: “the yolks spill through the broth, salty and rich, scarlet, golden, saffron and crocus and crimson and rose, all the colours of a fire, alive and always, every minute, new”.

If your experience of grief felt more like being hurled against a coral reef while hammerhead sharks circled, you are not alone. Likewise, the solace of small comforts can be exaggerated, as in an unreadable interlude about chicken soup. “When the feeling persists – the bad feeling – there is only one way out,” Risbridger writes. “The way is chicken soup.” Her meandering three-page recipe for this magical elixir may test your tolerance for the twee.

But the excesses do not spoil the book, which is, for the most part, wise and tender, a reminder that however gloomy your situation, the world abounds in beauty, should you choose to see it.

METRO

en-za

2022-08-12T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-12T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://thestar.pressreader.com/article/281685438623056

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