My favourite cookbook probably ever
It's Ella Risbridger's The Kitchen Book and we have a Q&A + an extract + a recipe
‘I love to make my life nice in ways that it doesn’t need to be nice. I love to make things nicer than they need to be. I love to make things just, like, ten percent more lovely than the bare minimum. I love to use heavy cutlery and beautiful Japanese ceramics to eat dinner on the sofa watching twenty-year-old cop shows. I love to buy flowers and make butter and buy bread. I love to make noodles at lunchtime in five minutes flat’.
From the introduction to The Kitchen Book - read it in full further down
What I love is this book. It is glorious. It is intensely charming. The food in it is fantastic. It makes my heart sing - at the author, at her stellar recipes, at the generosity of her writing, and at the idea of cooking all these absolutely delicious things alongside her. It’s the most intimate, friend-like cookbook I’ve ever read. It feels like being in on a secret.
You’ll know Ella’s writing if you’ve read Midnight Chicken, The Year Of Miracles, In Love With Love, or her poetry compilation, Set Me On Fire - or, of course, if you subscribe to her Substack, which you absolutely should.
She has a remarkable gift for intimacy. This book is your friend in the kitchen - your chatty, funny, clever, wildly romantic (but realistic!), perfectly imperfect friend, who is super aware of how everything not only tastes but also looks and feels, who creates whole moods, always has a story or an observation or a little trick up her sleeve, and who makes exactly the food you want to eat.
It’s a cookbook about pleasure and about living. It’s beautiful because it’s real. This photograph sums it up perfectly:
Here is the introduction to The Kitchen Book in its entirety, exclusively for us. Read that now - get really comfortable, it’s that sort of writing, plus it’s satisfyingly long - and then come back for a Q&A with Ella, and for the recipe I’ve made twice in five days (so easy, so good).
1. What’s in your fridge?
Five to nine kinds of fermented situation: two jars of Savvy Ferments dill-beetroot kimchi, the Vadasz hot and sweet relish, pickles of all kinds, olives, a kilo tub of gochujang, that kind of thing. Kerrygold butter; Oatly Barista oat milk. Many glass tupperwares of leftovers, including most of an anchovy-butter spatchcock chicken, a really fantastic better-than-usual green sauce, and the tahini-miso dressing from the cucumber salad in my book, which I am using as a sandwich spread.
2. What are you wearing? What do you like to wear? You write very well about clothes - are you interested in fashion? Do you think you dress how you cook?
To quote the great Barbara Trapido: clothes are consumingly important to me! I am a paper doll in spirit: I must wear the right clothes for every occasion. I love getting dressed. I love looking at and thinking about clothes. I suppose in fashion and food I am trying not so much to do something original as to do something that works and feels good and easy and special. I have very exacting requirements and I spend a long time trying to find the perfect thing.
Right now: I am wearing five perfect things, can you believe it? The best pair of jeans I have owned in years, which are these Elijah trousers from Sézane in denim. They are flattering, in that they don’t make me look thinner but they make the shape I am look fantastic. A white shirt from a charity shop in Upper Street in Islington, London, where all the best charity shops are: originally from Whistles, it has a lovely lace back and a soft billowy bracelet-length sleeve. I have mended this shirt one million times. I will never throw it out.
This little vintage gold locket with these incredible photographs of my grandparents in: on Brighton Beach the year they got married, and they look like Dylan and Baez. This was a Christmas present from my parents for this, the year in which I get married and move to Brighton! Also two perfect rings are always with me: one was my mother’s, with three tiny little diamond chips, and one is my engagement ring.
3. You’re getting married! What will you wear, unless you don’t want to say? (Also, I’m sure you know Queens of Archive, but if not I think you might like).
I! Am! Getting! Married! In a hot minute, actually. A busy summer for me! I feel like I haven’t been able to focus on it until the book was out. I booked a venue and caterers and ordered all the champagne in one fit of efficiency six months ago, and now need to think about everything else. I am simply wearing my mum’s dress – vintage when she wore it in the eighties! – which somehow needed only the most minor of tweaking to fit perfectly despite the fact we are very different shapes and sizes. I hated wedding dress shopping, which made me feel disgusting about myself, and I remembered twirling around in this dress when I was a little girl. I have always loved it! It felt miraculous.
(I did NOT know Queens of Archive, would you look at this and also this?)
4. Do you wear makeup? What’s your favourite makeup?
I do, but in such a desultory fashion. I don’t really put anything on my face except the BeautyPie Vitamin C moisturiser: I recently tried my sister’s Charlotte Tilbury Sheer Glow stick tint thing and might splash out for the wedding. I love highlighter. I love an eyelash curler.
5. Why/how do your parents live on a French mountain?
They like it there! Really though, my mum loves painting and poultry, and this was her dream; and my dad loves my mum. My parents are very big on doing things you want to do, and they really want to live rurally in France, speak a lot of French, paint a lot of pictures and sell eggs from a wheelbarrow. So they do.
6. There is a sort of wild, pink-cheeked, twigs-in-the-hair romance to the book that feels more literary than cookbookish. How important is romance (bad word, wrong word - I think I mean ‘the poetry of everyday life’) to you?
By nature I am quite a bleak person so I have to romanticise to stay alive. I am looking constantly for some magic, some reason to get through, some reason to be here that is not the terrible burning entropy which is the human condition. But the human condition is also butter and Fairy Liquid and roses and little sample tins of expensive paint and good denim and cold clay in the hand. I am on a constant quest to make the paint tins and embroidered lingerie and beeswax wraps for sandwiches outweigh the cosmic irrelevance of our brutal unfair existence. And most days, I win!
8. Do you feel emotionally attached to kitchen objects? What would you save in a fire?
I am emotionally attached to absolutely everything that I have ever touched. It is my blessing and my curse. I would save my cutlery, especially the forks I borrowed from my parents which have my great-great-great grandfather’s initials in the handle. I would save the dinner service that was my boyfriend’s great-grandmother’s, and which we use every day. And I would save my ragged and ruined signed copy of Nigella’s How To Eat.
9. People coming in 15 minutes and you’d forgotten. What one thing do you make/buy/order in?
When we were deciding where to live I said plaintively I can’t live anywhere without Waitrose on Deliveroooooo and my boyfriend has never once let me forget it.
Crisps/dill/feta for an elegant little starter (crisps and crumbled feta into platter, top with dill and olive oil); chicken to spatchcock (down to a sweet 45 minutes in a hot oven), green salad, the best bread they have. You have to go to the cornershop for wine so it’s properly cold. Be drinking a glass of cold wine and wearing lipstick when they arrive, even - especially - if you are shoving a chicken into the oven and tossing a vinaigrette, it makes you look relaxed and like you knew they were coming.
Do not neglect to warm the bread.
21. The book is so joyous and reassuring about ‘entertaining’, something people get completely freaked out about. Can you talk about parties?
You must just calm down about it; and also invite maybe two friends to come over two hours beforehand to drink cold champagne with you – the best champagne is for this point – and put flowers in vases. The secret is to be having such a nice party before the party that you don’t care at all if anyone else shows up. But they will show up! And they are lucky to be invited! And if they turn up and you are drinking beautiful champagne surrounded by flowers, they will know that and they will match your tone.
The other secret I learned from my friend Cornelius, who always makes roast potatoes for parties and everyone loves them. So do that too.
10. What do you eat most often? Like, what’s your go-to thing on autopilot when you can’t be arsed?
Toast.
11. I love the thing in the book about bad stir-fries and people who think food is fuel. What do you think that’s ABOUT?
I think maybe people who find delight in other ways? Or maybe people for whom delight is not the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. I hope people find delight in something, even if they eat the world’s worst stir fries every night of their lives.
12. Do you have therapy?
I was in therapy for probably twelve years, and then I stopped to do ceramics, and now I have a personal trainer who knows more about my life than almost anyone. Being able to make a plate, and being able to do one push up while wearing leggings and a crop top in public, have been very valuable for my mental health. I will go back to therapy, though. Probably when something bad happens.
13. You’ve recently bought a house, hooray, after quite a nomadic time. How does it make you feel?
Crazy! Thrilled! Scared! Desperate to make a million pounds so as to do all the million things I yearn to do!
14. I bet you’re vg at making a house/flat/room feel like you very quickly. How do you go about it? What colours do you like? Are you drawn to particular styles/images/memories? Where do you look for inspiration, or is it just inside your head? Do you have TIPS?
I actually am trying very hard to slow down. I have had so many rental homes, all of which have been sold very quickly with almost no notice, so I’m used to having to try and make a house feel like a home super quickly. And I am great at it! But now, here, I am trying to take my time to make slower choices: to choose something that will last as long as the dinner service. I love old things and fear the Oliver Bonasification of interiors. I love tapestries, quilting, textured paintings, flowers dying slowly.
I want to live inside the house of a history professor and her sculptor husband in, say, the early eighties: rich colours, plants, terracotta, aloof old cat.
I want to live inside a Dutch still life but with more telly. (I hate looking at the telly, but love watching telly. What’s to be done?)
Here is the only tip you really need: find one thing you love, like a curtain or a cushion or a painting or even a book. Find three colours that are in that thing. Make those three colours your guide. Follow those three colours. Come back to them where possible.
For example: the thing I love is the exposed plaster on our kitchen stairs: we stripped it back, and underneath found beautiful lime plaster, and tiny fragments of paint and paper from the last hundred years. We’re waxing over it to make it safe and durable, but otherwise, it’s staying: it’s like a story of the house in almost gold and flashes of green and Roman plaster pink.
So we’re deep green in the kitchen; gold limewash in the hall. We are this amazing paper, my pride and joy, on the next set of stairs, with soft gold skirting coming up into two bedrooms, one almost-pink, one absolutely pink. The dream is to put pink-gold-green stained glass into the front door eventually, but as a temporary measure I’ve ordered this to stick over the fanlight– the soft blue notes of which made me think about painting the library (a sitting room by any other name) dark blue, with gold skirting and a huge blue vase of pink peonies, and a gold-framed mirror. Etc, etc etc. Then we can put dark blue notes in our pink bedroom, very soothing; and nice clean green notes in the almost-pink guest bedroom. Deep green guest towels. You see? The possibilities are endless. The pattern is clear. Everything goes. Nothing is trouble.
15. Tell me three things you would like to own that you don’t already.
I yearn almost painfully for this painting by Lilia Orlova Holmes.
I want these navy silk pyjamas.
I want this David Austin rose to climb all over the back of my house.
Also, I want a wardrobe and a chest of drawers that aren’t horrible, but can also get up my very narrow lime-plastered fragile stairs, which seems like an impossible dream.
16. What food do you dislike?
I hate when red food touches green food except in very specific circumstances.
17. What are you reading? What recentish novel(s) would you recommend to people?
I am reading Service, by Lauren Mooney and it is a perfect ghost story. I have just listened to the new Patrick Radden Keefe, which made me want to read more about Russia, and also, if anyone has read it, please message me: what did you make of it? I must discuss.
18. What music do you like?
My mental state – house, wedding, book – is such that Spotify recommends me only either Dad Rock Air Guitar or Gregorian Chant Medieval. I do have taste, I just can’t find it right now.
19. What is your current handbag and what is in it?
I have had the same handbag for nine years, which is this big brown tote from a now-defunct Brighton leatherwork shop. I wanted something big enough to put books, laptop, craft project, spare tights, a jumper, etc, but also look nice, and it has been perfect – perfect – for every day of those nine years.
I have a grey felt pouch for my laptop, paper diary, notebook, pens and passport; and a smaller grey felt pouch for Useful Stuff: Strepsils, tampons, tissues, a little foldable toothbrush, tweezers, miraculous cure-all Lucas’ Papaw Ointment. It heals wounds. It clears up spots. You can put it on your eyelashes instead of mascara in a pinch. I love this stuff and it is miles better than competitive brands. Some rubbish wireless headphones I just bought which have nonetheless transformed my life. Keys to my house; keys to my best friends’ houses. One of those little French water sprays in case I get hot. A million hairgrips.
This fancy hand sanitizer. A little French pharmacy thing for if you get stung by a mosquito. Prescription sunglasses. Eyelash curler. I’m looking in it right now: socks, moisturiser, sunscreen. Kindle. Highlighters for organising my diary.
Two little pyramids of oat milk in case I want a cup of tea somewhere and they only have dairy.
All of these things are daily use items and this is why I am permanently lopsided because all of this is on my right shoulder at all times.
20. What’s a favourite restaurant or two?
I love 4th & Church, in Hove, which is so nice and does beautiful Manhattans; I love The Palmerston in Edinburgh, which is the best place to eat solo in the world; I will use this platform to say that Elliot’s in Borough Market have stopped doing the potato pizzette with sour cream and salmon roe and chive butter and they need to bring it back immediately. It used to be the best small plate in London! Bring it back!
21. There is enormous generosity in the autobiographical elements of everything you write. It’s so open-hearted. Is that just how it comes out, or do you have to surmount a degree of reluctance in favour of candour?
I have a disease and the disease is memoir. I have an open heart and I cannot make myself stop anyone from peeping in: a blessing and a curse. Come one, come all, bring a friend, let me tell you about everything that has ever happened to me or I will never understand it.
22. What are you doing next? (literally next, when you finish answering these).
I am going to try and find some kind of nice outfit to wear to my launch dinner tomorrow! I hope for green or butter yellow?
And then I am going to eat some toast, answer a million and one emails, and do the washing up while listening to Ulysses on audiobook, which I do every single day of my life, and is at this point more like a meditation practice than anything else. Maybe I’ll continue my impossible quest for a wardrobe? Maybe I’ll paint my nails? Thank you for having me; I have had a lovely time.
Turmeric satay salmon with greens
Oh, man, the takeaways I have loved and lost!
Nobody talks about this casualty of the UK rental market: never being a regular anywhere. Or, worse, becoming a regular for half a minute and then being swept away on the tide. Sometimes I look at these places on Google Streetview. Sometimes they are still open, full of people who aren’t me. Sometimes they are just gone, swept away too. (Same problem.)
One of my great losses is a Thai restaurant by the sea,† which sold this incredible thing they called - simply and amazingly - ‘I Love Salmon’. And listen: it would be impossible not to love salmon by the time you’ve finished eating this. I spent a long time trying to recreate this recipe: a bright gold, creamy, coconutty sauce, thickened with peanuts, and salty-deep with fish stock, bright with spices and given a boost with cavolo nero or whatever wilty greens you have to hand. It is so incredibly easy. It tastes like a takeaway while being perfectly healthy and full of nourishment. It takes about half an hour with minimal skill and minimal washing up. Everyone loves it. I love it. I love salmon! It is the easiest win I have ever achieved.
It is not exactly like the original, but it is - dare I? - maybe even better: more of a dinner, more substantial, bright with turmeric (exceptionally good for you!) and greens (also fantastic!). It is so easy!
And, best of all - you can make it wherever you happen to be.
SERVES 4
2 tablespoons coconut oil 4 garlic cloves
10cm ginger
1 big shallot
4 tablespoons red curry paste
3 teaspoons ground turmeric
2 limes
400ml tin coconut milk
2 tablespoons peanut butter
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 fish stock cube
4 salmon fillets
2 teaspoons sesame oil
100g shelled, roasted peanuts
1 small bunch spring onions
200g cavolo nero
Rice, to serve
Melt the coconut oil in a large heavy-bottomed pan over a medium low heat.
Peel and grate the garlic, ginger, and also the shallot. Tip into the melted coconut oil, and soften for 15 minutes.
(This is a good point to pre-heat the oven to 180°C.)
Stir through the red curry paste and cook for a couple of minutes. Add the turmeric, stir, and cook for another minute or so.
Juice one of the limes. Add the coconut milk, peanut butter, light soy sauce, brown sugar, lime juice, a coconut-milk tin of hot water (400ml) and the fish stock cube. Stir to fully dissolve the stock cube and sugar. Simmer for 20 minutes.
Brush the salmon fillets with sesame oil and season well. Roast for 20 minutes, or until just flaking apart.
At this time, it is helpful to cook the rice (we do plain jasmine) and do the washing-up. There is not much! It’s a gem of a dinner, this one. For garnish, finely chop the peanuts and the spring onions.
When you’re 5 minutes away from serving, wash and tear the cavolo nero into strips. Toss into the sauce until wilted.
Rice into bowls. Salmon atop the rice. Generous ladleful of turmeric-coconut-peanut sauce, plus wilted greens, over the top of everything. Scatter with peanuts and spring onions. A squeeze of lime. Heaven.
Notes and Queries
Cavolo nero keeps its shape really well, which is why I like it so much. Feel free to toss in basically any cruciferous green: broccoli will need steaming, so pop a lid on; spinach will add water, so it’s lid off and heat high.
I just use whatever shelled, roasted peanuts are available. The salted kind tend to be easier to get hold of in corner shops. Salty! Delicious!
Reheating thoughts: it will be weirdly solid at fridge-temp. Don’t worry about this. It will be fine.
A zillion thanks to Ella Risbridger and to 4th Estate. The Kitchen Book is published TODAY and by this point I think you’ve probably got the gist - I passionately recommend it. Here it is on Bookshop (they have signed copies), at Waterstones and on Amazon.
I like that Q & A format, do you? I might do more from time to time.
Thank you for reading! Do please kindly leave a ❤️ on this post if you liked it, thank you, and more to the point do make that salmon, it’s so delicious and so easy. The whole book, honestly - it’s a dream of a cookbook.
I’ll be back shortly with a weekend supplement for paid subscribers, BUT it might be on Sunday rather than Saturday, because the week has run away with me and I need to file a book review before I write anything else. It might write itself very quickly, you never know, but if it doesn’t then it will be Sunday.
Have an excellent Thursday - it’s the beginning of the warm weather and the weekend is going to be BOILING, at least here in the east of England.
I’ve already made the satay salmon recipe twice, too. Also: discovered you can make double the sauce and freeze it, which makes an almost instant meal another night. Perfection. Ella is brilliant in her tender openness. I adore the book.
“I have a disease and that disease is memoir.”
“I was in therapy for probably twelve years, and then I stopped to do ceramics…”
This on TOP of amazing food,
I’m in love with Ella. Don’t tell my wife. 😬