Ella Risbridger On Using Cooking As A Tool For Tackling Anxiety

“What I try to achieve with everything that I write about mental illness is to say, ‘OK, how can we live with this? How can we make a life worth living when things are really hard, when things feel really difficult, how can you find the good?” says Risbridger. “How can you find something to hang onto when you’re in that dark place?

“What I wanted to do most was to help,” she says of the driving force of the book. She wanted it to be useful, to make the kitchen accessible and “to make it clear that having anxiety or depression or any kind of mental illness, is a part of life”.

For Risbridger, her mental health issues made “everything feel very chaotic”, and cooking presented a “puzzle” that “fitted very perfectly into what I needed it to be. It combines this creative impulse, which I love, with this sense of inevitability: If you put these two things together, you’ll get this result.

“There’s a precision to it, a creativity, and, at the end of it, you’ve got something to eat – you’ve done something practical, you’ve taken a real step to help yourself.

“There’s something really soothing about that,” she adds.

Cooking offered a reliable kind of safety, rather than a fear of the unknown. “Without sounding horrible about it, I just had bigger problems. I was so nervous about everything, [I thought] ‘Well, cooking, what’s the worst that can happen?’”

Hence the book’s list of: What to do when it all goes wrong – e.g. “Order a takeaway. Nobody will care.”

“Cooking’s great. It’s essential for me, and everyone’s got to do it at some point, you might as well try and have fun with it – but it is just food,” Risbridger says matter-of-factly.

“If it goes wrong, it’s a pain – and I understand that’s quite a privileged position in itself, as some people might not have the money to chuck away dinner, and I can understand that’s a whole set of social and economic and financial realities that are really terrible – but I suspect, for most of the people reading and buying this book, they’re probably in a position where if dinner goes wrong and they have to have toast, it’s probably going to be OK.”

And there’s always her three core principles to fall back on:
1. Salt your pasta water (“It makes such a huge difference”)
2. If in doubt, butter (“That really makes me laugh”)
3. Keep going (“It really is a book about keeping going”)

While there are melancholic moments (Risbridger touches on a suicide attempt and difficult family relationships in the book), mostly it’s about the things she loves, like dumplings (“I would live on soup dumplings”) and mini pasta shapes (“They’re so adorable. To have a soup with tiny, tiny stars in just makes everything feel better”), and the hot-pink ribbon it has for keeping your place (“Isn’t it great?!”). But what comes across most, on practically every page, is how much she delights in cooking for others.

“I love having people for dinner,” Risbridger buzzes. “[I’ll say] ‘What do you want to eat? Come here and I’ll make it for you’ – I love that, it’s like giving people a birthday present, all the time.

“My flatmate, I text her in the middle of the day: ‘What do you want to eat?’ She’ll text back two words, like: ‘Maybe sausages?’ Great, I’ll go to Asda and I will think.”

Risbridger calls Midnight Chicken “a very accurate picture of my life five years ago, a lot has changed in my life since then”. And so when asked what happens next, she replies: “I need to work out where I’m going, what I’m doing.

“It’s been a bit of a year,” she muses. “I need a bit of time to just look at it all.”
But for now, there’s joy to be found here. Platefuls of it.

Midnight Chicken by Ella Risbridger is published by Bloomsbury. Available online now.