The year of miracles (recipes about love + grief + growing things)

Risbridger (Midnight Chicken, 2019) delivers another deeply personal cookbook of healing recipes, this time spurred by the death of her partner and a global pandemic in the span of a year. She weaves beautiful, journal-like prose among the recipes, taking the reader through the year with observations and personal reflections. Recipes are charmingly simplistic, encouraging the reader to rummage in the fridge for substitutions, and are accompanied by funny and equally endearing origin stories. Inexperienced cooks might be daunted by the use of metric measurements and the often-casual directions, such as an imprecise reference to a "small baking tray" when making three-ingredient brownies. But veteran home cooks will take pleasure in the kitchen improvisation, just like the author does. (By the way, make the brownies.) This is a must for cookbook readers and Risbridger's fans, who will love curling up with this sequel and again enjoy how food, and the art of cooking it, have the power to heal.

In this sumptuous culinary equivalent to Ilene Beckerman's Love, Loss, and What I Wore, British journalist Risbridger (Midnight Chicken) chronicles a year marked by loss and shares the recipes that nurtured her along the way. "It's true that in the presence of the dying, small miracles happen all the time. Practical miracles," Risbridger muses, and it's in this optimistic spirit that her story proceeds, documenting how, after losing her partner Jim to cancer in 2018, she healed herself through food and the steadfast support of her friends. Drifting through the months of her first year alone, she recalls the sticky toffee skillet Guinness brownie pudding that saw her through the doldrums of February as she reacclimated to her London home without Jim in it, while a recipe for chaat butter greens evokes the catharsis of cooking with friends over the phone. A spring Vietnamese-inspired coconut pow, meanwhile, conjures touching memories of "the April when Jim had died." Even in recalling her grief, Risbridger's narration is buoyed by humor (when making dippy eggs, her friend Jo archly observes, "The thing about death... is that it's exactly as terrible as an egg is perfect"), and the book's charming watercolor illustrations make it all the more worth savoring. Readers will find this a treat. (July)