In this week’s cookbook review, we turn our attention to The Kitchen Book: Good Food For Every Day, the instant Sunday Times bestseller from Ella Risbridger, the author behind the much-loved Midnight Chicken. Where that book was part cookbook, part memoir, a case for cooking through the hardest days, this one is a different kind of argument: that everyday cooking can be gorgeous, achievable, and genuinely worth looking forward to.
The ambition is stated plainly from the start: “Make your life just, like, 10% better.” It’s a modest goal, and Risbridger delivers on it in full.
The most distinctive thing about The Kitchen Book isn’t any single recipe, it’s the organizing principle. Rather than chapters built around courses or ingredients, Risbridger structures the book by context and energy level.
On the sofa covers the nights when you barely have the will to cook. At the kitchen counter is for when you’re engaged but casual. For a gathering handles dinner parties and crowded tables. With a tablecloth elevates the occasion. On the floor, a chapter title that says everything, acknowledges that some nights end up exactly there.
It’s a taxonomy of real cooking life, and it works. Picking up the book after a long day and turning to the right chapter feels natural rather than prescriptive. The “big list” chapter, a guide to stocking the fridge, freezer, and spice drawer — is the kind of practical foundation that most cookbooks skip entirely, and here it anchors everything that follows.
The recipes across all seven sections are notably global in reach and modern in sensibility. Risbridger moves freely between sticky-crispy Korean tofu, cumin lamb ragù, turmeric satay salmon, carbonara rice, fish finger and smoked sweetcorn tacos, and one-bowl cannélés, a range that reflects how people actually cook today, drawing from everywhere without feeling forced or performative.
Each recipe has its characteristic touch: specific, warm, and honest about the shortcuts. A no-knife potato curry. A marinated bavette. A sticky lemon cake. Recipes that are genuinely achievable on a weeknight and good enough to serve at the weekend, the balance that most everyday cookbooks aim for and rarely hit.
Risbridger writes about food differently from most cookbook authors. There’s a literary quality to her recipes that earns comparisons to Nigella Lawson, and for once those comparisons are apt — not because the styles are identical, but because both writers understand that voice is inseparable from recipe. You want to cook this food because she’s made you want to be in the kitchen.
The endorsements that arrived with this book are extraordinary by any measure. Nigella Lawson, Dolly Alderton, India Knight, and Olivia Potts all reached for superlatives. That degree of consensus is unusual, and in this case it’s earned.
The Kitchen Book is exactly what it promises: good food for every day. Ella Risbridger has written a cookbook that understands real life, its constraints, its moods, its occasional need for something genuinely beautiful at the end of an ordinary Tuesday, and meets it there.
This is a book you will cook from in the first week you own it, and still reach for five years from now. An easy recommendation, and one of the most enjoyable cookbooks we’ve reviewed this year.
The Kitchen Book is Ella Risbridger at her besta warm, witty, and genuinely useful cookbook that makes everyday cooking feel like something worth doing.
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The Cooking World is a team of professionals passionate about the world of food from diverse areas.
Our purpose is to share our passion and knowledge with everyone to teach how they can cook more and have a good time while doing it.
