Collected by Alison Riley

I thought this looked like an intriguing gift for any of my cooking-minded friends, so checked it out of the library to preview it (after a number of astonishing failures, I’m trying to do better about reading books before giving them as gifts). I figured I could flip through it at the very least, but I was shocked how quickly I was thoroughly immersed!

First, it is a beautiful book, with full-page photos to illustrate each story/recipe, and would make an excellent gift I think. This also makes it go by fast: I had casually opened the book just to flip through it, and two hours later, I was halfway through and already eager for the next story. Secondly, it covers so many different foods and so many different situations, including some very timely ones of isolation and illness during the pandemic.

It opens with Samantha Irby’s recipe for Rejection Chicken, a perfect author of brilliant, very human (i.e. often humiliating) stories to set the tone for an anthology about comfort foods in tough times. All the stories were so interesting and varied, with only one dud in my opinion. The final story, too, closed the book with such a humorous disaster that I gasped.