RECIPE: Ella Risbridger’s Yuzu Meringue Sunshine Bars

In Ella Risbridger’s first book Midnight Chicken, she showed readers how food can serve as a light in our darkest days. Now, in The Year of Miracles, Ella shares her story of recovering from loss with the help of good food and good friends. The book celebrates making a fancy dinner even if you’re just eating it with a spoon in front of the tv; having people over to dinner without overthinking it; finding late night snacks to ease you to sleep; and having seconds–of everything. Above all, it a powerful testament to how cooking can help us get up and start again in the face of unimaginable hurt.

Read an extract from The Year of Miracles below, complete with a recipe for some truly delicious yuzu meringue sunshine bars!

Ella Risbridger

Yuzu Meringue Sunshine Bars

(Supper in the Park)

They say grief is like a shipwreck. There are a lot of analogies that people tell you, when you’re first grieving. Grief is like a shipwreck. Grief is like a circle. Grief is like an earthquake. Grief is like a ball in a box with a button in it. Some of these are helpful; some are mad; some are helpful one day and worthless and trite the next. So let’s say it: grief is like a shipwreck.

Grief is like a shipwreck; let’s say, actually, trauma is like a shipwreck. You’re clinging onto the door, like Rose in the Titanic.

(A memory: Nancy and I, curled up on the sofa, a few months before the end. ‘There isn’t room for two,’ I said. On the screen, Jack Dawson was freezing to death. ‘There just isn’t balance. They would both die, if she gave him the door too.’ Nancy looked at me. ‘Is that a metaphor?’ she said, and I shook my head, but I’m cursed with the kind of mind that makes everything a metaphor, so it was.)

So trauma is like a shipwreck, and you’re there clinging to a bit of wreckage. All you can do is float. The water is full of broken things that used to be yours, and used to be beautiful. And the storm is still raging. At first the waves are a thousand feet high, and they come every few minutes, every moment, every few seconds. Every time they wipe out the world, and you’re underwater and drowning and trying too hard to float. All you can do is hang on to your wreckage.

And after a little bit, the storm starts to abate a bit; the waves are still so high, but they come less frequently. Or the waves are a little smaller, even if they keep coming. You start to be able to look around. You start to see what else there is that can be saved. The storm abates further; the waves, after months or years, are further apart and smaller still. You start to learn to read the signs that mean a storm is coming. You start to learn the ways of the waves. You learn how to live in the ocean, and how it’s beautiful here, with the birds and the stars, and the phosphorescent algae stuff that glows like on Blue Planet II and in Lord of the Flies. You see the great white albatross and the great blue whale, like you never would have known if the ship had never sunk. And you’re cold, and you miss land, and yet you start, too, to learn how to survive these great waves that come – that still come – every once in a while. You start to understand how a person could hang on; how a person could let the storm take them, and believe and trust and hope they would survive it.

You understand, maybe, how a person could learn to live in the storm and in the sea. You understand that you’re a sea person now, a changed person, and you can’t go home again. You can’t jump in the same river twice, and you can’t go home again: there’s only finding where you are, and doing your best to float through it.

And you stop fighting. You stop trying to save someone who can’t be saved; stop trying to keep a house you can no longer afford. You give up; you lose; game over, and then you see where you are. You see where the tide has taken you now, and as you float past you notice. You look. You adapt, you twist, you make it work.

There seems, suddenly this summer to be a lot of celebrate. New people. New everything. New books and new birthdays and new babies, and I’m tired of not celebrating: I’m tired of waiting for things to be perfect before we praise them. I like it here. I like this summer. I like this plague year, five summers after our lives fell apart the first time. Nancy and I sit on her balcony, Beezle begging for Dorito chips, and plan like it means something.

(It always means something.)

We invite people. We buy fairy lights; I dig out sheepskin rugs. We roast four chickens – two Midnight, two Theo – and pack them in ice; press frozen champagne bottles around them like extra icepacks; order huge loaves of sourdough from our beloved bakery, and beg very nicely for the baker to slice it for us. I make yuzu meringue bars, the kind that would – in any other world – have been a pie, and been the worse for it.

Shortbread base; vivid golden yuzu curd middles; smoky toasted-marshmallow meringue tops. They take time, these meringue bars. It’s a commitment and it is worth it. It’s worth it partly because they are delicious; but partly the faff is part of it. Each moment you spend (finding yuzu, stirring the curd, monitoring meringue with a beady eye) is a perfect moment: still and calm and interesting. The sea settles. The storm abates. The sun, bright yellow, peeks through the cloud.

Theo stirs curd; Nancy orders tablecloths and wooden cutlery and paper plates; Otto organises champagne; I organise vats of hand sanitizer and napkins and baby wipes, and lay out everything outside so as to give everyone the kind of space that still feels baffling. We are not used to space; we are the kind of friends who hug, hold hands, play with each other’s hair, sprawl across each other. Kiss mother, Nancy says, when I see her, in a passable imitation of somebody else’s mother-in-law. Kiss mother. I kiss the air she holds out her arms in the way we do now; I am thinking all the time of the day when this will seem to me like a mad distant memory, and I write it down to remind myself to appreciate it. Kiss your friends every chance you get; but don’t stop having supper in the park.

It’s cool out, for August. The clouds are pale grey and soft, but there’s shafts of nearly-autumn sunlight sapling through the trees.

We raise our glasses to everything: to the weather holding, to the chicken, to the yuzu meringue bars. To Nancy’s book. To my book. To all the books. To Jim. To the dead. To each other, to old friends, to new friends, to absent friends. The champagne is of such wildly varying quality – £3.99 fizz, Bollinger, some odd fruit-flavoured sparkling apple wine – and none of it matters at all. We sit, each on our own blanket, and drink, and tear chicken from the bones. Nancy sits with Otto; I lean against Theo and hold Jo’s hand. Danny, a country away, sings through a microphone: Tom, Dolly, Jen, Tessa, Ryan, like sun through the trees, like sun through the clouds.

People trade secrets and gossip as the sun goes down; and later in the dark we sing on the steps of the Cutty Sark, the way we’d sing at home, if we were allowed, trad mostly. Otto sings; then Jo sings, and Nancy’s brother; Nancy sings ‘The Parting Glass’ and the night is over, and for once in this year we have met ourselves exactly where we ought to be, and everything is right, the great ship behind us, and the River Thames rolling away forever to the sea.

Recipe

Makes 25 little squares, or 12 big bits (also, can be a very good 20cm round cake for birthdays, to serve 12 people easily)

Ingredients

For the base
250g butter
250g plain flour
120g rice flour
120g golden caster sugar

For the curd
100ml Yuzu* juice (or zest and juice of 3 unwaxed lemons)
40g butter
90g caster sugar
4 egg yolks

For the meringue
200g caster sugar
½ tsp lemon jusice
4 egg whites

Method

Start by making the base: a shortbread, basically. Pre-heat the oven to 180°C. Blitz together the butter, flours and sugar in a food processor. It will make a dry, crumbly dough that you’ll press into place with your hands.

Line a 30cmx23cm baking tray with baking paper. (I also make this in a 20cm round cake tin for birthdays.) Tip the crumbs into the prepared tin and press into all the corners. Prick it all over with a fork, then bake for 30 minutes or until golden.

In a double boiler, or bain-marie (a Pyrex bowl set over a saucepan of simmering water over a low heat – you know this by now, as so many recipes in these pages seem to require one), stir together the yuzu juice, butter and sugar until the sugar is dissolved. Patience, grasshopper. Then, slowly, whisk in the yolks. Keep whisking. You’re looking for a custardy texture, and then a jammier texture still. Sometimes they say curd should ‘coat the back of a spoon’, which really means: If you dipped a spoon in the curd, and then ran a finger through the sauce on the spoon, would that line hold? Would it be visible?

We want jammier than that, though, so keep stirring. Get to spoon-coating level and keep stirring. It will thicken, I promise. It will get there. You want something that you could take a spoonful of, and it would sit proud above the level of the spoon without threatening to spill over. When it’s reached this point, set it aside; take the shortbread from the oven, and let both curd and base cool while you make the meringue.

Take the whisk attachment and the metal bowl of a stand mixer, and wash them very thoroughly. Yes, they were clean to begin with. Wash them again anyway: grease ruins meringue. For the same reason, rub the whisk attachment and the bowl with the cut side of a half a lemon.

Set up (yet another) bain-marie – this time with the metal bowl from your stand mixer over the water, and a kitchen thermometer resting in the bowl. Put the sugar, lemon juice and egg whites into the bowl, and stir. Keep stirring, using the mixer’s whisk attachment in your hand, until the sugar is fully dissolved and the thermometer reads 81°C. Then, turn off the heat and take the thermometer out of the bowl. Attach the bowl and whisk to the stand mixer, and beat the meringue thoroughly for 3-5 minutes, until it’s perfect and glossy. We need what they call ‘stiff peaks’, which is to say: If you take a spoon of it, dip a finger in, and pull a strand up to a point – would that point stay stiff? Or would it bend itself over?

When you achieve this –and you will –take the shortbread base and the curd. Spread the curd thinly over the shortbread, then dollop the meringue on top of that. Use a spoon to bring it up to a series of swirls and peaks, just for prettiness.

Turn the grill onto high (a blowtorch would be better, but I’m personally a liability so don’t use one) and slide the meringue under it for a few moments, keeping a close eye on it, until it is bronzed and – in some places – delightfully charred.

Allow to cool as much as you can bear, then slice into squares with a knife dipped in boiling water, for extra ease.

*Yuzu is sometimes described as the halfway point between a lemon and a lime, which I can’t see at all: personally. I think it’s more like the halfway house between a clementine and a grapefruit; a sharper, puckerier tangerine; a warmer, sunnier lime. It always seems to me to be more complicated than lemon – but then again, when you buy a very fancy lemon, the kind that leaves slick citrusy oil on your fingers as you zest, I’m often surprised by how complex that is. Buy yuzu if you can get it easily; if not, buy great lemons – the bars will be delicious nonetheless.

—The Year of Miracles by Ella Risbridger (Bloomsbury) is out now.

The Year of Miracles

Recipes About Love + Grief + Growing Things

by Ella Risbridger

From the author of Midnight Chicken Ella Risbridger, a month-by-month chronicle of writing and recipes that explores joy and healing through food.

This cookbook is about a year in the kitchen (and in the garden under the fire-escape steps). A year of grief and hope and change; of cardamom-cinnamon chicken rice, chimichurri courgettes, quadruple carb soup, blackberry miso birthday cake, and sticky toffee Guinness brownie pudding...

Order NowRead More

No comments Share:

About the Contributor

Booktopia Guest Blogger