an
interview
with:
ellabell
risbridger
Ellabell runs a mental health and cooking crossover
blog: Eating With My Fingers. It’s full of whip-smart
prose about cooking on good days and bad days,
and feels like sitting by the fire on a rainy day. It
tells us not to worry, because food will always be
there – in the back of your cupboards, in the bottom
drawer of your fridge – and it’ll forgive you for
forgetting about it, or not knowing what to do with
it. But in EWMF, Ellabell shows us what can be
done. Here, she talks to editor Carlotta about coming
up with recipes, taking it easy, and synaesthesia
Q
Tell us how it started. How did Eating With My
Fingers begin, and why Eating With My Fingers?
Eating With My Fingers started life in Spring 2013 as an experimental novel called The
Sugar-Eaters. It was going to have pop-up pages, diagrams, maps, and (yes) recipes. But
I was working full-time, as well as studying for my degree, as well as losing my mind by
degrees, and The Sugar-Eaters got a bit marginalised.
A few months later, in the autumn, I was hospitalised for my anxiety disorder. In the
grey waiting room I sat with Tall Man, totally out of it, and I found myself (inexplicably)
thinking of food.
I wrote in my head two recipes: the first, for Very Distressing Crumble (which made it onto
the blog), and the second, for Crisis Team Carpaccio (which didn’t), and the beat of the stepby-step, the progression from raw ingredient to finished dish, shone out at me: here was a
framework, a structure I could build the rest of my life on.