Sick Day Banquet

These menus were originally part of Bella Milroy’s 2019 Soft Sanctuary programme at Bootle Library. At the Library volunteers cooked the artists’ recipes for a series of free communal lunches held in Bootle Library.

Two introductions (2019, 2020) for the Sick Day Banquet, written by Bella Milroy, can be accessed here.

Below is the Sick Day Banquet recipe collection, including updated and additional recipes commissioned by Bella. The recipe booklet is available to download, view online, or as a print copy. You can also find audio descriptions of each of the recipes below.

Our At the Library Chopping Club producers Gregory Herbert and Niamh Riordan have also collaborated with artist Kyla Harris and Bella to produce a short film, “methods of care: ramen edition". Since the beginning of the year, Bella and Kyla have been recording a conversation over Voice Notes, about sick day foods, cooking, care, and their experiences of hiring and living with Personal Assistants (PAs). The film weaves together this conversation with footage of a virtual cook along, in which Niamh and Kyla cook Kyla’s recipe for ‘Comfort Ramen’ together over Zoom – Kyla directing Niamh through every detail of the recipe. You can watch the film here.

Kyla is a visual artist, writer and activist who explores the perspective of 'the other'. Her work subverts relationships with the body, capitalism and normativity. Kyla is the creator of The Other Screen, a film event dedicated to widening the outlooks of disabled people and the D/deaf community. At the time of this project, she was writing a television series for Channel 4, 'We Might Regret This', which she also starred in.

There's nothing more life affirming than a warm broth, intense with flavour, contrasted by silky noodles. Too grandiose, and sweeping of a statement? Definitely. But this is how I feel about ramen. This is an ever changing recipe, adaptable to what's in the fridge, time and of course, personal taste. 

At times when it is difficult to access the outside world, or desperately need a creative, meditative day in the kitchen, this is the dish I make. To me, food truly has transformative powers. Fire, salt, fat and acid change any ingredient and in this recipe, combined, they become a bowl of nostalgia and comfort that I hope you take as much pleasure in as I do. 

Leah is an artist based in London, working mostly in film and performance. Her practice is concerned with the relationship between the psychological, emotional, and physical, often through personal accounts of unusual or hard-to-articulate experiences. Her work also focuses on sickness / cripness / disability in art, in critical and practical ways.

This is one of my favourite meals, made by my partner George. He’s a really wonderful chef and does the majority of the cooking at home, I’m very lucky! This is great comfort food - it’s nourishing and delicious, and is both a winter warmer and salady-summery thing. It’s great on a sick day because it’s packed full of goodness and is also really yummy and satisfying.

I can be in quite a lot of pain when I'm in a bad phase, and food can feel like something nice my body can experience. If I was left to my own devices, it'd be cereal for dinner every night, or the recipe writer Alice Hattrick who also has M.E. gave me (while we were on a residency at Wysing Arts Centre thinking and talking about sickness, cripness and disability) - a tin of sweetcorn. Meals like this sweet jacket potato make me feel a bit more human again.

Kabir utilises woven text/textiles, sound, video, and performance to materialise concepts concerning the cultural politics of cloth, gendered archives, and colonial geographies. Kabir’s (un)weaving performances and tapestries comment on histories of trans-national power, global production, and matrixes of labour. Her textile works uses a queer theory of entanglement to weave discourse around disability, resisting function and the queer racialised body as a living archive of collective trauma.

Baked Beans don’t sound super glamorous do they? They are something we eat out of everyday comfort, brilliant on a Jacket potato with grated cheese, and more than likely you can be guaranteed to have them in your cupboard. I know from days when I had pretty bare cupboards, I could count on transforming a tin of Baked Beans into a quick easy dinner.  

It all started from a seed dish that I used time and time again on sick days. When I used to have days with very little energy and that meant no energy to go to the shops, so a very bare kitchen, relying on things that had been in my cupboard for a while. These were also days I couldn’t really cook a full meal for myself because of low energy.  Baked beans have haricot beans in them, which are full of protein and  really nutritious. On these days I would put the can into a sauce pan, add fresh tomatoes and feta cheese, a crushed garlic maybe, or a sprinkle of chilli flakes, possibly some chopped olives, and eat with parsley on top. Whatever I had to hand, would throw it in there and have a warm bowl of food. It fed me and  filled me up when I had little resources or spoons that day. 

Here I have reinvented a recipe that creates it’s own very nutritious and full of flavours version of the humble but dependable dish of baked beans. Instead of using bought baked beans (which you certainly still can!) I am using tinned butter beans, which is another hearty type of white bean, and can be substituted with, haricot beans, cannellini beans or baked beans in tomato sauce as well. You can also use a mix of different white beans in the same dish (just use one of each).  

During lockdown of 2020 I spotted a tray bake dish in a newspaper recipe booklet, and it quickly became the favourite dish of the week, delivering amazing flavours, and was a joy to eat during those difficult  months: it was soothing, comforting as any type of baked bean dish, and was incredibly very very easy to make. A low energy dinner - but stunning to serve, eat and share a meal together.  

It was so reminiscent of those days of turning a dinner of baked beans, into something special. So here I’ve tweaked and altered this recipe and it is tried and tested and eaten at least once a week in my home.  

Romily Alice Walden is a transdisciplinary artist whose work centers a queer, disabled perspective on the fragility of the body. Their practice spans sculpture, installation, video and printed matter, all of which is undertaken with a socially engaged and research-led working methodology. Recent work has shown at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art: Newcastle, Hebel Am Uffer: Berlin, SOHO20: New York and Tate Modern: London. In 2019 Romily was a Shandaken Storm King resident and a 2020 resident at Rupert, Lithuania.

I don’t even know if I should call these burritos because in no way
do they resemble the complex and delicious flavours of an authentic burrito. But, for me, they do resemble a very comforting and delicious thing that I want to eat when I’m feeling sick, sad, hungry, angry, tired, happy or any time at all. You can make a vat of the mix, freeze it and then eat it with salsa and guacamole if you have the energy, or as is with some rice / cheese if you can’t manage the chopping.

When I feel low, I crave tasty, uncomplicated food that also leaves
me feeling nourished. There’s something implicitly comforting about holding onto the warm and heavy parcel that is a freshly wrapped burrito; and for that reason I always eat this meal with my hands. 

This is also a really lovely meal to share with friends. There’s lots of bowls full of different little bits on the table, so you have to pass things to each-other, help those for whom reaching is hard, share the spoils and talk about what you want. I like that this communal meal facilitates conversations about needs, desires and pleasure concerning food. Whether you cook alone and then share, or make the whole process communal, there is an ingrained element of pleasure-seeking when you construct a meal that can be tweaked and adapted to each individual eater’s desires. I think it can be hard to find moments of pleasure, joy and awareness in day to day life, especially if one is dealing with pain, stress, sickness or care.

A moment taken to put together a burrito isn’t going to change your life, but it may well change your mood. Sometimes the simplest pleasures remind me that there can be space for joy and desire, even within suffering.