Bhogal brings Comfort and Joy to Bloomsbury with new cookbook

Bloomsbury has landed a second cookbook from award-winning author, journalist, chef and restaurateur Ravinder Bhogal. 

Rowan Yapp, who was this week made head of Bloomsbury Lifestyle, acquired world rights to Comfort and Joy from Felicity Blunt and Sabhbh Curran at Curtis Brown. Bloomsbury will publish in May 2023.

Recipes celebrating vegetarianism and vegan cooking are interspersed with short essays and meditations on food. "Comfort and Joy is a fresh take on vegetarian and vegan cooking; not geared towards health or denial but indulging all the senses with a decadent global larder," the synopsis explains. "It is a cookbook of great bounty, promising a banquet of fortifying dhals and soups, bright pickles and preserves, the warm embrace of aromatic fritters and bhajis and stellar desserts. 

"For Ravinder, food should be made and shared with abundance in mind, and this sense of pleasure is conveyed on every page. From Miso Mushroom Carbonara and Crispy Aubergine with Spicy Caramel Sauce to Strawberry Falooda Cake, this is food as pursuit of pleasure."

Born in Kenya to Indian parents, Bhogal’s food is inspired by her mixed heritage and the UK’s diverse immigrant culture. Her first restaurant, Jikoni, was ranked 56th in the UK by the National Restaurant Awards within seven months of opening and achieved a place in the Michelin Guide in the same year. It was the UK’s first independent restaurant to go carbon-neutral.

Her cookbook Jikoni: Proudly Inauthentic Recipes from an Immigrant Kitchen (Bloomsbury, 2020) was the winner of the IACP Awards Best Chef/Restaurant Cookbook and was shortlisted for both the André Simon Award and Fortnum & Mason’s Food and Drink Awards. Her debut book, Cook in Boots (HarperCollins, 2009), won the Gourmand World Cookbook Award for the UK’s Best First Cookbook and was awarded the first runner-up prize for the World’s Best First Cookbook at the Paris Cookbook Fair in February 2010.

In June 2020, Bhogal launched a sustainable vegetarian home delivery brand, Comfort and Joy, as a sister brand to Jikoni. She is a food columnist for the FT Weekend Magazine and Guardian Feast, a contributing editor at Harper’s Bazaar, and regularly writes for the Observer Magazine and Vogue online.

"I was brought up in a culture where vegetarianism is the norm," she said. "My ancestors created effortlessly vibrant, crave-able dishes with humble, wholesome ingredients that were valued to the point of reverence. I was taught that fruit and vegetables are a boon because they have stoically held their own against the elements, pests and blight— their presence in our kitchens is life-affirming. I am grateful to Bloomsbury for partnering with me to share this love and inherited culinary wisdom that lavishes plants with the kind of care, culinary sorcery, creativity and surprise that we might normally bring to a steak or a chop."