recipe for mysql 5.5

It depends on the distribution and version thereof you are using.

The mysql cookbook relies on packages provided by the distribution maintainer such that for Ubuntu as an example mysql 5.5 would get installed on versions starting with 12.04.

You could always write your own version installing from a downloaded tarball or search for (in the case of ubuntu) a PPA providing mysql 5.5 for older releases of Ubuntu and add the PPA repository to your APT source list (via chef).