Be Your Own Guest - Bee Wilson 🌞

Be your own guest (cooking alone)

‘Sometimes eating supper alone feels private, quiet
and blessedly liberating. You may eat anything you
want . . .’
Marion Cunningham, The Supper Book, 1992


Of all the tactless assumptions in cookbooks, one of the most pervasive is
the default phrase ‘serves four’. It sends a message that cooking is only
worth doing if you have a neat nuclear family to feed, or an overflowing
tableful of friends. It makes the person who cooks and eats alone most days
feel that they – and their appetites – don’t count. Yes, a single person can
scale a recipe down or eat the same thing four days in a row. But it would
be nice if cooking alone could sometimes be recognised as something
rewarding in its own right, not to mention normal.The person who eats alone,
at least some of the time, is far from exceptional. In the UK, it is far more
common to live in a two-person or one-person household than one with
four or more people. In 2018, the number of people living alone in the UK
exceeded 8 million for the first time. One of the biggest population trends
in the world today is the rise of single-person households. In Stockholm,
by 2012, 60 per cent of all households consisted of one person and a
similar trend can be seen in most other European countries plus the US
and Canada. Living alone is on the ise almost everywhere, from Japan to
Ghana, although in low-income Asian countries it is still relatively rare.

Given that so many of us are living alone, it is strange how little the
world caters for solo dining. Supermarkets make it hard for the person
cooking alone not to overbuy fresh ingredients and the pages of food
magazines are still full of the kind of large aspirational dinner parties that
hardly anyone – single or not – seems to have much any more.

Cooking alone is completely different both in mood and content from
cooking for others. But this isn’t to say that it has to be less enjoyable. In
some ways, it’s the purest form of all cooking, because you can focus so
completely on the process and your own pleasure without factoring in the
judgement of others. I adore cooking solo meals, but I say this as someone
who spent a quarter of a century almost always cooking for or with other
people. For me, cooking alone now feels like a calm space all for myself.
After my husband left, the sight of his empty chair at the table kept catching
me in the throat. But when the children went off to have dinner with him, I
found that I actually relished time alone in the kitchen, keeping myself
company, listening to podcasts or music and adding as much garlic or chilli
to the meal as I liked without anyone complaining. I would light candles
and pour a glass of wine (or fizzy water with a dash of Angostura and a
slice of lime, which is what I drink when I am not-drinking). It felt selfish,
in a good way.

But cooking and eating alone is not always easy. For anyone whose
eating is disordered it can feel panicky to find yourself alone with a full
fridge, without the structure of social meals to determine when eating will
stop and start. Some of the loneliest times in my life were after my parents’
divorce, as a teenager, sitting by myself at the kitchen table, bingeing on ice
cream and sliced bread. My mother, who cried most days, was out at work.
My sister was in her bedroom, reading and not eating. With no one else
around, I made food my companion and my torturer. Alone in the kitchen, I
felt two things at once: that no amount of food could satisfy my hunger and
that any amount of food I ate was more than I deserved.

Even without an eating disorder, cooking alone can feel demotivating.
Some of us choose our solitude in the kitchen while others have it forced
upon us. A divorced friend whose children are grown up told me that he
sometimes got a sense of deep ‘futility’ when cooking his dinner: ‘Why
cook this thing that will take an hour when it’s just for me?’ He did not
mind so much if he could read a book while idly stirring something with his
other hand, but settling on what to stir was also a problem. He missed
having his children’s preferences to think about. ‘When all you’re
consulting is your own taste, it can be hard to decide.’

During the pandemic, I spoke to a surprising number of people who said
that, stuck alone at home, they no longer saw any point in cooking. It
seemed to be the most generous cooks who suffered the most, the ones who
generally use cooking as a way of connecting with other people. A friend –
one of the best and most sociable cooks I know – spoke of his boredom at
the thought of eating lentil soup day after day with no one to share it with.
Whether you enjoy cooking alone or not depends partly on your
relationship with food and partly on your relationship with yourself. But the
good news is that neither of these things is fixed. One of the most promising
things about being an omnivore is that we can change our relationship with
food and our tastes at any time in the human lifespan. We can also learn to
be kinder to ourselves. I know this often sounds like an empty phrase, but it
becomes less empty when you actually put the kindness into daily practice
with your hands. It might be a gesture as small as bothering to make
yourself a cup of tea with fresh mint instead of a teabag. It might be
garnishing a plate of food to make it look extra beautiful (garnishes are one
of the first things to go when we cook alone). Or it might mean making
yourself a special surprise breakfast of pancakes (obviously you will have
to pretend to be surprised when you see the pancakes, but aren’t all surprise
celebrations a bit like this?).

In the summer of 2020, I came across a remarkable little book from 1954
called Cooking Alone by a writer called Kathleen Le Riche whose writing
seems to have been more or less forgotten. I found it comforting to realise
that there have always been solitary cooks. Le Riche argues that the key to
cooking alone is finding ‘positive incentives’ to help you enjoy it more. She
rightly sees that these incentives will be different for different people. For
some, the incentive might be health; for others it will be pleasure. Le Riche
describes a convalescent who nurses herself back to health with small
nourishing meals of poached eggs or frozen raspberries and sugar. For
others, cooking alone is a form of independence. One of Le Riche’s
chapters is about a ‘happy potterer’, a woman who loves ‘pottering’ in the
kitchen trying new recipes because it signals to herself that for once in her
life ‘My Time is My Own’. Another of her chapters is about a lonely
mother who feels she doesn’t really deserve food but who starts making
herself nicer lunches by pretending she is expecting guests.

One of the secrets of cooking that has taken me a lifetime to learn is to
try to cook for yourself as if you are company. Too many of us still see
cooking alone as a kind of cooking that doesn’t matter, compared to
elaborate entertaining. But this reflects a false view of what home cooking
really is, as if it were all for show. What could be more basic and essential
than following your own instincts and cooking to please yourself? It’s a
way of making yourself feel more at ease in the world. The added bonus is
that the better you get at cooking alone, the easier you will find it to cook
for others, because you will feel so much more confident in your tastes and
your cooking will come from a place that is authentic rather than rehearsed.

Screen out the voices telling you it isn’t ‘worth’ cooking for one. Kick
off your shoes and pour yourself a nice drink. Let the world outside (or
Twitter) continue to do all the maddening and unjust things that the world
outside is always doing. All that matters now is the sound of your knife on
the chopping board, the scent of the green herbs, the tickly feeling of rice
falling through your fingers, the anticipation of good things and the
knowledge that you deserve to eat them.

Treat yourself like company...Got it Bee!