The Spinster Cookbook: Culture, politics and pleasure in the single woman’s kitchen

by Eli Davies

The Spinster Cookbook is a piercing exploration of what it means to cook for one in a society designed for couples and families. With sharp cultural insight, Eli Davies takes us on a culinary tour of the single woman’s kitchen, a space shaped as much by a search for freedom as by appetite.



The kitchen has always been a complex space for a place of labour and gendered expectations, as well as a site of nourishment, care and company. But how does this change when you’re alone, not cooking for family or friends, but simply for yourself?



Eli Davies explores what happens when food is uncoupled from domestic duty and romantic relationships and what it means to cook (or not) for yourself and by yourself. How does this shape your mealtimes, the way you shop for food, the kitchen equipment you use, and your relationship to cleaning up and looking after yourself?


With warmth, humour and insight, The Spinster Cookbook explores shopping and leftovers, solo meals and dinner parties for one, joy and grief and the politics of living on your own. This is a book about making a home in the face of housing precarity, loneliness, heartbreak and social norms, and finding independence, pleasure and self-expression through cooking. It’s a cookbook of sorts, and a manifesto for living differently.

Genres: Nonfiction, Food, Cookbooks, Memoir

272 pages, Hardcover

Published June 11, 2026

Reviews

[Anna]

The title of The Spinster Cookbook: Culture, politics and pleasure in the single woman’s kitchen caught my eye, as I am a spinster and have improved my relationship with food sufficiently to read non-self-help books about it. Davies combines personal memoir with discussion of changing British food culture, including a recipe at the end of each chapter. I enjoyed her choice of reference points across fiction and non-fiction. As I'm very similar in age, these were often familiar: the Bridget Jones novels, Nigella Lawson's TV series, Convenience Store Woman, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, etc. The book begins with Davies' experiences during lockdown. She reflects extensively on the loneliness of living alone, particularly during a pandemic, after cohabiting with a partner for years.

I found Davies' writing involving and her autobiographical commentary moving. Her deep love of food and cookery really come across. Her recollections of induction into adulthood by her parents and older siblings via food and drink are particularly touching. She also recounts relearning the joy of cooking just for herself in the wake of a difficult breakup and comments on the precarity of being a single renter in Britain. I hadn't previously thought about how popular British cooking changed in the 1990s as a wider range of ingredients became available in supermarkets and popularised via celebrity chefs on TV. Davies has interesting things to say about this and it was striking to realise how trends in ingredients and recipes have changed. All of which basically passed me by for decades while I mostly refused to cook. My personal experience of food, cookery, and spinsterhood has therefore been extremely different to that of Davies, which makes hers all the more enriching to discover. I really like that she ended the book with ideas about more community-orientated and companionable forms of cooking and eating. Her roast butternut squash and chili soup recipe looks great too; I will try that when hot soup season returns.

[Ted and her books]

Part culinary memoir, part cookbook and part fun, I had such a great time reading this book, it took me some time, but that was because I was savouring it.

I’m not really a non fiction girly ( I wish I was) but when it’s about food, count me in.
This was fun, it was educating, and I actually really loved it a lot !

[Natalie]

This was a compulsively readable, thought-provoking blend of memoir, with literary, pop culture, & political analysis of spinsterhood and cooking/domesticity. A real delight!

[Livvie Newman]

Diss reading - 4.5

[Laura Hutchinson]

A really lovely, thoughtful read - half memoir, half recipe book, which a few rounds of vodka and toast on the side. Captures perfectly that cooking for yourself can be an act of indulgent self care. The final bit about single women living together made me very pro living in a retired convent!

[Grace Gooda]

love this love food love cocktails love all the references and research in this

[NoMo Book Club]

Much of food-book culture is centred around cooking for others - families, gatherings, partners. But Eli Davies seeks to change this with 'The Spinster Cookbook'. It celebrates the joy of eating alone, eating what you want, eating for your own pleasure - and not just containing this within one-person portioned recipes.

Eli's life is centred around her choice to forego a co-habiting relationship - she's fully embraced the identity of 'spinster', and loves the independence and freedom it brings (but doesn't shy away from its challenges either). Although, she's also a big advocate for communal living outside of the parameters of traditional relationships and praises the joy of collaborative food preparation / sharing.

The book is part memoir, and traces the ups and downs of Eli's relationship with cooking across her adult life - particularly contrasting how she viewed it within the boundaries of a long-term partnership in earlier adulthood vs how she sees it now in middle adulthood as a solo woman. One was a domesticated task of role-playing an acceptable version of female adulthood, and another is an act of self-care and a search for culinary freedom. I know which one I'd rather dine upon.

But the scope encompasses something wider as Eli studies how women, food and cooking were portrayed or acted out across a wide range of cultural and historical references. And therein lies the heart of Eli's book - how the spinster can subvert the domestic servitude or gendered labour that was tied in with food preparation, meal times, cleaning etc in the heteronormative household, and turn it into something that is truly her own. It's a warm celebration of food (with a few delicious recipes thrown in), but more importantly, it's a joyful ode to the single kitchen.

[Jan Mawdesley]

Reviewed by Trish Palmer for Bluewolf Reviews and New South Books
This small hardback book, The Spinster Cookbook has quite a surprising title. The contents are even more surprising and a pleasure to read. While this is not a cooking book as we know the genre, it does contain recipes.
More importantly it contains the research and observations of the author about single women and food. As Eli Davies says, women have long been the caretakers of the kitchen and provided nourishment and gender expectations, while giving care and companionship. So how does this change when there is just one person to do it all?
Eli looks at the politics of living on your own. How to cope and manage the many situations which arise. She does this with humour and reminds us of the scene in Bridget Jones’ Diary, where Bridget is trying to impress her friends and produces a blue soup. The author remarks on the changed nature of single women in today’s society and has useful hints for shopping and cooking for one.
The Spinster Cookbook is much more than a guide for living. It explains what it is to think through the material realities and politics of building a life as a middle-aged woman without a partner. There is a need to find some kind of joy and peace, and this is the idea that Eli brings to this writing.
As a young person the author enjoyed cooking and was influenced by people like Nigella Lawson. This was where she got an idea that food was there for your satisfaction. When Nigella made a dish of devilled eggs and sat down by herself to eat them Eli felt the power of Nigella’s confidence with her lifestyle.
This is an entertaining, educational and satisfying read for women, and also contains some great recipes.

[Ann]

This is an interesting topic : how do single women eat? What happens when cooking is separated from the cultural expectation of "taking care of the family?" This can lead into a larger discussion about what single women mean in our society, or even what food means in our society.

I myself definitely belong in the group of women who would gladly subsist on bread and cheese if there was no nutritious family dinner to be provided every evening. At the same time, I understand that single women who enjoy food and cooking may want to make sure they have access to those pleasures. When is cooking drudgery and when is it fun?

The author meanders through these questions, often with quotations from favorite authors of mine, like Barbara Pym and Laurie Colwin, and some of this is thought-provoking. On the other hand, this book ultimately read too much like a personal memoir for me. Food during her childhood, during her early post-college days, during a long domestic partnership, after the breakup, living alone doing a PhD, during the pandemic. The recipes that were included were not inspiring, either.

In summary : this was clearly a very personal book, something that the author clearly needed to get off her chest. She has done her research with obvious interest and dedication. But too little of that ended up in the book, with stories about her own life appearing to take priority.

[Niamh]

Reading this gave me the exact joy I get out of reading Ruby Tandoh's book, not least because of the intersection between food and pop culture. I also want to live in the feminist utopia of shared living Golden Girls style where we eat amazing food.

[Emily]

This book is a generous account of the author’s experience of cooking for herself, and a reminder that women have their own appetites to satisfy when it comes to food. Davies mixes memoir and a recent cultural history of cooking as she considers different types of meals, from snacks and cocktails to roasting a chicken. I also enjoyed the chapter on eggs (‘I love the mystical quality surrounding the boiling of an egg’). This is a great read that moves the focus away from the ‘family dinner table’ and towards a new kind of eating shaped by women’s lives.

[Stiene Thillmann]

3.5 x

[Bookworm on the sofa]

Loved this book especially the ideas around uncoupling a love of cooking from a sense of servitude. Impressive list of references and further reading which I plan to explore.