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The Spinster Cookbook: Culture, politics and pleasure in the single woman’s kitchen
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.
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.
- GenresNonfictionFoodCookbooks
272 pages, Hardcover
Published June 11, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 25, 2026
This was a compulsively readable, thought-provoking blend of memoir, with literary, pop culture, & political analysis of spinsterhood and cooking/domesticity. A real delight!
June 11, 2026
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 !
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 !
June 17, 2026
Diss reading - 4.5
July 24, 2026
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!
July 27, 2026
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.
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.
August 1, 2026
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.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews