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Cooking Alone
Supper for one? Whether you're a career girl, bedsitter or bachelor, this vintage 1950s cookery gem introduced by Bee Wilson is 'wonderful ... funny and full of charm' (India Knight) including 'lots of ideas worth nicking' (Rachel Cooke)The Career Woman (who buys a chicken as a treat)The Bedsitter (who experiments with newfangled gadgets)The Old Lady (who feeds her menagerie of pets)The Schoolboy Moocher (who makes toffee and wallows in grapes) The Bachelor (who learns to stockpile food)Meet the experts in cooking alone . . .Cooking Alone (1954) is a delicious miniature compendium of tales inspired by a cast of eccentric solitary characters. Brimming with entertaining anecdotes, recipes (rabbit with aubergine and prunes, anyone?) and top tips (ever wondered how to store ice cream in a bedsit?), Kathleen Le Riche is a witty, charming guide to the single life. Reissued with a new foreword by Bee Wilson, this vintage delight is a hymn to the pleasures of dining solo.'Every servantless man and woman should read her.' Truth'A clever book, and amusing too. Somebody ought to bestow its author's name upon a sauce.' Belfast News Letter'Delightful . . . Ingenious.' Home and Country'Remarkable. Aside from its wit and period charm, this is one of the very few cookbooks to recognise that the most important ingredient in the kitchen is the human ... Nearly seventy years on, this still feels like a radical message.' Bee Wilson'Richly imagined ... There is great tenderness and defiance in Le Riche's attention to the pleasures of the solitary cook.' Rebecca May Johnson
- GenresFood
141 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1954
8 people are currently reading
87 people want to read
About the author
Kathleen Le Riche
3 booksHer first book Cooking from Scratch has the premise that Le Riche had started off hating cooking but now found herself an accomplished cook: 'from can-opener to Cordon Bleu!'
Her second book was Cooking For a Party. By the 1960s she abandoned food writing and became an amateur Shakespeare scholar.
Her second book was Cooking For a Party. By the 1960s she abandoned food writing and became an amateur Shakespeare scholar.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 15, 2021
Recently reprinted as a facsimile edition by Faber, this was Le Riche’s third cookbook. It’s like no other cookbook I’ve read, though: It doesn’t list ingredients or, generally, quantities, and its steps are imprecise, more like suggestions. What it reads like is a set of short stories with incidental recipes. Le Riche had noted that people who live alone some or all of the time, for whatever reason, often can’t be bothered to cook for themselves properly. She offers to these old ladies, bachelors, career girls, and mothers with children off at school her ideas on shopping, food storage, simple cooking, and making good use of leftovers, but all through the medium of anecdote.
For instance, “The Grass Widower,” while his wife is away visiting her mother, indulges his love of seafood and learns how to wash up effectively. A convalescent plans uncomplicated meals she’ll fix, including lots of egg dishes and some pleasingly dated fare like “junket” and cherries in brandy. A brother and sister, students left on their own for a day, try all the different pancakes and quick breads in their repertoire. The bulk of the actual meal ideas come in a chapter called “The Happy Potterer,” whom Le Riche styles as a friend of hers named Flora who wrote out all her recipes on cards collected in an envelope. I enjoyed some of the little notes to self in this section: appended to a recipe for kidney and mushrooms, “Keep a few back for mushrooms-on-toast next day for a mid-morning snack”; “Forgive yourself if you have to use margarine instead of butter for frying.”
I don’t think there are any recipes here I would actually try to reproduce, though I may one day attempt the Grass Widower’s silver-polishing method (put a strip of aluminium foil and some “washing soda” (soda crystals?) in the sink and pour over some boiling water from the kettle; dip in the silver items, touching the foil, and watch the tarnish disappear like magic!). This was interesting as a cultural artefact, to see the kinds of meals and ingredients that were mainstays in the 1950s (evaporated milk, anyone?) and how people coped without guaranteed refrigeration. It’s also a good reminder to eat well no matter your circumstances.
For instance, “The Grass Widower,” while his wife is away visiting her mother, indulges his love of seafood and learns how to wash up effectively. A convalescent plans uncomplicated meals she’ll fix, including lots of egg dishes and some pleasingly dated fare like “junket” and cherries in brandy. A brother and sister, students left on their own for a day, try all the different pancakes and quick breads in their repertoire. The bulk of the actual meal ideas come in a chapter called “The Happy Potterer,” whom Le Riche styles as a friend of hers named Flora who wrote out all her recipes on cards collected in an envelope. I enjoyed some of the little notes to self in this section: appended to a recipe for kidney and mushrooms, “Keep a few back for mushrooms-on-toast next day for a mid-morning snack”; “Forgive yourself if you have to use margarine instead of butter for frying.”
I don’t think there are any recipes here I would actually try to reproduce, though I may one day attempt the Grass Widower’s silver-polishing method (put a strip of aluminium foil and some “washing soda” (soda crystals?) in the sink and pour over some boiling water from the kettle; dip in the silver items, touching the foil, and watch the tarnish disappear like magic!). This was interesting as a cultural artefact, to see the kinds of meals and ingredients that were mainstays in the 1950s (evaporated milk, anyone?) and how people coped without guaranteed refrigeration. It’s also a good reminder to eat well no matter your circumstances.
April 2, 2021
A DRC was provided by Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and stomach-growling review.
Utterly charming time capsule of a book, where the narrator chats with various types of people who must cook for themselves. But also they must entertain and clean up and think for themselves and so the book becomes a little guide to life, for anyone who ever feels lonely or bored or impoverished. Though it is of a very particular time and place - postwar Britain, where I know from family stories that food stood for so much that had been lost, kept and might come back in abundance - Le Riche's people come to represent any time in history where people especially need their little comforts and rituals to get by. Sound necessary, say right now? One could be read aloud like a fairy tale for the sing song cadence of the prose, or a bedtime story with the soothing short chapters. Pair with Cooking in a Bedsitter by Katharine Whitehorn, Alone In The Kitchen with an Eggplant by Jenni Ferrari-Adler or The Pleasures of Cooking for One by Judith Jones and you have much of humanity in a serving or two.
Utterly charming time capsule of a book, where the narrator chats with various types of people who must cook for themselves. But also they must entertain and clean up and think for themselves and so the book becomes a little guide to life, for anyone who ever feels lonely or bored or impoverished. Though it is of a very particular time and place - postwar Britain, where I know from family stories that food stood for so much that had been lost, kept and might come back in abundance - Le Riche's people come to represent any time in history where people especially need their little comforts and rituals to get by. Sound necessary, say right now? One could be read aloud like a fairy tale for the sing song cadence of the prose, or a bedtime story with the soothing short chapters. Pair with Cooking in a Bedsitter by Katharine Whitehorn, Alone In The Kitchen with an Eggplant by Jenni Ferrari-Adler or The Pleasures of Cooking for One by Judith Jones and you have much of humanity in a serving or two.
January 11, 2024
This is a sweet little reprint of a 1954 cookbook with a modern foreward by food writer Bee Wilson.
The recipes are presented exactly as all of those shared between my mother and her friends throughout my childhood. There are not lists of exact ingredients and precise steps, but rather general ideas and guidance. Each chapter is a glimpse into the life and preferences of an individual character that cooks alone. While I doubt that I will replicate any of these ideas that were originally created in homes without refrigeration and often on just a hot plate, I really appreciate the general premise of the entire book: cooking is self care that we all deserve, even when alone.
"In fact, nothing is extravagant if it adds to enjoyment. That is, almost nothing. Within reason."
"So if I'm not a captive, and not a nun under a vow of abstinence, then why don't I give myself the pleasure of eating? Silence and solitude are imposed on me for many hours each day, but I needn't starve. I'm not poor. And yet there are days when I do! And I'm not the only one.... I must be a little cracked..."
The recipes are presented exactly as all of those shared between my mother and her friends throughout my childhood. There are not lists of exact ingredients and precise steps, but rather general ideas and guidance. Each chapter is a glimpse into the life and preferences of an individual character that cooks alone. While I doubt that I will replicate any of these ideas that were originally created in homes without refrigeration and often on just a hot plate, I really appreciate the general premise of the entire book: cooking is self care that we all deserve, even when alone.
"In fact, nothing is extravagant if it adds to enjoyment. That is, almost nothing. Within reason."
"So if I'm not a captive, and not a nun under a vow of abstinence, then why don't I give myself the pleasure of eating? Silence and solitude are imposed on me for many hours each day, but I needn't starve. I'm not poor. And yet there are days when I do! And I'm not the only one.... I must be a little cracked..."
November 23, 2022
An odd little book with characters and scenarios around recipes for one, but it does make you think it’s worth more than a sandwich even when solo. The recipes are mostly still valid although some descriptions or explanations don’t quite work with modern versions of the ingredients. Sticking a fork in half an onion and cutting off the skin is certainly a way to avoid the smell… (what about the tears?)
January 17, 2022
What a quirky, fun little read.
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May 7, 2023A delightful little slice-of-life from another era
June 18, 2023
Great content.
August 9, 2024
Charming period piece celebrating lone foodies at a time before fridges and other conveniences.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews