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 women: 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.
Praise
‘Eli Davies has written a profoundly relatable culinary memoir of 00s life – of drinking in a rented kitchen while a Nigel Slater dinner bubbles on the stove on the eve of moving house (again) after your landlord has sold up – that will be familiar to so many. An immensely pleasurable and companionable enquiry into what it means to cook for oneself, alone – full of delicious references and research that never burden the lively writing. Barbara Pym’s heroines would approve!‘
— Rebecca May Johnson, author of Small Fires
‘A richly fascinating, and inspiring read – a real breath of fresh air.‘
— Felicity Cloake, Guardian columnist
‘Astute, deeply researched and tenderly written, The Spinster Cookbook will reframe everything you think you know about cooking, community and care.’
— Ruby Tandoh, author of All Consumed
‘The Spinster Cookbook is a delightful, stimulating literary companion for anyone seeking to master the art of cooking and eating alone. It celebrates and acknowledges the expansive possibilities of care, pleasure, and connection no matter how many places you set at the table.‘
— Amy Key, author of Arrangements in Blue
‘The Spinster Cookbook is a treat that invites us to sit with the meaning of cooking for one. It is a sumptuous, deeply satisfying read about life in relation to food: privations, survivals, indulgences, and everything in between.’
— Sophie K. Rosa, author of Radical Intimacy
‘The Spinster Cookbook is the perfect companion for your solo dinner table – it is a rare feat for writer to be this warm, intelligent and genuinely insightful. It is a book about caring for yourself in a world which is not always kind. A radical meditation on the joys of suiting yourself.’
— Caroline Magennis, author of Harpy: A Manifesto for Childfree Women
‘I didn’t realise I’ve been waiting for a book exactly like this one until I read The Spinster Cookbook. Davies writes with joy, candour and eloquence about the fine art of cooking for one. It’s such a deeply companionable book, compelling, well-researched and immensely relatable. The sort of book you’ll want to share.’
— Jan Carson, author of The Raptures
