Cooking Alone

(Hardback, Main)

Publishing Details

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Description

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)
The Lonely Mother, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. (who becomes a toast connoisseur)

Meet the experts in cooking alone . . .

Supper for one 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.

'A clever book, and amusing too. Somebody ought to bestow its author's name upon a sauce.' - Belfast News Letter

'Every servantless man and woman should read her.' - Truth

'Delightful . . . Ingenious.' - Home and Country

Reviews

Wonderful ... Paints vivid pen portraits with recipes and advice. More than a period piece, it is funny and full of charm. -- Sunday Times

Remarkable. Aside from its wit and period charm, this [recognises] that the most important ingredient in the kitchen is the human ... Nearly seventy years on, this still feels like a radical message. -- Bee Wilson

This is not just another cookery book; it is a tonic and a beacon for the many who must and the few who wish to live alone. -- Wine and Food

Author Bio

Kathleen Le Riche is the author of Cooking Alone, Cooking From Scratch, and Cooking for a Party, which were published by Faber from the 1950s onwards.

Bee Wilson is a prize-winning food writer and historian. Her books include Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat and, most recently, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat. In 2016, she won the food writer of the year award from The Guild of Food Writers for her journalism.