What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [1]
Even after our travels, people have continued to speak to us with enthusiasm and candor about their exploits in the realm of cooking for one. Their revelations have made us see how many possibilities there are for feeding ourselves, possibilities that lie well outside the borders of what usually passes for normal, let alone “right.” When we eat alone we often break all the rules surrounding not only what to eat but when to eat and even where. And this is true regardless of what we know about cooking or about what makes a proper meal. As writer Fran McCullough says, solo meals can be all corn and tomatoes if that’s what you like. Solo meals are different, surprising, and they can also be funny, but sometimes predictable.
Some men cook exceptionally well for themselves—roasting meats, opening fine bottles of wine as well as a book, and enjoying their own company, while others are happy eating a sandwich at the kitchen counter. Women, who especially enjoy being liberated from the routine of cooking for others, often see solo dining as an opportunity to eat not only what they want (“a bowl of oatmeal with fleur de sel” says one who is otherwise quite a sophisticated cook), but whenever and wherever. Do we eat on the couch or set a proper place for ourselves? Sip soup at our computers or wander around talking on the phone while eating? We do all of these things and more when there’s no one watching and expecting us to do otherwise.
There’s tremendous variety in the foods we turn to when we’re alone—snacks, old standbys, adventurous dishes, expensive cuts of meat, or the single vegetable menu. But regardless of the particulars, the minute we include even one other person at the table, everything changes. Our cooking can become more joyful and exuberant, or it can become freighted with such things as the hope of seduction, intentions to nourish, annoyance about having to cook or clean up, and all the other emotions, good and less so, associated with cooking and feeding others.
What We Eat When We Eat Alone is hardly meant to be a definitive study of human behavior. Rather, we’ve simply been chatting with friends and strangers about the art—or chore—of feeding ourselves. The solo eating we’re thinking about doesn’t have to do with dashing bachelors and martini suppers, but with any of us who take meals alone, who have times when we cook and eat without another person in mind. We have interviewed people who share our worlds—other cooks, farmers, artists, writers—as well as random others we’ve sat next to at a concert or on a bus to the airport, our friends’ elderly parents or their twenty-year-olds, for age is no barrier to the need for the occasional solo meal.
About the Recipes
After cooking many of the dishes people said they made for themselves—and taking some liberties with them—we’ve concluded that what most people want is to be involved in preparing their meals, but to a limited extent only. And this is true whether they are food professionals or work at something else entirely. While some true food maniacs are delighted to spend a few hours making sausage for themselves or boning and stuffing a chicken, most of us want a much smaller investment of time when it comes to dinner. We’re simply not going to make lasagna from scratch, as appealing as homemade lasagna might be, but we will happily wash, chop, and cook something—as long as it doesn’t go on too long. And it’s quite impressive what you can accomplish in a short time without resorting to frozen or processed foods, microwaves, or takeout. After all, when it’s just for one person, not four or six, there’s that much less to do.
Cooking for one, it turns out, is a lot of fun, because recipes suggest rather than dictate, and that’s because cooking for oneself is really about cooking by eye, deciding how much of this or that ingredient pleases you, or if you want to