Cooking alone - Kathleen Le Riche

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).

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

'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