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



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.