The Spinster Cookbook: Culture, politics and pleasure in the single woman’s kitchen

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.