Like many people, I read a lot during the Covid-19 lockdown, and one of the books I enjoyed most in those strange, silent months was a memoir by the novelist Michèle Roberts called Negative Capability: an account of being alone, but not lonely. In the face of what people on social media like to call (ugh) self-care, Roberts wrote of her efforts to be good to herself after a painful rejection without recourse either to self-pity or to yoga. Four years on, I still sometimes pull it from the shelf when I’m feeling embattled. Radiant and meditative, a few pages are all I need to get going again; to remind myself to pay attention to everything, and by doing so both to recognise and to give thanks for what great good fortune I have.
I was, then, pleased but not wholly surprised to learn that Roberts is shortly to publish a cookbook: a charming little paperback that smells lightly of roasted endives and anchovy butter (obviously I’m speaking metaphorically; my early copy carries the scent of fresh paper, though I predict this will change quite soon). To make a proper supper for yourself is, after all, a kind and tender thing to do if you’re under pressure – and her book contains only recipes for one person. For the absence of doubt, however, I must stress it isn’t the kind of manual that has you making lasagne, to be frozen in individual portions. The dishes included are at once more simple and more luxurious than that. Mussel salad with ravigote sauce. Rabbit with mustard. Steak with bordelaise sauce. So many micro feasts, and every one of them nourishment for body and soul.
Its title is French Cooking for One, and it is a gentle riff on Edouard de Pomiane’s classic of 1930, French Cooking in Ten Minutes. De Pomiane’s book was subtitled “Adapting to the rhythm of modern life”, and it is from this that Roberts takes her steer. Cooking for one person is all about rhythm, and not only because, as she notes, it requires “streamlined, no-fuss, foolproof techniques”.
I don’t live alone these days, and as a result cook only for myself less often than I used to (though I’m now rather longing for T to go out for the night, the better that I might make Roberts’s diminutive but luxurious cheese soufflé, perhaps with a lily-gilding bowl of Normandy-style green beans on the side). But when I did, ritual and punctuation were all. If it was too easy to slump in front of the telly with a slice of toast, it was difficult-verging-on-impossible to conjure a meal that would be delicious, achievable and a means of pressing pause on the stresses of the day.
Roberts is half-French, and her text is edged like an old tablecloth with the spirit of her maternal grandparents’ kitchen as well as her own domestic expertise. Most of the recipes, short and uncomplicated, aim to deliver the perfect effort-to-taste ratio; if she has an Elizabeth David-like briskness on the page, she’s also a sensualist, a part-time sybarite. But even if you’re not in the mood for cooking, simply to read them is to encourage rumination. She is such a noticing writer, and in her hands you find yourself doing the same, a dowdy cauliflower suddenly beautiful, a slab of marbled meat a world unto itself.
It is odd how relatively rarely food writers dare to embark on the territory of solitary cooking and eating, even in 2024. Aren’t we told again and again that ever increasing numbers of people now find themselves living alone? The last book I owned on the subject was Delia Smith’s One is Fun, which came out in 1985 (though I’m sure there have been others since). The thought, I suppose, is that those who are unencumbered by other human beings can please themselves. What would they want with a recipe? But freedom cuts both ways. It doesn’t have to mean culinary impoverishment. The woman who is at liberty to eat a quick tin of sweet corn without even bothering to sit down as she does so also has the latitude, if she so chooses, to spend a little time rustling up a couple of fat stuffed tomatoes, a delicate plate of trout with almonds, a comforting bowl of melting pork with prunes.
