When you’re a single woman who lives alone, what is your kitchen actually for?

In The Spinster Cookbook, British author Eli Davies explores the pleasurable and fraught relationship a single woman can have with cooking while living in a couple’s world. For a little over two years, I lived alone in a 23sq m studio apartment in Auckland’s CBD. There was no dining table. The unattached woman living alone has been a monkey on society’s patriarchal back for a long time. The feminist movement has heavily ruptured old notions of women being subservient to a husband, children and the home. But it’s still a couple’s world, argues British author and academic researcher Eli Davies in her new book, The Spinster Cookbook. When it comes to food and drink, for instance, she notes the word “we” is still visible everywhere. “Who is this ‘we’? Quite frankly, I want to smash it to pieces.”It’s a provocative book title. But “discomfort is the point”, Davies tells Viva over Zoom from her place in east London. Originally, the word “spinster” described women who spun but became loaded with stigma, usually unfavourably referring to older unmarried women. Shame, therefore, is often part of the single woman’s experience – one that Davies admitted feeling at times in the 272-page book. However, for Davies, now in her 40s, using the word is not about reclaiming. It’s about defining the space single women live in itself. British author and academic researcher Eli Davies.“We’re not waiting around; we’re not defining ourselves in terms of waiting to be in a relationship or on our way to being in a relationship or making do or trying to make the best of circumstances until we meet the right person,” Davies says.And while “cookbook” is in the title too, it isn’t what you’d think. Read as a sharp and entertaining memoir, cultural criticism and recipes rolled into one, Davies, who has a PhD in literature, peppers literary and film references of single women’s habits in feeding themselves throughout the pages, while exploring the highs and lows of solo cooking, and how it links to housing precarity, the politics of domestic space, the labour and resources a single woman does or doesn’t have access to. I almost shuddered at the validation. Thinking about the economy, I found more mercy on myself for being in a 23sq m shoebox. There was no affordable alternative close to work at the time. This meant multiple trips to the supermarket on grocery day, as I no longer had easy access to my car (I’d rather have more cash for food than spend $75 a week for parking), and I only had the physical strength to carry so much at once. This meant no convenient parking space for friends to visit. This meant no space for an oven. This meant when I cooked, like Davies, there was “no one to help me clean up afterwards”.It also meant eating what I wanted, when I wanted. It meant having loaded toast (toppings of stir-fried vegetables using herbs grown from my tiny balcony garden) for dinner at 5pm and feeling absolute joy.“We can learn a lot by paying attention to what and how single women cook and eat – about food supply, domesticity, the economy, gender roles, sexual freedoms, home design and much more,” she writes.But it is how I lived. Not how we’re meant to. As Davies notes: “If you look at kitchen design, at recipes, at cooking implements and a lot of the food sold in supermarkets, you can see [living alone] isn’t how we’re supposed to live.” That’s because it’s all designed for at least two. One way this shows up for a single person is through food wastage. Davies, who loves spinach, says she will buy a big bag but then it quickly wilts. “I can’t use it all in the time that’s needed before it goes off, so portion sizes are a really key thing”.A kitchen’s configuration can also be problematic. When shopping for pots, pans and dinner, everything seemed too big for how much I cook, eat and had space for – for Davies, who is the same height as me at 1.62m, being alone also meant no help reaching high shelves.Threaded throughout the book is Davies’ own story of becoming uncoupled after her 10-year relationship ended in 2017. However, she attests the book is not a “break-up memoir”. Using food and the relationship in the body of work makes it a useful way for the reader to understand issues around domesticity, Davies says, making it “more interesting and illuminating”.For Chelsea Daniels, another single woman living alone, the domestic space is a rebellious one.Since moving to Auckland from Christchurch in March 2018, the Adelaidian has lived with two other couples. But Daniels was always “the single one” in her groups, she says. When her flatmates broke the news they were moving out to live on their own, Daniels, 35, decided it was time for her to do the same.The Spinster Cookbook by British author Eli Davies is now available in New Zealand.For the past two years, she’s been renting a colourful one-bedroom alone in central Auckland. Like my old apartment, it’s tight inside. It’s also cosy. There is no washing machine or microwave. But there is a cat and a TV. And 16 mismatched mugs.“I have far too many mugs for one person; I don’t know what kind of party I’m having around here if there are 16 people to have tea all at the same time,” Daniels jokes.While Davies’ relationship with cooking changed after she started living alone, Daniels’ has remained much the same – cooking about once a week. “I don’t like cooking,” she admits. “It’s never brought me joy.” It never brought joy to Daniels’ mother and grandmother as she was growing up either, she points out.“The process of [cooking food] is so tiresome and so elongated, then I eat it in 10 minutes.”For the uncoupled women in Davies’ life, girl dinners – a bite-sized assortment of food that doesn’t require much cooking – are important, making a rebellious statement against cooking, doing the dishes, and making it easier to ditch rigid set mealtimes and eat when one chooses. As Daniels’ main kind of meal, it is important for her too.Inside her fridge are cheese and crackers, hummus, ham, carrots. With these she makes her favourite thing: girl-dinner platters, or “bitsies”. It’s something her mother was also big on as Daniels was growing up. “You’ve got a little bit of everything,” she says. “I feel good about it because it’s like got veges and protein and all the things that we’re meant to have to be healthy apparently – and I like the taste of it.”For Daniels, the maths for takeaways sometimes makes more sense than grocery shopping. “In my head I’m like, well I could just go and get braised pork on rice with green veges on Dominion Rd for $15,” she says. “I wouldn’t be able to make that pork and rice for $15. It has broccoli and half an egg in it. And the pork belly – that’s $15 right there.”But if she decided to buy pork belly for cooking, Daniels explains she would have to braise it, then “eat it for the next three weeks” because of the portion it comes in, or freeze it in an already-packed freezer. Not worth it.Davies says this kind of “single woman’s urban lifestyle” – one that involves the decision to opt for takeaways – isn’t simply about convenience and affluence. “I truly believe there is also something being worked out here about cooking, domesticity and gender roles, as I have been trying to do myself for the last few years,” she writes.Though rare, there are moments when Daniels enjoys being in the kitchen. It’s usually to cook one of two things: mince and cabbage chow mein with rice or the Greek dish avgolemono. These meals are special. They evoke memories of those who no longer live close. The former channels her mum. “You know those meals that your mum made when you were growing up, and you’d come home, and you’d smell it, and you’d be like, ‘oh my god, she’s cooking that again, it’s awful, I want McDonald’s’ – it’s those meals that I crave,” Daniels says.But the latter – a kind of lemon and chicken soup with egg – is one that Daniels’ friend’s mum Adriana taught her. To this day, she says she visualises Adriana’s glasses when measuring ingredients for the avgolemono. “It’s all by sight,” Daniels says.Daniels says she can relate to the sense of shame imposed on single women explored in Davies’ book, especially when it comes to dating. “In this day and age, a lot of men like a ‘traditional woman’ – it’s someone who wants to stay at home and cook and clean and have the kids … have a vege patch and like to make bread from scratch and s***.“I am quite literally never ever going to do that.”Davies wrote The Spinster Cookbook not just for uncoupled women living alone like Daniels. “It’s for everyone,” Davies says, hoping the book will spark conversations about “how we live and why we live the ways that we live”.Because pleasure is the whole point.Regardless of our relationship status, gender, sexuality and whether we have a family or not, Davies wants us to pay attention to the things that “actually make us happy and enable us to care for ourselves and each other in a way that’s also nourishing, fulfilling and pleasurable”.“You have to understand your own pleasures, your own needs, to be able to have other relationships where you’re giving other people pleasure and care – not just in a couple [but also] in friendships, in communities”.Varsha Anjali is a journalist in the lifestyle team at the Herald. She is based in Auckland.