In 2017, writer Eli Davies’s nine-year relationship came to a sudden end. They shared a home in London, and spent days in “kicking-the-can avoidances of the big life-altering decision [they had] made.” Going out to a pub on the Holloway Road in London, they “avoid[ed] the terrible rupture lurking on the horizon.” This moment changed the course of Davies's life. An academic and writer, she has spent the last eight years building a new life, where food and love are neither singular nor binary. Her debut book, The Spinster Cookbook, is a blazing manifesto for a new world in which she imagines—demands?—more for us all than the small routined lives that are chained to set-notions of how things should be. Reject meal times, if you want to, and eat when you are hungry. Put in the effort to make a tray of devilled eggs just for your own pleasure, like Nigella Lawson did during the pandemic. Or if you are tired: dinner does not have to be complicated; a thick slice of buttery toast paired with a drink (vodka in Davies’s instance) can suffice just as well.
A Painful Breakup and the Tools to Rebuild
The London-based writer was daunted by the task of untangling a life built together with her ex. All the little items collected throughout the years, which would need to be assigned for one or the other to keep. She could not face dividing up their belongings. Davies writes that an unexpected break-up in her thirties sent ruptures throughout her life, which she describes as “one of the most difficult and painful things I’ve ever had to do.” Of this period, when she was leaving the home she lived in with her then-partner, she writes: “I looked through our belongings, what we’d collected over the years, I found I didn’t have the stomach for it. I didn’t want any of this stuff… everything was a reminder of something that had died.”
Through the heartache, she salvaged what little she could bring herself to take. She said: “I did manage to identify a handful of objects to keep - a hand blender, a bright orange Le Creuset cooking pot, a slotted spoon, sharp cook’s knife and [her] big granite pestle and mortar.” These were the tools that she set forth with through many kitchens—eight rental properties in the last eight years—in which Davies carved her new life. On the last morning in the flat she shared with her ex-boyfriend, Davies cooked herself an egg. She writes of this moment: “I wonder briefly if I should wake up the sleeping man in the bedroom and ask him if he wants some too, but I stop: no. This is not my responsibility any more. And so I stand in our kitchen, making breakfast there for the last time, frying myself an egg.”
A Beacon for Single Women
These tender moments are woven throughout The Spinster Cookbook, a beacon to other single women that it is not a failure to put your own nourishment and needs first. Under patriarchy, women have been conditioned to prioritise the needs of their family unit. The Spinster Cookbook declares that women can no longer carry the responsibility for everyone at the expense of themselves. As she left that home for the last time, Davies faced a vast new life, untethered and single. She questioned: “How do you look after yourself as a woman when you are outside the conventional couple and family?”
Popular culture had an answer of sorts. It shows single women deeply invested in both their love lives and their meals: keeping an eye on the calories they eat for fear of changing shape; dining out in restaurants so a kitchen is an accessory rather than a necessity; or sitting face to face with a glorified stranger on awkward and unsatisfying dinner-dates. The Sex and the City women meet in various eateries around New York City to pick over the bones of their love lives, offering input even into the most minor of dramas. Similarly, Bridget Jones—in both the 1996 Helen Fielding novel and the 2001 film starring Renée Zellweger—ricochets between obsession with love and what she consumes, noting down her daily measurements as if her life depended on it. When she is not eating Marks and Spencer’s goodies—she is making a disaster of cooking for her friends, eternalised in the infamous “blue soup”.
Challenging the Couples-Centric World
What ties both of these cinematic representations of single women to Davies is a primacy put on the enduring bond of friendship forged through food. For better or for worse. Davies quotes playwright Tony Kushner: “The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one.” She adds: “We are all in relationship with each other!” But this, by the author’s own admission, is not how societies are run. The world—from hotel rates to council tax—is built to accommodate couples. Uncoupled people are stung with “the singles tax”, paying over the odds to have the same luxuries—meals out, holidays abroad.
So while the women of Sex and the City and Bridget Jones strive for coupledom, Davies does not. She wants her book to begin a conversation on how we can “imagine ways of living differently.” She wants women to dream bigger for themselves, to think of themselves as worth the effort. When cooking lavish meals just for herself, she is asked: “Why bother going to the effort just for yourself?” In response, she said: “The question to me is: why not go to all the effort for just one person? Eating should always be some kind of occasion for pleasure.” The Spinster Cookbook by Eli Davies is out now.
