Do single women bother to cook for themselves?
‘Let us begin with cookbooks. Or, rather, with a rejection of them. I cannot look at mine. They remind me of a person I no longer want to be.’ This is a bold start for a book whose title contains the word ‘cookbook’; but then much of The Spinster Cookbook is a subversion of the domestic and the expected. It is, for starters, not a cookbook (though it does contain a few recipes) but sits in several different realms: it is Eli Davies’s personal narrative, edging into memoir; it is a review of spinster literature from the interwar period onwards, taking in everything from Lolly Willowes to Sex and the City; it is a meditation on what it means to make a home; and it is a manifesto on different visions for co-existing. It is not a paean to cosy solo domesticity.
