Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone

by Jenni Ferrari-Adler

It is the privilege of loneliness; in privacy one may do as one chooses. —VIRGINIA WOOLF, Mrs. Dalloway

In the pantry bin, potatoes eye the onions slipping out of their skins. An apron hangs from the closet door like the shadow of a companion.

Loneliness, you think, loneliness with its lyrical sound; you look like a lone lioness.

You don’t need a literal eggplant on hand to realize—with the pleasurable shock that comes from recognizing a small truth—that you are alone in the kitchen with one.

I missed the texture and chaos of daily life shared with others.

But if time were money, I was rich.

If I’d been able to completely forget about nutrition, I might have created a diet based only on pickles and ice cream, salty and sweet.

We read to feel close to people we don’t know, to get into other people’s heads. I get the same sensation of intimacy from following a recipe.

It started to seem as if we were talking about a phenomenon that hadn’t yet been recognized as a phenomenon. It started to seem like anthropology. Or sociology. Or something that belonged on the Discovery Channel.

Dinner alone is one of life’s pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.

It turns out that where food was concerned, I had a seemingly endless capacity for repetition.

I wasn’t sad, I was alone, and when I’m alone it’s impossible for me to have any standards about eating.

I believe that food can be a profound means of communication, allowing me to express myself in a way that seems at times much deeper and more sincere than words.

Do I not believe that I am entitled to the same level of tenderness that I extend to others? Or is it, in fact, a greater level of self-love to not put myself through the hassle of making dinner?

I think it is quite possible to be a very good cook while caring next to nothing about food.

Eating as a simple means of ending hunger is one of the great liberties of being alone, like going to the movies by yourself in the afternoon or, back in those golden days of youth, having a cigarette in the bathtub.

Eating, after all, is a matter of taste, and taste cannot always be good taste. The very thought of maintaining high standards meal after meal is exhausting.

Even now it is a picture of heaven to me, an evening spent alone and well fed in the tradition of my own low standards, pure heaven.