‘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. After a seismic break-up in 2017, the author found herself living alone on the north coast of Ireland, writing a PhD thesis. But ‘this book’, Davies tells us up front, ‘isn’t really about how cooking saved me’. Instead, it is an unflinching reckoning with ‘the burden of having to feed myself in this period, to make a decision every single day’. It grapples with a push-pull longing for, and rejection of, conventional homemaking. It is more about behaviour and domestic identity than anything else. Often it is about the act of not cooking.
