The Spinster Cookbook is not so much a guide to dishes to cook – the first recipe appears on page 77 and it is basically toast – as an exhortation to live the good life in a kitchen of one’s own. If toast is what you fancy after downing a few vodkas, then toast can be dinner. This is a book at war with the traditional female role in the kitchen. It is premised on the notion that food and cooking are ‘intensely fraught subjects for women’, never free from gendered expectations. Eli Davies emerged in her late thirties from a ten-year relationship to discover the financial disadvantages of being single in a world set up for couples. She was poor and living in short-term rentals. She liked to cook and eat. She had failed, when coupled, to notice how ‘the word “we” crops up everywhere in relation to food and drink’, and had been happy to cook for her man and guests who came in couples. Post-break-up, she cooked for herself, embracing the identity of the spinster whose freedoms include love and connection along with solo living.

Those who live by themselves can attend to their own moods and appetites. Solo living offers release from the family dinner table, scene of so much oppression and not surprisingly the setting for dramatic outbursts in novels and plays. Why have a table? Why cook at all? The spinster can