Solo Food: 72 recipes for you alone. Janneke Vreugdenhil

water and bring it to the boil. Place the bowl over the pan. I start to whisk and then very gradually add the clarified butter in a thin stream. My finger glides through the custardy sauce and moves towards my mouth. Mmmm. A squeeze of lemon, a sprinkle of salt, then some chervil and a little more tarragon. Take the lid off the potatoes, turn up the heat. Sputtering oil, sizzling chips. Coarse salt on the steak. Griddle pan on the hob. When the air above the pan begins to quiver, I place the meat on the steel ridges. One minute only – I like it bloody – then the other side. Beautiful black stripes burned into the dark red meat.

      Man, do I love Coltrane. While the meat is resting, I hum as I look for my favourite plate, a flea-market find made of white porcelain and decorated with delicate blue blossom sprigs, a dragonfly, a butterfly and birds. I get a napkin from the cabinet, grab some cutlery from the drawer and lay the table. Even though it’s not dark yet, I light a candle. What do I care? This is my party. Dinner for one.

      The low point

      There I was, in the doorway of my new place, eating cold soup from a plastic container. I’d oiled the wooden floor that day and didn’t have any furniture yet. Well, nothing except the landlord’s brutally ugly leather sofa, to which for reasons that were beyond me he’d grown attached and would come to pick up in a week’s time. Because of the floor, I’d dragged the sofa out on to the roof garden. It was August, and the weather had been sunny for days on end. Carrot soup with ginger, from the refrigerator section of the nearby upmarket foodie supermarket. I was just about to empty the container into a pan to heat it up when I realised that my cooker wasn’t yet connected. Damn. I thought about pouring the soup into a glass, but why? Does it feel less pathetic to drink cold soup from a glass than from a plastic container? If so, would that glass be able to save me from the ominous sensation that my life was a complete failure? ‘Are you taking care of yourself?’ people close to me had asked over these past few months. I was gradually getting scarily thin. How can you eat when you’ve got a knot the size of a beach ball in your stomach? Since my marriage had fallen apart I’d been living on smoothies, bananas and soup. Anything I didn’t have to chew. As long as I didn’t have to cook. I only did the latter on the days I spent with my sons – a sad, monotonous succession of pasta with gloop and rice with gloop. I found it hard to force down even a mouthful.

      The soup tasted fine, even cold. Not that this improved my mood, but at least my taste buds noticed. And my mind noticed that my taste buds noticed. I observed that something inside of me was still capable of making observations. And as I sat there in the doorway eating my soup, running circles inside my head, the sky suddenly turned black. Really black. As if Judgement Day were upon us.

      A storm of apocalyptic proportions came rolling in over the rooftops of the neighbours at the back, and within a minute it was blowing and raining harder than I’d ever seen it blow and rain during a Dutch summer. Damn – the sofa. I ran out with some plastic sheeting. Pelting rain. Galeforce 3 million. Plastic sheeting fighting back. A four-storey roof garden with no railing. It flashed through my mind that if I fell off now, I would be rid of it all. In the meantime, my body was, luckily, doing its utmost to save both my landlord’s sofa and my own skin.

      I sat inside, on the freshly oiled floor. I cried. Pretty hard. With mucus and sobs, the whole works. I didn’t think I would ever stop, but then all of a sudden I did. I stopped crying and started to laugh. Sounds pretty hysterical, I know, but that’s how it was. Then I thought: I’m still alive. Yes, it all sucks big time, and, yes, everything’s down to me from here on out, but I’m still alive.

      As I drank down the last drops of the cold carrot soup, I resolved that, first thing the next day, I would go out and buy a hose so I could hook up the cooker. And soup bowls. And a few pans. A cutting board. A knife. If I was going to be on my own, I was at least going to take good care of myself. After all, no one else was going to do it for me.

      What I’ve learnt along the way

      For more than a year and a half now, I’ve been on my own part time – my sons live with me half of the week, so that bit doesn’t count as alone. The other days I live solo. I put out my own rubbish, replace lightbulbs, top up the boiler, do laundry. And I cook. Do I wish there was someone who would do one of these jobs for me, even if only now and then? Well, sure, sometimes I do.

      But more and more often I don’t. It took a while, but I’ve discovered I can live on my own just fine. I have to admit, though, that cooking was the hardest thing of all. For the first nine months my evening meals consisted of supermarket soup, bags of crisps, toasties, fried eggs, mayonnaise, avocado and anchovy sandwiches (which are delicious, by the way!), Indonesian takeaway from the shop around the corner and sometimes just a bowl of oatmeal. Thank god, friends would invite me over from time to time and lovingly feed me healthy home-cooked meals. Then, slowly but surely, as the rawest of my grief over my broken marriage began to recede, my interest in food returned, and with it my enjoyment of cooking. I no longer bought ready-made soups but made them myself. I cooked rice and stir-fried vegetables that I flavoured with ginger, chilli and soy sauce. I sautéed a piece of salmon or fried a steak and ate this with a salad. I cooked spaghetti and made a sport out of getting the sauce ready in exactly the same amount of time as it took to boil the pasta. I ate fewer meals in bed, staring at my laptop, or sprawled on the sofa in front of the television, and more of them sitting at a proper table. I started to stock my new kitchen with a decent supply of basic ingredients so that on busy days, when I came home late, I could still throw together a quick meal. And I started to have fun with it. ‘Check me out!’ I would say to myself as I sat there all on my lonesome, digging into a delicious plate of risotto. Candles, music, glass of wine. There in the kitchen, during the second half of those first eighteen months following my divorce, I learnt to take care of myself again. I was used to cooking for other people – for my husband, my children, my relatives and my friends – crikey, sometimes I even cooked for the entire street. Cooking was my way of giving pleasure to others, and now I was learning that I deserved that kind of pleasure too. Now I know that cooking for yourself is nothing less than an exercise in loving yourself.

      Solo is the new togetherness

      More and more people are living solo. Young people, old people, people of all ages. Like me, some of them are divorced; others are widows or widowers, or simply haven’t yet found the love of their life. Whatever the reason, more and more people are consciously choosing to live on their own. According to Statistics Netherlands, there are currently more than 3.3 million one-person households. This number is only expected to increase in the decades to come. So, singles are on the rise, and not just in the Netherlands. In Britain the number of people living alone doubled in a generation. More than half of all North Americans are single – that’s nearly two and a half times more than in the 1950s. This kind of demographic shift will inevitably have far-reaching economic, political, sociological and cultural consequences.

      Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with the statistics, what I’m concerned with here are the culinary consequences; all those singles who – maybe not every night, but very often – are tucking into their grub on their own. So what does this look like? There’s a persistent, clichéd image out there of the single man or woman sitting slouched in front of the television and shovelling down microwave meals night after night. Or worse yet, eating leftover baked beans straight from the tin by the cold light of the fridge. When I asked around among my single friends, I was relieved to find that things weren’t quite so bad. People in single households actually do cook, but almost everyone also admitted that they found it hard to keep their solo meals somewhat interesting, healthy and varied.

      Although my little survey may have been totally random and unscientific, the findings are consistent with bona-fide research. On the whole, the meals of people who eat alone are less nutritious than those eaten by people who share their table with others. Singles generally have a more limited diet and eat less fruit, vegetables and fish. These facts are quite disheartening.