The Pleasures of Cooking for One

The Pleasures of Cooking for One

by Judith Jones
Knopf, 273 pp., $27.95

Legendary editor Judith Jones, in addition to editing a host of culinary superstars including Julia Child, Edna Lewis, and James Beard, also writes books of her own. In her wildly successful memoir, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, Jones wrote about cooking for oneself, warning that a subtle conspiracy among the food industry, anti-feminist sources, and a pleasure-hating diet industry had convinced women living alone that "it wasn't worth it" to cook for themselves.

In The Pleasures of Cooking for One, Jones takes on this cultural message and refutes it utterly. She enthusiastically illustrates exactly how to cook delicious, nourishing, and soul-satisfying meals for oneself, for a mere fraction of the money one would spend dining out.

She begins with the sorts of pots and pans that are most useful for one person and proceeds to what ingredients are good to have on hand in the pantry, freezer, and refrigerator. Then she illustrates how to use up every bit of food you buy, with recipes to transform a single chicken, steak, or other major ingredient into three or more entirely different meals. For instance, lamb chops can be grilled one day and the leftover chops made into lamb and lentils the next and finished as a lamb curry. She has worked out ingenious systems to keep time, effort, and cost truly minimal while turning out the most rewarding meals possible. The book also includes recipes for soups, egg dishes, vegetables, and desserts that are appropriate for the single cook.

Best of all, The Pleasures of Cooking for One is suitable for any single person of any gender, whether heading to college at 18 or widowed at 83.