We live in the age of the extrovert, so it’s not surprising that we have come to think of cooking primarily as a social event. I mean, I get it: I am, emphatically, a feeder and few things make me happier than having family and friends around my table. But perhaps I’m getting selfish in my old age, because I’m beginning to feel that one of the things that actually does trump the pleasure of communal dining is cooking for myself.
I sometimes feel that cooking loses its innocence when corrupted by the need to please others. This isn’t because pleasing others is undesirable, but because the anxiety can be crippling. And, even if this is a brutal way of putting it, it makes it about you and your need for validation, for applause even, and not about the food or, really, those for whom you’re cooking. It’s also one of the fastest routes to resentment and burnout.
And while these are also my own failings — insecurity being part of the human condition, after all — no truly happy life in the kitchen is possible under such constraints. When you cook just for yourself alone you remove pressure, you remove performance anxiety and you can concentrate unselfconsciously on the process itself. As a lazy person, I do understand what people mean when they say “I can’t be bothered to cook for myself”; as a greedy person, I find it baffling. Besides, how can it make sense when the percentage of single-occupancy households in the UK is pretty well 30 per cent now? Some of the hesitancy may well be that many of those who live alone do so because they’ve been widowed, divorced or left home for the first time. In times of cataclysmic change, nothing can feel right, and yet feeding yourself is a beginning, a way to shore yourself up.