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A review by hcq
Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant : Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone by Jenni Ferrari-Adler
3.0
This summer a dear lady I’ve known my whole life died, the mother of my best friend. Not long after her memorial service I was talking to said friend, checking in and asking how her dad was doing. He was okay, she said, but she and her sisters were a bit concerned about how he was eating—or not. He claimed that they didn’t need to worry, because after all he had cooking experience from his single days, but that was 63 years ago!
My first thought was of this book. I thought it might be useful, or at least interesting, to him, but of course I had to read it first to be sure. (My husband also not-so-helpfully pointed out that today, with the evolution of the eggplant emoji, the title can now be read as much, much ruder than it was at publication.)
As I expected, the essays in it varied—how could they not? There’s a definite New York bias to them, which I hadn’t expected but which was fine for my purposes, because my friend lives in the suburbs and has worked in the city for decades.
There were the usual NYC “my first kitchen was so small” stories, as well as the “I used to eat in this wonderful tiny neighborhood restaurant that of course has now vanished into mist” ones, both of which I grew up on. There were pieces about particular dishes people had encountered, particular meals, particular dining customers (the story about an exacting woman who became a regular at a restaurant on the West Coast was memorable). Some were funny, some were poignant, some were more interesting than others.
Overall, I was really enjoying it, and thinking, “yes, yes, this will be great, he’ll find stories of people in the same boat but doing well with it,” when sadly, someone struck exactly the wrong note I had feared. In one terrible, throwaway line, which I’ll paraphrase because I was too horrified to write it down, one author said that eating alone was fine, unless one was doing it “because one’s old and bereft, which is of course horrible”—and there went that idea, because that is precisely his situation.
Rats.
My first thought was of this book. I thought it might be useful, or at least interesting, to him, but of course I had to read it first to be sure. (My husband also not-so-helpfully pointed out that today, with the evolution of the eggplant emoji, the title can now be read as much, much ruder than it was at publication.)
As I expected, the essays in it varied—how could they not? There’s a definite New York bias to them, which I hadn’t expected but which was fine for my purposes, because my friend lives in the suburbs and has worked in the city for decades.
There were the usual NYC “my first kitchen was so small” stories, as well as the “I used to eat in this wonderful tiny neighborhood restaurant that of course has now vanished into mist” ones, both of which I grew up on. There were pieces about particular dishes people had encountered, particular meals, particular dining customers (the story about an exacting woman who became a regular at a restaurant on the West Coast was memorable). Some were funny, some were poignant, some were more interesting than others.
Overall, I was really enjoying it, and thinking, “yes, yes, this will be great, he’ll find stories of people in the same boat but doing well with it,” when sadly, someone struck exactly the wrong note I had feared. In one terrible, throwaway line, which I’ll paraphrase because I was too horrified to write it down, one author said that eating alone was fine, unless one was doing it “because one’s old and bereft, which is of course horrible”—and there went that idea, because that is precisely his situation.
Rats.