'What We Eat When We Eat Alone' - Q&A with Deborah Madison

Photo: Amazon

For me, it's cured fish or perhaps cold, leftover dark-meat chicken, gnawed bare-handed and shared with my minimally patient dogs.

For my husband -- who can't tolerate the smell of the pickled herring I down like a rabid porpoise -- it's almost inevitably the nearest Chinese joint's chicken and mixed vegetables sauteed in brown sauce, chased by a bourbon Old Fashioned, muddled from the unpretty orange that tags along in the delivery bag. The cocktail, I can fully support. The gloppily sauced crinkle-cut carrots have featured prominently in several of my nightmares.

These are rituals of a chosen solo cuisine, and Deborah Madison, author of "What We Eat When We Eat Alone", says it's not at all unusual that we're so diametrically opposed.

Deborah Madison: People eat what their spouses don't like a lot of the time. A number of men said of blood sausages, 'My wife doesn't like blood sausage, so when she's gone that's what I cook.'

Slashfood: How did you get started on this topic?

DM: Many years ago, I was invited to go with Oldways Preservation and Trust -- which is a food think tank out of Boston -- to a lot of Mediterranean countries. I got to bring my husband, who's an artist, and he was just a little awkward, I think. He didn't really know people but knew of them so he started asking this question kind of as a way of breaking the ice. He kept a little notebook and I never knew about this until I found it when we were moving a few years later.

SF: So many of the people you interviewed have common experiences -- they'll make a big steak or have herring. And then there were some that didn't fit the mold. What was the strangest thing you heard?

Read more about solo toast, herring and margarita mix after the jump.

DM: The strangest thing was the margarita mix poured over bread -- not only strange but also fairly revolting, and every time I've mentioned it, people have the same kind of clenching, kind of 'ew' response to it.

Other things that I thought were strange at the time turned out to be rather shared. For example, there was lots of crumbling things into liquids like matzoh or oyster crackers and saltines into milk. I found out later because so many people mentioned it: 'Oh we used to do that when we didn't have that much money,' or 'My father still does that, he remembers it from the Depression. It was a way of feeling full or having dessert, you put a little sugar in your milk or some butter or a bunch of crackers.'

SF: Cornbread with buttermilk seems to a huge thing with older Southerners I've met.

DM: You do find that there are these regional variations on things. What people like sometimes comes out of their background which comes out of an ethnic background, from a period like the Depression or from a place where they lived.

SF: And what did you find about people's postures while they ate?

DM: Well there is the slumping posture, curled up over the sink, tearing chicken.

SF: Do most people set a table?

DM: A lot of people expect to see gross, weird combinations and the eating over the sink kind of posture. But, in fact, a lot of people do talk about eating alone with a measure of self-respect. They set a table, and they actually sit at the table, pour themselves a glass of wine. They treat themselves as nicely as they might treat somebody else -- which is actually a little bit rare and it was very moving to me to discover how rare it is, in fact, that we seem to be able to enjoy our own company as much as we would enjoy that of another person.

SF: I guess we finally get the chance to ritualize it.

DM: For a lot of people, eating alone is a little bit of a task. It's something you get through -- you don't really enjoy it, or you curl up on the couch, you watch television -- there's kind of an element of distraction. I think eating alone is really kind of an art to do well. It's about respecting and loving yourself, enjoying your own company.

SF: Did you find people who, say, lived alone and always ate alone, people who were used to eating with somebody else and they sort of used it as an escape? Was there a mixture of that?

DM: Yes, definitely. People who find themselves alone rarely see it as a kind of holiday -- often those are people with children. You can be a man or a woman but it's often women with families who suddenly don't have to cook and don't have do deal with 'Oh, well you don't like that? I'll make you this.'

The quote I loved from this one woman was, 'Basically when I'm alone, it's about good carbs and salt.' It might be steel-cut oatmeal and some salt eaten at 11 o'clock at night. Obviously that's a time when most people who are cooking for others take a little break. But, people who cook for themselves all the time -- because they're widowed, they're really alone, they don't have partners in their lives or they're older, whatever the circumstances -- they tend more to figure out how to really cook for themselves and feed themselves decently well.

SF: Who do you find is more likely to undertake cooking a big dinner: men or women?

DM: You know, I can't say one or the other. A lot of the men we spoke to actually were surprisingly interested in cooking and they really did make things for themselves that seemed kind of elaborate and extra complete. They thought maybe in terms of 'I'll have this, and then I'll have that.' So the men held up their end of decency extremely well in the kitchen. I was surprised by that. They also sometimes said the most gross things.

SF: I really enjoyed the story about the woman who would share shrimp with her cat.

DM: 'A shrimp for me, a shrimp for Tiny.' That was a cute story, but it's funny because people didn't bring up their pets so much. I would imagine that they are a big part of our life whether it's your dog staring at you or waiting for a bite, or a cat snuggling up to you. But it didn't really come up except for that one story.

SF: So what do you eat when you eat alone? I'm sure you've been asked that a million times.

DM: I have, but it has actually changed for me since this whole book. I think in the book I actually said I don't like to eat alone, but I don't mind eating in a restaurant alone. I actually rather enjoy that -- which is something that a lot of people are really mortally terrified of doing.

I'll tell you what I eat when I eat alone. I often cook vegetables. I make some sort of a braise, especially this winter. I'll make a braise that you know cooks gently for maybe 20-25 minutes or so and yields a sauce. In the summer, it might just be some tomatoes dropped in a skillet for a minute with some fresh herbs and garlic. Whatever it is, I eat it over toast.

SF: It seemed like people really had a toast fixation throughout the book.

DM: I called it, in a book I wrote, 'Summer Sandwiches.' You want the bulk and texture, which the toast provides. It also sort of drinks up the sauces that are in the pan and it becomes a knife-and-fork food, as opposed to something you are just going to stand around and pick up. It's simple, and yet it's not just one thing -- it's not just a sandwich or a vegetable. It has a little bit of complexity but it's easy to make, you sit down, and it's definitely a knife-and-fork food.

SF: It feels a little more momentous that way.

DM: Again, it's a little bit more self-respectful, I think, because you have to sit down at the table. I don't eat in fast food places but we just took a trip and went to a Dairy Queen. What I find so appalling is there is no such thing as silverware. Everything is with your hands. You just pick it up and hold everything. There's always a time and place for that, but I think for a lot of people that's often how they eat. There isn't a knife and fork, there's not a plate, it's in a wrapper because they're all over the road. I pick them up on a regular basis.

SF: God forbid you stop driving for a second to actually eat like a human. Do you find that people are dying to talk to you about this topic?

Deborah Madison: Oh, they do constantly! For about a year when we'd go to parties and things and people would ask 'So, what are you up to?' We'd say, 'Oh, we're writing this book on what we eat when we eat alone.' 'Oh let me tell you what I do!' And in fact a lot of the blog reviews we've had always end up being about what people eat when they eat alone, not about the book at all but people love to [discuss it] -- it's an interesting subject to them.

Buy What We Eat When We Eat Alone on Amazon.

So, readers, what's your favorite solo food? Share it in the comments below.