"solo dining" news and stories

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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.