In June 2020, right in the middle of the COVID pandemic, British food writer Bee Wilson’s husband of 23 years left her.
At the time, Wilson was writing a cookbook and had spent hours musing on the role of cooking in modern life.
“I already had the thought that … cooking can sometimes be a salvation and help us at difficult times,” Wilson, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal and the author of several books exploring the world of food, including First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (2016), tells ABC RN’s Blueprint for Living.
While Wilson was understandably devastated at the end of her marriage, she also saw that it presented her with the opportunity to test her hypothesis that cooking could provide solace in times of sadness.
“The strange thing was that it did,” she says.
The act of cooking for herself and her children gave her days a sense of purpose, however modest.
“I had to get up … and make breakfast for my youngest son, who wakes up like clockwork every morning at six thirty … and somehow it helped — just the act of cracking eggs into a bowl and adding the flour and the milk and making pancakes ,” she says.
As she worked through her grief, she learned firsthand that far from a laborious domestic chore, cooking — even if just for one — can be an underrated act of self-care.
This insight helped shape her latest cookbook, The Secret of Cooking: Recipes for an Easier Life in the Kitchen.
The reasons we cook
Wilson believes cooking simple recipes from scratch offers a way to rekindle our relationship with food and with ourselves.
“The more you can get off the treadmill of ultra-processed food and just make something for yourself, as simple as it might be — start with an omelette, start with a salad, start with a bowl of soup — suddenly a lot of that noise and chatter around food melts away.”
Wilson — who shares a recipe in her book for chana masala that only takes seven-and-a-half minutes “if you’re really speedy” — acknowledges convenience has a place in cooking.
“Sometimes, yes, of course, you want … a 10-minute recipe, something with as few ingredients as possible,” she says.
But not every recipe has to be designed for speed and convenience.
We cook for other reasons, too.
“To take us out of ourselves, to take our minds off things and also to have that satisfaction of making something with care and craft,” Wilson says.
She believes we should treat time as its own ingredient.
“Sometimes, you want to be in the kitchen for an hour or two hours, chopping things, listening to podcasts … [or] music because it’s going to make you feel great, just as going for a run might make you feel great,” she says.
She believes cooking tethers us to the present, connecting us to the material world and calling upon all five senses.
“It’s the most grounding, practical thing you can do in life when most of us are stuck on screens for far too much of the time,” she says.
Expressing love through food
When Charlotte Ree’s marriage ended in 2020, she also turned to cooking to assuage her grief — an experience she recounts in her book, Heartbake: A Bittersweet Memoir (which recalls Nora Ephron’s 1983 novel Heartburn, about a food writer also dealing with a marriage break -up).
Ree, who worked in publishing, was 29 when she left her husband.
“I looked at myself in the mirror one day, and I didn’t know who I was, what I wanted or what I liked,” she recalls.
“I was defined so much by my relationship and my career, and I had to figure out who that person was and began to love myself.”
Ree, who grew up in country NSW, had learned to cook from her husband, who came from a family of Latino restaurateurs.
She became a passionate baker and loved to make desserts for her friends and family.
Food was her “love language”, she says.
“I got so much out of the meditative process of cooking but also the joy in gifting food to someone else.”
The day after she left her husband, the city of Sydney went into lockdown, and Ree unexpectedly found herself living alone for the first time.
She prepared lasagnas from scratch for her new neighbors and created elaborate feasts for the dates she matched with on Bumble.
“I would cook these strangers three-course meals thinking that if they loved my food, they would love me,” she says.
Ree loved to cook for others, but as she slid further into despair following the breakdown of her marriage, she rarely ate the food she prepared.
“Food became something that was totally grotesque in a lot of ways, and I stopped eating,” she says.
‘A healing experience’
Eventually, Ree re-established her relationship with food, taking her mother’s advice to approach the problem by taking “small bites”, starting with hard-boiled eggs.
“I started to slowly realize that I could love myself … by cooking myself beautiful meals,” she says.
For Ree, making herself ravioli filled with pesto and ricotta by hand or grilling a lone prime cut of steak for dinner are expressions of self-love.
“No-one else is going to see it, no-one else is going to taste it, it’s just for you,” she reflects.
“[Realising] that was a real breakthrough for me and a healing experience.”
In an era when single-person households are on the rise, many of us are cooking for one.
It’s something Wilson wishes the prevailing food culture was better acknowledged. Most recipes are labeled as ‘serves four’, which she describes as “tactless”.
“If you’re a single person reading that over and over again, it’s saying, ‘you don’t matter’,” Wilson says.
“Cooking for other people is one of the most immediate ways you can either express love or make other people happy.
“But I also think this applies to your relationship with yourself.”
RN in your inbox
Get more stories that go beyond the news cycle with our weekly newsletter.