'Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone'

Nora Ephron scarfs down buttery mashed potatoes in bed. Ann Patchett tops saltines with white cheese and salsa, then spreads butter and jam on more saltines for dessert. For Beverly Lowry, it's salad, which she eats with her hands.

In the delightful essays-plus-recipes collection "Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone" (Riverhead Books, 2007, $22.95), 26 writers expound on the unique challenges and freedoms that come when a meal's cook and its sole intended recipient are one and the same. In the introduction, editor Jenni Ferrari-Adler writes that she came up with the idea for the book for one simple reason: She wanted a copy for herself. As a graduate student in Ann Arbor, Mich., living alone for the first time in her life, she struggled to adapt to culinary solitude.

She found solace in works by Amanda Hesser ("Single Cuisine"), Laurie Colwin ("Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant"), and M.F.K. Fisher ("A Is for Dining Alone"). Then she unearthed some others, and then she sought original contributions. Among the rewards: cookbook author Paula Wolfert's meditation on the Catalan specialty Pa amb Tomaquet (bread with tomato), Marcella Hazan's recipe for Il Tost (Italian-style grilled cheese and ham sandwich) and novelist Haruki Murakami's durum-filled remembrance of "The Year of Spaghetti."

For anyone who lives and cooks alone, or remembers such days vividly, there's plenty here to savor, with or without a bowl of mashed potatoes in your lap.

-- Joe Yonan