"I'd only be cooking for one"

If you live alone, this belief has weight. Cooking is for people, the picture goes, a table and a conversation, and there's something a bit sad about standing at a hob for fifteen minutes to make something nobody will see. The order, by contrast, is what people who live alone do, so it feels like the normal thing.

Susanna Mills and colleagues, in a systematic review of thirty-eight observational studies on home cooking, found that close personal relationships were among the things that went with cooking more, alongside being female, having more time and being in work. So the belief isn't imaginary. People do cook more when there's someone to cook for. But look at what that finding says. It says a partner or a family is one reason people cook. It doesn't say the cooking is for them. And the thing the review was clearest about is that what makes people cook is more complicated than whether they've got the skills, which means it's also more complicated than whether they've got an audience.

Turn it round. The plain plate is the natural size for one. A pan of pasta for one is the easiest meal in the book. Cooking for a family is where the event lives, the picky child and the timing and the different plates. Cooking for yourself is a bowl and a fork and no one to please. What you make is what you feel like, and nobody's checking.

And the sadness, if I can say so, is in the picture and not in the kitchen. Fifteen minutes at a hob with the radio on, making a thing you'll like, is one of the better parts of an evening alone. Eating something out of a box on the sofa is one of the emptier ones. The order looks like company because it comes to the door and somebody made it, but you eat it just as alone as you'd eat the plain plate, and with less to show for it. If there's anyone who deserves fifteen minutes of your cooking, it's the one person who'll definitely be eating it.