The divorcé diet: a newly single man learns to cook (again)

One of the commonest clichés of divorce is that the man, cast adrift from the family home and the wife’s cooking, reverts to a diet of beans on toast, Pot Noodles and ready meals. This would be insulting if it didn’t contain a grain of truth. As it happens, I am a terrific cook. I once was so hungover that I cooked a chilli con carne without remembering to put any onions in it, which is a bit like writing an article without remembering to put in any prepositions, and even then people said it tasted delicious.

The funny thing is that once you find yourself living in Bachelor Heights, or the equivalent thereof, you revert to the prehistoric stage of masculine development. Without anyone else to cook or shop for, and little inclination to do it for yourself, you lose all faith in your ability to rustle up a roast duck with star anise, and, moreover, you lose your appetite for the meal itself. Married men reading this: between one in three and one in two of you are going to go through this, and it’s not going to be a walk in the park, but trust me, things get better. Not overnight, not by any means, but they do, honest.

In the old days, I fancied myself quite the cook. Signature dishes: braised beef with dried orange peel and sage; chicken with mustard; sticky rice; stir-fried vegetables with oyster sauce; the full Sunday roast with all the trimmings. People would come from far and wide to praise my cooking.

Not now. For a start, the people who visit no longer expect all the stuff that comes as a by-product of running a family home, such as foresight, the ability to do a Big Shop in a car, and the inclination to go to those efforts in the first place. Visitors now know that they will get all the wine they need, and a shared bag of Kettle Chips, if I remember.

One of the things that they don’t tell you when you get divorced or you separate is that, what with various new overheads and child maintenance and the whole loss of the economy of scale, you’re looking at what is in effect a £10,000 a year pay cut — at the very least. You are going to have to get used to the idea that this really is the end of one line and the beginning of a new one, and you’re going to need to save every penny you have.

This might not be as easy as you think, or hope. By geographical accident, the nearest supermarket to the Hovel (my bachelor flat in an 1850s house on Baker Street) is a Waitrose. It does its best to keep the riff-raff from its doors with a certain creativeness to its pricing policy. Another gimmick, which drives me slightly crazy, is the way it puts inspirational adjectives and/or rubrics on its packets of herbs. ‘Romantic rosemary’ or, in the case of the packets of parsley, ‘The chef’s choice’. The what’s what? Chefs choose all sorts of ingredients, and will even choose sputum if they see a particularly ill-favoured celebrity sitting down to dine in their restaurant.

All this gloom does much to depress the appetite. The ingredient that really matters in home cooking is love, and if you don’t have that, then you wonder what the point is. It is no accident that the only item that survived from that rather boastful menu of mine was the Sunday roast, which I would cook when the children came to visit. Also, I now have an electric hob, and you can’t cook proper rice or most Chinese dishes without gas. It is most tiresome. And, crucially, you’re not cooking for a family or guests any more: you’re cooking for one, two max. Meals become strictly utilitarian affairs, or reversions to the comfort foods of childhood. I consumed an awful lot of poached eggs on toast. Or cheese on toast. Or baked beans on toast. As you can see, there is a theme developing here, and it is toast-based. After one particularly toast-filled week, the toaster expired and it was months before I could summon up the inner strength to go to John Lewis to get another one. I nearly died of starvation. Here is one thing that can be said for separation: it’s the best slimming aid ever invented.

But gradually, the appetite returns. You start remembering how to cook, and you meet someone you want to cook for. That is when you can go to town, and shop at the deli where tomatoes are so expensive that it makes you gape stupidly. But until that time comes you have to learn how to make the best possible use of leftovers. My hot tip is to make rillettes from a leftover roast. This delicious stuff costs as much per ounce as gold in some delis but you can make it for free. Look up a recipe online, and prepare to spend most of your

Sunday evening pulling bits of meat off the bones. As for the rest of the cooking, that’s up to you. The important thing is that you have enough money for your nightly bottle of wine. You’re going to need that.

Nicholas Lezard’s Bitter Experience Has Taught Me is published by Faber and Faber, £9.99 and will be out on July 4th