UK and Irish reviews

'French Cooking for One by Michèle Roberts (published by Les Fugitives) provides a very different sort of pleasure: it’s an enduring delight for readers and cooks alike. And its old-school approach has nothing of the retro campness — enjoy it though I do — of Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake. Roberts (author of, inter alia, Daughters of the House; Food, Sex & God; and, more recently, Colette, My Literary Mother) is a beautiful memoirist, reflective essayist, and novelist of the first degree. I actually first came across her writing in the early 80s, with the publication of her second novel, The Visitation, and [I] have never understood why she hasn’t been more fêted. Half-French, half-English, and with an acutely tuned sensibility quite her own, this is her first actual cookbook. By “old-school approach”, I don’t mean that it is a curio or museum piece, but simply that she writes with the assumption that her readers can cook and want brisk but intelligent company in the kitchen (though I must assure you that her uncluttered recipes have just the rigour that’s needed for them to be followed comfortably) and that this notebook-sized collection, while it conveys a huge number of said recipes and much delicious information, contains not a single photograph.' - Nigella Lawson, Stocking Fillers 2024, nigella.com

‘This slender volume insists that food for one should be simple yet delicious. Drawing on memories of her French grandmother’s cookery, Roberts’ recipes are elegant and – mostly – quick to prepare: celeriac croquettes, trout with almonds, or sausages with apples and cider. A delightful little book.’ — Constance Craig Smith, Daily Mail Best Cookery Books for Christmas

‘To make a proper supper for yourself is, after all, a kind and tender thing to do if you’re under pressure – and [Roberts’] book contains only recipes for one person. For the absence of doubt, however, I must stress it isn’t the kind of manual that has you making lasagne, to be frozen in individual portions. The dishes included are at once more simple and more luxurious than that. Mussel salad with ravigote sauce. Rabbit with mustard. Steak with bordelaise sauce. So many micro feasts, and every one of them nourishment for body and soul. (…) [Roberts’ book is] edged like an old tablecloth with the spirit of her maternal grandparents’ kitchen as well as her own domestic expertise. Most of the recipes, short and uncomplicated, aim to deliver the perfect effort-to-taste ratio; if she has an Elizabeth David-like briskness on the page, she’s also a sensualist, a part-time sybarite. But even if you’re not in the mood for cooking, simply to read them is to encourage rumination. She is such a noticing writer, and in her hands you find yourself doing the same, a dowdy cauliflower suddenly beautiful, a slab of marbled meat a world unto itself.’
— Rachel Cooke, Observer Food Monthly