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I put together a wish list of food and fiction writers and invited them to participate in the project. I asked them: Do you have a secret meal you make (or used to make) for yourself? Do you have a set of rituals for dining alone (at home or in a restaurant), or rules?

To my surprise, they responded, often enthusiastically. Some seemed as if they'd been waiting a long time to be asked.

Rosa Jurjevics, daughter of the late Laurie Colwin, responded to my invitation almost immediately, writing, in part:

I'm not much of a cook, I'm afraid to say, but I have a few funny meals that I do like to cobble together. They are mostly comprised of comfort food from my childhood growing up with my mother, strange foods we both loved due to our collective salt tooth.

All autumn essays floated into my computer's inbox. How good it was to know that Ann Patchett used to eat oatmeal in Provincetown, like a plow horse, like generations of Patchetts before her; that Beverly Lowry and Marcella Hazan eat anchovies; that Ben Karlin makes a sauce that changed the very course of his life! Some contributors react to their parents—Dan Chaon prepares a spicier, wilder chili than his mother used to cook; Anneli Rufus, free from her mother's rules against carbohydrates, revels in making plain, starchy meals (and, like Amanda Hesser's friend, she wants them white). There are fantasies: Phoebe Nobles transforms for a season into the Asparagus Superhero; Jeremy Jackson sings the song of the black bean; Holly Hughes, the mother of three young children, imagines what she would cook if she could cook only for herself. Colin Harrison, drawing on decades of solitary lunches, searches for his next regular restaurant. Laura Dave's tale of cooking not only ends in but directly causes romantic love. On the flip side, Jonathan Ames poisons himself with expired eggs, then basks in the comfort provided by the kind and bosomy waitress at his local diner. Erin Ergenbright writes from the perspective of a waitress serving a finicky solo diner and provides a recipe from the restaurant. Courtney Eldridge, not yet willing to produce the dishes her ex-husband, a chef, taught her to make, offers her mother's salsa recipe. Jami Attenberg braves a hotel buffet at a resort before retreating to the safety of room service.

With repeated readings I was able to inhabit each essay. I walked to Ann Arbor's Kerrytown Market to buy the ingredients for Steve Almond's quesaritos. At Steve's suggestion, I asked the fishmonger for tiger-tail shrimp to make myself seem cool. I made Jeremy Jackson's black beans and rice and thought of Jeremy up to his arms in dried beans. I wrapped myself up in a kimono and ate Nora Ephron's mashed potatoes, a perfect predecessor to Laura Calder's Kippers Mash, comfort food for a queen. It's almost impossible to make Marcella Hazan's tost without thinking of how her husband calls her mangia panini (sandwich eater), or Paula Wolfert's pa amb tomàquet without conjuring up her day of pure Mediterranean bliss, or Ben Karlin's salsa rosa without thinking about hash and Italy. If you do as Laura Dave instructs and listen to "Atlantic City" and drink two glasses of wine while you make beef stroganoff, it will be hard not to be swept into Laura's Manhattan, in which all things lonely and difficult become romantic, glazed with youth and hope. This book abounds with recipes, tips, idiosyncratic truths passed kitchen to kitchen, mouth to mouth.

My friend Rachel—she of the cafeteria fear—works for a nonprofit that advocates for independent farms. She feels weird mentioning my book to her colleagues, since their organization believes in community dining. I think this concern is intriguing but ultimately beside the point. My book is by no means a suggestion to eat alone; even the most community minded among us must occasionally find ourselves hungry and alone in the house. There are various reasons for solitary dining, only some of them a result of loss in its numerous forms. We adjust to solitude and an increased responsibility for caring for ourselves as we grow older, as we leave home for the first time, as we move, as our circumstances change. We dine alone once or for a brief time or for a long time.