THE SINGLES SURVIVAL GUIDE : Home alone in the kitchen: A report on cooking for one--the frustrations, the pleasures, the mess. : Alone in the Kitchen : Strategies for Survival : Men alone: Why they bake brownies, the omelet phase, and a vegetarian solution.

By MICHELLE HUNEVEN

Jan. 10, 1991 12 AM PT

Whenever my mother was gone for the evening and my father was left to his own devices in the kitchen, he’d make creamed hamburger on toast. I never understood it. It didn’t look good, it certainly didn’t taste good, and all that starch and grease wasn’t good for anybody. Nevertheless, he prepared it with authority, ate it with relish and, when I was around, expected me to partake with enthusiasm.

Throughout the years, I have discovered that while not all men share his fondness for “ . . . on a shingle,” many of the men I know, when “batching it,” create food they alone can stomach. Upon occasion (all too often as a matter of fact), one of them will offer to share his favorite dish with me.

One friend, for example, lives on sardine omelets. Another loves to cut up leftover pizza or burritos and scramble them with eggs, thereby creating what is essentially a frittata of leftover fast food. Yet another friend poaches oysters in bottled salad dressing. I have never understood whether these offers are acts of friendship or aggression, fits of generosity or pleas for immediate rescue.

Whatever else it is, bachelor cooking is a curious product of our sexist society in which the kitchen was a woman’s stronghold. Says one 50-year-old divorced man: “Most of us didn’t learn to cook in the kitchen. We learned to cook in the Boy Scouts. Over fire. With tin foil. It was years before I felt comfortable in a kitchen.”

“I grew up with two brothers,” another man says. “We learned how to make brownies. To this day, my mother’s recipe for brownies is the only thing I know how to make.”

When I asked yet another man where he learned how to cook, he said: “I didn’t. The only thing I ever learned how to do was barbecue because my dad did. It’s simple, and you get to make a fire.”

Of course, a man can always learn how to cook, but in some cases, there’s resistance. A magazine editor I know waited until he was married to become a serious, knowledgeable cook. “When I was single, I cooked Uncle Ben’s rice and Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks. I used to see how many nights in a row I could eat them,” he says. “Four nights.

“And then I went through an omelet phase. Omelets served a dual purpose. I liked them, and I wanted to be able to say, ‘You should taste my omelets.’ As a way of, you know, asking someone to spend the night without really asking them.”

Conversely, there are men who become so attached to their own concoctions that they are loath to give them up. A woman I know says: “When my husband was single, he ate the same thing every night: ramen noodles with El Pollo Loco chicken and either frozen peas or beans. He ate it out of the saucepan over newspapers at the coffee table.

“He’s not always comfortable letting me cook for him. Some nights, he says he’s not hungry and that I shouldn’t make anything for him. Later on an El Pollo Loco bag appears, and that saucepan. . . .”

Whether it’s an act of desperation or defiance, many single men who are unschooled in the culinary arts do cook for themselves. As a result, some develop their own unique approaches, approaches that are remarkably untempered by Irma Rombauer, junior high home economics and the legacy of kitchen dos and don’ts traditionally handed down through matriarchal lines. “I essentially regard the kitchen the way I regarded a chemistry set,” says one man. “For a long time, I was a slave to recipes because I was so afraid that what I cooked would turn into a stink bomb. But then I began to experiment.”

One night recently, I decided to see what was cooking on the stoves of all my bachelor friends. I started off by calling my friend Phil, a 56-year-old divorced artist with an herb garden.

“I have a cold,” he said, “so today I put a cup of short-grained brown rice in a pot with three cups of water and boiled it until the water was gone. Then I added a can of chicken stock and some more water and boiled that.

“In a frying pan, in quite a bit of olive oil, I fried up some chopped onion and garlic, fresh rosemary and a big handful of sage until it was all brown. I put that into the rice with one of those tiny, cute cans of tomato sauce. This made a thick soup, which I poured into a bowl. Then, to cool it down, I added a lot of cream.”

I asked Phil where he learned to cook.

“Right here,” he said. “In my kitchen, just by knowing a little bit about chemistry, what happens when you heat stuff up, emulsification, etc. I could probably follow a recipe, but I’d rather wing it on my own.”

After talking to Phil, I called my friend Ed, who’s 35, a confirmed bachelor and a vegetarian with a quasi-macrobiotic bent. That is to say, one afternoon several years ago. Ed attended a seminar given by the two most famous experts on macrobiotics. After several hours of lectures, he realized that “putting all the foods together the way they are supposed to go is like assembling a 91,500-piece jigsaw puzzle.” At the end of the seminar, he approached one of the macrobiotic lecturers.

“Eating macrobiotically sounds like an awful lot of work,” Ed said. “I don’t think I could do it and hold down a full-time job.”

The expert looked at him. “Get married,” he said.

“I knew then,” Ed says, “I’d never be macrobiotic.”

Nevertheless, every night Ed prepares some kind of vegetarian seaweed soup that has some macrobiotic elements. When I called him, he was just finishing up a bowl. “I vary it a lot, depending on how hungry I am and what vegetables appeal to me in the grocery store. Tonight I got some kombu seaweed soaking and then filled my pan with some nice, fresh water. I chopped up two onions and some hard vegetables--carrots, potatoes and some broccoli stems I had and threw them in the water. After they’d cooked, I put in some red chard, the seaweed and some already cooked brown rice. When that was all heated up. I turned off the fire and added some miso. It’s been a nice, light, hot dinner.”

On other nights, he’s added tofu, fried tofu, soaked adzuki beans and many different kinds of vegetables. Ed occasionally eats his soup for breakfast too. “Sometimes in the morning, I’ll put in a seven-grain mixture for the last five minutes and feel marvelous all day.”

This soup is the only thing that Ed feels he knows how to cook, but he doesn’t make it for other people, much less take it to potlucks. When he has to contribute something to a meal, he’ll follow a recipe. “And I show up with this thing I made feeling all bashful, like this is something my mother really made.”

Next, I called my friend Michael, who’s 48 and divorced. He’d eaten the Monday-night fried-chicken special at his favorite coffee shop, but was all excited about a barbecue sauce for chicken he’d made over the weekend “out of the icebox door.”

“It had hot sauce, apple cider, a few dashes of soy sauce, two teaspoons of peanut butter and a lot of fresh dill. I stirred it up and stuck it in the microwave for a few minutes, then soaked the chicken in it. Boy, was it good chicken. There was no real prominent flavor except for the dill, and there were a bunch of aftertastes, like peanut butter with a hot tang.”

We talked a little bit about how and why he and some of the other bachelors I know cook the way they do. Michael was one who learned how to cook in the Boy Scouts. His coup de grace (the one of his creations he’ll make for company) reflects a continued penchant for the standard Boy Scout one-dish, foil-wrapped approach. Michael calls this dish Chicken Harvest Home.

“You take as many chicken breasts as there are people, and then some, and put them in a baking dish. On top of this you’ll want to put some cutup stew vegetables--onions, carrots, celery, potatoes--and a number of apples cut into chunks. Pour apple cider over the whole thing and flavor with pumpkin pie spices--nutmeg, cloves, lot of cinnamon, ginger and cumin. Cover the dish with tin foil with holes punched in it and bake for an hour and 45 minutes. Serve the vegetables on the side, and if the sauce is too runny you can thicken it with a little cornstarch.”

I couldn’t help myself. “Michael,” I said. “Cumin is not a pumpkin pie spice.”

He thought for a long minute. “I put cumin in my pumpkin pies,” he said.

I called my friend David in New York and asked him what he had for dinner. I remembered that he used to make this big mess of rice, canned chicken, bacon, onion, celery and scrambled eggs all bound together with butter or bacon grease and was half hoping to catch him in the act. But when I talked to him, he said he’d been on a steady diet of Weight Watchers dinners.

The advent of palatable frozen dinners, the proliferation of quality take-out prepared foods and the microwave oven have gone a long way, he said, toward legitimizing his eating habits and thus alleviating the effects of his ‘50s sexist upbringing. “I never ventured into my mother’s kitchen. And none of the other boys my age learned how to cook either,” he said. “But the times are definitely changing. Today, more men are cooking, and more women are ignorant about cooking. In the store, I’ll ask a young yuppie woman a cooking question only to find out she’s just as much in the dark as I am.

“At the same time,” he said, “the rewards for knowing about food are obvious. I’m certain that following a recipe is every bit as fascinating as following the directions in my computer manual, and that I’m just as capable of doing it.

“But a part of me wants to save that experience and share it with a woman. I’m 50 years old now. Self-deprivation’s a form of ammunition. Hurting myself is one of the few things I have left to get a woman.

“Cooking well is like growing up. And for some reason, I refuse to grow up unless there’s a woman there to watch me. Why would I want to do it just for me?”