ONE MAY NO longer be the loneliest number – marriage, marriage everywhere – but it does tend to be the hungriest. The solitary seeker of food is a singularly woebegone figure; it is one thing if you can't get anybody to sleep with you, but it is quite another, and far worse, if you can't find anybody to eat with. Your conspicuous failure reminds all the insecure people around you that they too are just a step or two from pathetic isolation – the true American way.

The travails of the lone restaurant diner have been amply discussed by media chatterboxes, but one reads little or nothing about the plight of those who are home, and alone, at dinnertime. For them the answer must be a foil-wrapped burrito picked up on the way home from work, or a pizza delivered by a teenager driving a car with a burned-out taillight and no bumpers. Or, perhaps, one of those boxed dinners kept in the freezer and heated up in the microwave, to be gobbled in front of the television.

Yet there is a third (or is that a fourth?) way: cooking for one. It sounds hopeless, true; many people have mentioned to me over the years, when they found themselves unattached, that they stopped cooking because it made no sense to go to all that trouble just for themselves. There is an important message here about the social content of food; the soul as well as the body finds nourishment at table. We do not like to eat alone, and when we have to do so, we do it furtively and quickly and with as little effort as possible.

But it does not have to be this way, as I was reminded recently while glancing through San Francisco Cuisine 2004 (Trifari, $14.95), a kind of aggrandized, glossy advertising circular that includes menus and recipes from well-known local restaurants. One of the recipes, from Harris's chef, Michael Buhagiar, is for pepper steak and "serves one." The ingredient list is short, the procedure straightforward and not time-consuming; here is a dinner that doesn't arrive in a disgraceful box or come out of a dirty microwave. And, on the side, how about some quick-cooking polenta, mixed greens (drizzled with balsamic vinegar, soy sauce, and extra-virgin olive oil), and a quartered tomato sprinkled with a bit of salt?

Pasta also lends itself to single servings, but you can also make a full-scale version of something and portion it out over the week. Soups tend to improve with age, as do chili and many stews. The truth is that, sooner or later, one does eat it all.

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