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More people living alone leads to one-egg frying pans
Frying pans big enough to hold just one egg, small plates for just one slice of toast, and tea pots, which only hold one cup of tea are now some of the fastest selling items in cookware, says high street store Debenhams.
According to The Office for National Statistics, In Great Britain the proportion of people living alone has roughly doubled since 1971 and there has been a similar increase in one family lone parent households and the needs of those people regarding cook ware have been addressed.
Apparently sales of the tiny cooking pots have increased by 140% and the trend is so great that stores have extended their range of single serve cookware and predict that it may create a new movement in cooking.
Said Steve Lightfoot, Trading Director for Home at Debenhams: “Some of these pots and pans are so small that they wouldn’t look out of place in a doll’s house.
“Our sales figures show that people are not only cooking simple meals for one but preparing increasingly smaller servings - Never mind beans on toast, these dishes are so small that it’s more likely to be bean on toast.”
As recently as 30 years ago, sales of such small singleton cookware would have been virtually unheard of as big, durable, family-sized dishes, plates and pans were the top sellers, with all cookware designed to hold enough food for at least four people, with many dishes able to cater for six, eight and sometimes ten guests.
But a pivotal point was reached in 1996 – towards the end of the last Conservative government – when formal, large scale dinner parties were falling out of fashion after Black Wednesday.
The move away from super-sized cookware continued under Labour, with invitations to trendy but more simple “suppers” becoming common across the UK.
Since then family birth rates, and a greater number of women preferring to carve out successful careers than carve the Sunday roast have accelerated the trend.
Figures show that more people are now living on their own for longer before getting married, a rising divorce rate, and an increase in the number of people who never marry at all.
Cooking on such a small scale will mean that cookery books will have to change too as most seem to provide ingredients for 4 people and cooking for one is not simply cutting the ingredients by a quarter, the shopping list will change and then of course smaller portions may well need shorter cooking times. Perhaps this just means that there is a bigger market for cookery books for one.
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