I'm watching Mad Men, and it sort of caused me to wonder about something. By the 50's and 60's prepared food started to be widely available in cities and cheap restaurants etc. made food available. Several decades or a century earlier, I imagine single males continued to live in the home with their mothers or extended family who did the cooking until they married. But what about around the turn of the century as men started to move to the cities without their parents? Immigrants moving to new countries? I'm sure it's happened. What did they eat? Did they just cook for themselves? What did they cook? Generally, I'm just wondering about times in history when single men have been required to prepare their own food before the advent of processed food and restaurants and when typically it was the woman's job (culturally) to prepare food.
Maybe the answer is pretty uninteresting, but I'm curious nonetheless. Thanks!
In the 19th and 20th centuries, many single young men who moved to the cities to work lived in boarding houses, where they rented a bed or a room, and shared washing and dining facilities with the other tenants. The landlady might have provided some sort of simple meal (bread, stew, etc) or at least access to cooking facilities.
The 1962 movie The L-Shaped Room, while being salacious and dramatic, provides a decent look at what it was like to live in a boarding house in England in the early 1960s.
As /u/AshkenazeeYankee says, renting a roam with a kind of a meal plan was common.
Among the lower classes, it was not uncommon for men to band together and either hire a female (often a young umarried woman) to cook, clean and do laundry for them, or pay a wife of one of the older men to do it. This was common among forest workers and charcoalers as well as railway workers and miners even before industrialisation and urbanisation became a fact.
Swedish forest workers did cook their own food when out on their own though - kolbulle (a kind of pancake made form rye flour and water, fried with dry-salted pork in hideous amounts of pork lard and eaten with lingonberries) was common as a single hot meal during the day. It was fried in a tre-legged frying pan over open fire. Sandwhiches (with salted butter, cheese or salted meat) was common during other times. Milk, svagdricka (a kind of dark, cloudy small beer, about 1-2% ABV), water or lemonade was had with the food.
Renting a room that included meals with the family that lived there was common. In some cases, widows made their living this way - renting out the rooms in the house and providing meals, cleaning and laundry for the tenants to support herself.
One reference to this system in popular fiction would be Mr Holmes and Dr Watson, both bachelors, who rent rooms from Mrs Hudson, who provide cleaning and food for them (and probably laundry as well, althoughh I cannot remember it being mentioned in the books). Mr Hudson is never mentioned, so Mrs Hudson is probably a widow.
Swedish students used to rent rooms in boarding houses or family houses, and jokes from this time about stingy landladies trying to skimp on the meals are common, such as this;
The tenants sit down to the table and the landlady places a pot on the table.
The student Karlsson stands up, lifts the lid and starts to stir the soup with a spoon. He continues to stir the soup rather than serving himself with the spoon.
Landlady: "Is the peasoup not to satisfaction?"
Student: "No, no, I just thought I saw a pea."
Swedish peasoup is supposed to look like this (ie thick with peas and with generous amounts of pork.
