In Small Fires, Rebecca May Johnson reinvents cooking – that simple act of rolling up our sleeves, wielding a knife, spattering red hot sauce on our books – as a way of experiencing ourselves and the world. Cooking isthinking: about the liberating constraint of tying apron strings; the transformative dynamics of shared meals; the meaning of appetite and bodily pleasure; the wild subversiveness of the recipe, beyond words or control. It’s not a deeply normative editing process. We’re not trying to iron out the voice, the difference; we’re trying to make the difference sing in its best form. When I freelanced, I learned to self-censor: This isn’t appropriate because this is too weird. With the book, I tried to totally write against that. I’d spent years just taking all this out, so I tried to allow it to stay in. Johnson conducts her inquiry into cooking largely through the lens of a single Marcella Hazan recipe for red sauce, and all the ways in which she has experienced, lived, and “performed” the recipe throughout a decade of her life. Nodding to her own doctoral studies of Homer’s The Odyssey, Johnson transforms her relationship to the recipe into “an epic of desire, of dancing, of experiments in embodiment and transformative encounters with other people,” she writes. Why do we cook? Is it just to feed ourselves and others? Or is there something more revolutionary going on?

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Tell me about how you envisioned and sold Small Fires , especially because it is so experimental and form-breaking. I’ve also had that feeling that the recipe is impinging on my voice or my sensitivity in the kitchen. It’s kind of the fear of our agency being overruled. But really, it’s a turning away from the underlying knowledge that we’re always engaging with the knowledge and labor of others. Cooking is thinking! The spatter of sauce in a pan, a cook's subtle deviation from a recipe, the careful labour of cooking for loved ones: these are not often the subjects of critical enquiry. Cooking, we are told, has nothing to do with serious thought; the path to intellectual fulfilment leads directly out of the kitchen. In this electrifying, innovative memoir, Rebecca May Johnson rewrites the kitchen as a vital source of knowledge and revelation.

Radical, liberating, challenging -and at times emotional, this book really does help awaken (and rekindle), the little fires burning within all of us foodie feminists! Small Fires reinvents cooking – that simple act of rolling up our sleeves, wielding a knife, splattering red hot sauce on our books – as a way of experiencing ourselves and the world. Cooking is thinking: about the liberating constraint of tying apron strings; the meaning of appetite and bodily pleasure; the wild subversiveness of the recipe; the power of small fires burning everywhere.

Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen - Hardcover - AbeBooks Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen - Hardcover - AbeBooks

Did i miss smth lol? Why is the general consensus so positive? This book came across as pretentious, grasping at straws of vague arguments that appear—miraculously—out of nowhere. The whole spiel about the misogyny of the word lovely in relation to recipe writing was mind numbing, as well as the random mini essay about misogyny in translation inexplicably crammed in amongst the blabbering about ‘lovely’ and ‘maid.’ I suppose because my academic expertise is in the philosophy of translation of texts this part was especially eye-rolling. You’re an editor at Vittles , the publication Jonathan Nunn started during the pandemic . How does that work fit into this and the type of food writing you’d like to see more of? I loved a recent mixed-media piece by Aaron Vallance about his family’s songs at Shabbat lunch , for example. This joyful, revelatory work of memory and meditation both complicates and electrifies life in the kitchen. It shows us the radical potential of the thing we do every day: the power of small fires burning everywhere. Loved the beginning of this memoir/collection, but the 2nd half felt repetitive to me. I know that's the point with that section given it's about cooking the same dish from the same recipe with infinite variance with every preparation, but I feel like that point was just made again and again and again without a lot of deepening it in the latter half. But Johnson melds food criticism/cooking criticism into our very state of being in a very compelling way to me. I love it when a writer can make me think about a topic in a wholly new way or make me care about something I'm not as personally invested in, and I think this book handily succeeds in that. Loved the essay about cooking/eating as resistance through the worlds of Audre Lorde and the idea of a recipe/cooking as translation. Also love the idea of melding the body and the mind through cooking, though I think there could have been more body in the body-to-thinking ratio in the text. Would recommend as a good entryway into a) criticism broadly and b) food writing.

This book will make you hungry! The food writing is extremely evocative, Rebecca May Johnson is very gifted in this department and reading it not only made me very hungry, but made me specifically crave what she was writing about. The chapter detailing the many times she has made a certain recipe throughout her life was an absolute joy to read and I will no doubt be attempting the same recipe since I can't get it out of my head!