Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, is a fiery food-come-memoir, that takes a real look at the ways in which the kitchen can be a vital source (or should that be sauce -I know, hilarious) of knowledge, creativity and revelation. Especially focusing on the reclaiming of a once (societally seen at least) “cosy” domestic setting for women, and how they now navigate this area, within the realms of neoliberal feminism. I did a workshop with loads of translators from all over the world, and I asked them to cook the recipe. What they did wasn’t what was in the text. They had done lots of things slightly differently. They said they tried to follow the recipe, and it made them realize how much they change texts when they translate without even consciously being aware of it. It’s hard to follow a recipe exactly. The body and your feelings: There are so many minor interventions that change it.

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

A BRACINGLY ORIGINAL, BOUNDARY BREAKING EXPLORATION OF COOKING AND THE KITCHEN, FROM A RISING STAR IN FOOD WRITING Small Fires membahas salah satu pekerjaan rumah tangga yang seringkali disepelekan: memasak. Misalnya, 1) perempuan yang memasak terlihat bahagia, 2) memasak adalah tanda cinta, 3) dan yang paling sering kita dengar, love is the secret ingredients. Namun, penulis kurang setuju dengan stereotipe ini. I did get quite entangled in theory in the first half of the book, and I wrote the second half of the book by hand. I was like, I want to write a book that is about a kind of knowledge that comes through the body — why am I just sitting up here in this room looking at theory and not in the kitchen, not being in the body? Then I went and cooked the sausages and did that chapter about [psychoanalyst D.W.] Winnicott.

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An enjoyable book! About how we diminish the 'work' that goes into cooking in the name of 'love'. About recipes—what they bring to the table, what they don't, how we follow a recipe (to the dot, intuition, no measurement cooking etc. I def did not know about the 'no-recipe recipe book by New york Times editor Sam Sifton). Describing each cooking session as a performance. About Nigella Lawson's use of possessives in the way she describes her cooking and food. About MFK Fischer's thoughts on food. About navigating life through different hairstyles and food—the slow transformation. One of the most original food books I’ve ever read, at once intelligent and sensuous, witty, provoking and truly delicious.” -- Olivia Laing

Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen - Goodreads

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. Can I only appreciate cooking through the imagination of the other...I have been dependent on living through the appetites and desires of others. Alone I am so lost" While the book largely focuses on one dish (a seemingly simple tomato sauce), it tells of the variations and how a recipe is not really a one-time use or rendition of something. It has history and changes based on the smallest of things. The telling of the making of this dish is interspersed with the author's thoughts on cooking and the act of creating a meal, as well as the different works she has read and analyzed.And Small Fires speaks too to part of why these Greek myths and epics have resonated for so long. They stand so many retellings (of which there is a boom atm) yet so few of these retellings outlive the cultural moment that bore them, because they’re stories about systems and phenomena, or about a people far more than so than about *a person*, which we keep trying to personalise. It’s fun then to read Small Fires in the light of, e.g. Miller’s Circe - Miller charts individual and subjective emotional courses and throughlines (which when her books are working feel credible, when they’re not they don’t) through texts that can read as psychologically quiet distant or inscrutable when approached more directly (and a good section of Small Fires, drawing on Emily Wilson’s work, pulls into focus the operations translators have performed in relation to Odysseus’s reassertion of power through the massacre of slave-women - I think whether translators have downplayed, elided or tried to excuse his choice - a driver has been an effort to render something by modern standards psychologically inscrutable as legible). Something I enjoyed about RMJ’s book, arriving in this context, is that follows the other course, the Odyssey as an account of systems. Drawing on insights from ten years spent thinking through cooking, she explores the radical openness of the recipe text, the liberating constraint of apron strings and the transformative intimacies of shared meals. Playfully dissolving the boundaries between abstract intellect and bodily pleasure, domesticity and politics, Johnson awakens us to the richness of cooking as a means of experiencing the self and the world - and to the revolutionary potential of the small fires burning in every kitchen. At the very opening of her debut book, Small Fires, writer Rebecca May Johnson confesses, “I tried to write about cooking, but I wrote a hot red epic.” While it may sound like a cookbook, the deceptively slender volume—and “hot red epic”—runs a little deeper than that. Small Fires contains only a handful of recipes, and its main star is Marcella Hazan’s tomato and garlic sauce; a beloved dish that first crossed Johnson’s radar not via Hazan’s wildly influential 1992 tome Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, but instead thanks to a 2006 feature in The Guardian, in which it was nominated by the River Cafe’s Ruth Rogers as “best pasta.” Mungkin kita hanya melihat hasil akhirnya di piring, kita tanpa sadar meremehkan proses memasak. Sejak belajar untuk memasak di kala pandemi, aku menyadari bahwa memasak itu sulit. Dibutuhkan lebih dari 3 jam untuk membuat roti yang habis dalam 5 menit. Belum lagi mata yang berair karena mengupas bawang dan kulit yang terkena percikan minyak panas. Dan yang paling menyebalkan: semua usaha itu sia-sia karena yang dimasakin lebih memilih buat makan indomie.

In brief: Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen; This Beating

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. I went from not being able to sink into this book, to largely enjoying it by the end. When it's tagged as 'an epic in the kitchen' I didn't realize just how literal that would be. But it's not just the food that makes this a standout book, but rather the way the author weaves philosophy, feminism, and sociology, although with a dash of classics into the mix. We know that food writing can encompass so many ideas, but I think there is still a sense of limitation in the form, from what we know and from what already exists. How did you get past those limitations to write this weird food book? 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.

Eater: The recipe at the center of the book is one for red sauce. I’m sure there are a lot of things you’ve cooked repeatedly — why did that specific recipe stand out? I particularly enjoyed the essay “Again and Again, There Is That You,” in which Johnson determinedly if chaotically cooks a three-course meal for someone who might be a lover. The mixture of genres and styles is inventive, but a bit strange; my taste would call for more autobiographical material and less theory. The most similar work I’ve read is Recipe by Lynn Z. Bloom, which likewise pulled in some seemingly off-topic strands. I’d be likely to recommend Small Fires to readers of Supper Club. One of the most original food books I’ve ever read, at once intelligent and sensuous, witty, provoking and truly delicious’ Olivia Laing Just a peek at the authors cited in her bibliography – not just the expected subjects like MFK Fisher and Nigella Lawson but also Goethe, Lorde, Plath, Stein, Weil, Winnicott – gives you an idea of how wide-ranging and academically oriented the book is, delving into the psychology of cooking and eating. Oh yes, there will be Freudian sausages. There are also her own recipes, of a sort: one is a personal prose piece (“Bad News Potatoes”) and another is in poetic notation, beginning “I made Mrs Beeton’s / recipe for frying sausages”.

Kitchen Is a Place In Rebecca May Johnson’s First Book, the Kitchen Is a Place

Rebecca May Johnson: It genuinely was a moment of revelation in my life. When I first made this recipe, I was living on my own, I was early on in college. It caused a transformation in perspective and it gave me a sense of competence: an unalienating process; the thrill of being able to transform ingredients. It became the foundational grammar for all cooking that followed it, like when you can suddenly understand a language. rebecca may johnson's somewhat jilted prose took me some time to appreciate, eventually evolving into a methodical rhythm much like cook book recipes. smalls fires was truly a perfect blend of johnson cooking her favourite dishes, weaving in feminist theory and relating her life experiences to the food we cook for others and the idea of food being a vehicle for a gendered 'labour' of love (all physically, socially and emotionally). food truly took the front seat of this memoir and it felt, throughout, like a guide to loving both, food, and the work you do for others, and yourself. Laurel (because I know you're reading this!)--there is so much about the Odessy (and specifically Emily Willson's translation of it!) in this (she studied it in school), you would love this!!! I tried to write about cooking, but I wrote a hot red epic.” Johnson’s debut is a hybrid work, as much a feminist essay collection as it is a memoir about the role that cooking has played in her life. She chooses to interpret apron strings erotically, such that the preparation of meals is not gendered drudgery or oppression but an act of self-care and love for others. It’s also kind of a collective voice: Many people have contributed, over very long periods of time, to the knowledge contained in a recipe, whether it be explicitly those processes or an understanding of every ingredient in it.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. I don't think I've ever read a memoir quite like this - a mix of beautiful food writing and musings on greek mythology. Spattering is not mentioned in the recipe. The text does not anticipate the liveliness of the process it describes, which spatters wildly" In the period of time between reading Small Fires, then interviewing Johnson, then writing this piece, I myself performed “the recipe” a total of three times. Like Johnson, who wrote the entire second half of the book by hand, I took notes. The book I jotted them down in is now punctuated with red oil stains. As she warns, the sauce spatters and spits, angry and hot on the hob. But the resulting sweet confit of tinned tomatoes slow-cooked in oil and thinly sliced garlic was delicious every time. Don’t just take my word for it, though—if there’s one thing Johnson wants you to do after reading her book, it’s to draw outside the lines of your own favorite recipe. 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.