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. 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. Tell me about how you envisioned and sold Small Fires , especially because it is so experimental and form-breaking. It’s proven that not only can you just do that stuff, but people are willing to pay for it. The subscription model is nice in that sense. Publishers always underestimate readers: “Oh, readers aren’t gonna want to read experimental nonfiction about cooking.” Readers are going to read a 3,000-word piece about, you know, Aaron’s family traditions and their songs. Read for a book club, wasn't expecting it to leave such a bad taste in my mouth. I'm all the way down for some sort of novel food-based autotheory, and the memoir sequence that follows 1000 variations on the same recipe over the course of a life was quite nice, but Christ if it isn't overwrought in a lot of other places. Cultural studies concept creep runs rampant throughout (the author did a PhD on the Odyssey, and I believe lifts several paragraphs verbatim from her thesis for sections of this book), leading to absolute clangers such as describing people making food as 'bodies that cook' and one particularly ill-advised section where it is argued that describing food using the epithet 'lovely' 'does violence' to 'marginalised bodies'.

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

Spattering is not mentioned in the recipe. The text does not anticipate the liveliness of the process it describes, which spatters wildly" 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. Really, you need to tap into your own freaky clown self to write something that’s truthful and authentic.” 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. 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.

I feel like I am maybe the exact right audience for this book, in an extremely specific way. Like it was written for me to read at this moment in time. Serendipitously I have been working my way through Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey for the last few weeks. Yesterday when I was 1/4 of the way through Small Fires I found a copy of Marcella Hazans 'Essentials of Italian Cooking' in the thrift store. I had always been interested in owning a copy but didn't realize I til today how perfectly timed this discovery was. 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”. 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.

Small Fires,’ Rebecca May Johnson Rethinks - Eater In ‘Small Fires,’ Rebecca May Johnson Rethinks - Eater

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.” I didn’t make any changes. My editor at Pushkin loved the weirdest bits the most. I was expecting to be told off; I sent them a much weirder book than I said I was going to write. 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.

Perempuan yang mengaku sebagai ibu rumah tangga seringkali diberi tanggapan "ah, cuma ngurus rumah doang". Tapi, emang pekerjaan rumah tangga semudah itu ya? 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. Small Fires is a book about cooking. But no, like, it is *about* *cooking*. As in, it is about the specificity of cooking, or, no, the universality of cooking? Or no I think it is actually, literally, about how cooking and recipes contain the means to be specific and universal at the same time - which is an almost unique, or at least very unusual and remarkable, operation that tends to get glossed over, and so proves worthy of an extended study. This joyful, revelatory work of memory and meditation both complicates and electrifies life in the kitchen. 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.

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

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. The thing I really like about Winnicott is his writing on play. When I was entangled in theory, I thought, I need to remember how to play. It’s how you often make the best discoveries with knowledge: turning something inside out, like playing with the recipe. I decided to accept the moment: writing like a mark-making practice, also like cooking, where I have to accept what happened as it happened.When it gets to the point of being written down, it’s a form of knowledge that is trying to empower many people to do something. It’s not a text that is jealously guarded; you write it down because you want to spread knowledge. You want to empower many hands to come to a realization of how they can transform matter in their everyday lives and give themselves pleasure and give other people pleasure — I think that’s amazing. very enjoyable and thought-provoking, especially the parts where cooking is not being compared too heavily to rilke poems or the odyssey (we get it, you have a phd, but you don't see me comparing the cooking of pasta to poetic dialogue in the work of pernette du guillet!) I don't think I've ever read a memoir quite like this - a mix of beautiful food writing and musings on greek mythology. Fans of Korelitz’s deft literary mystery You Should Have Known will find plenty to relish in this character-driven tale of privilege, family dysfunction and belated personal growth. At its centre are the Oppenheimer triplets: smart, arrogant Harrison, overshadowed oddball Lewyn, and secretive Sally. The products of a marriage tethered to a tragic car crash years earlier, they were conceived via IVF; a fourth embryo was frozen, and on their departure for college in the year 2000, their mother has it thawed and enlists a surrogate, resulting in the birth of Phoebe, who will narrate the novel’s closing section. Each new twist triggers bright, witty insights into the complexities of sibling bonds as well as art, infidelity and more.