Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

by REBECCA MAY JOHNSON

Overview

** INCLUDES A NEW AFTERWORD AND RECIPES **

“An intense, thought-provoking enquiry into the very nature of cooking.” — Nigella Lawson

“One of the most original food books I’ve ever read, at once intelligent and sensuous, witty, provoking and truly delicious.” — Olivia Laing

A bracingly original, revelatory debut that explores cooking and the kitchen as sources of pleasure, constraint and revolution, by a rising star in food writing

This joyful, revelatory work of memory and meditation both complicates and electrifies life in the kitchen.

Why do we cook? Is it just to feed ourselves and others? Or is there something more revolutionary going on?

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 is thinking: 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.

Small Fires shows us the radical potential of the thing we do every day: the power of small fires burning everywhere.

The paperback edition includes a new afterword and recipes for Ten-Minute Tomatoes and Cream Pasta, Meatballs with Tomato and Tarragon Cream Sauce, plus other ideas for tomato and cream combinations and platings inspired by a visit to the archive of groundbreaking English food writer Elizabeth David.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781911590491
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	04/09/2024
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Rebecca May Johnson has published essays, reviews and nonfiction with Granta, Times Literary Supplement and Daunt Books Publishing, among others, and is an editor at the trailblazing food publication Vittles. Small Fires is her first book.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue in the Kitchen
I tried to write about cooking, but I wrote a hot red epic.

Not sea spray on my skin, but sauce spattering from a pan. The heat of small fires. Tying and untying my apron strings. A recipe that is both the ship that carries me and the hot red sea. In this book, I tell the complicated story of cooking for ten or more years in ten or more kitchens. I tell of the people I encounter, whose desires and refusals rewrite the recipe a thousand times. I tell of what I have learnt.

The contents of this book might have vanished unrecorded – cooked and eaten and washed up, leaving no trace. Documenting what I do in the kitchen can feel like the task of recording almost nothing. But it is the nothing that I am doing, and do almost every day, and have been doing every day for over a decade. It is the nothing that has been part of almost every social interaction of my life as an adult and through which I have come to know almost all the people I love. It is the nothing through which I have been sustained and transformed.

Ten years or more learning to think and to cook unfold in separate spaces, officially at least. I am taught that the work of critical thinking takes place outside of the kitchen, and that cooking in domestic space is not connected to the endeavour of serious thought. It is an exclusion that has limited the shape of our ideas: an imaginative drought, a half-light. If food and thinking coincide, it is in an image of men who have been served dinner, talking face-to-face over the table.

Slowly I realize that when I cook, I am also researching the relationship between the body and language, between self and other; I am learning how to think against a rationalist and patriarchal history of knowledge. This book is a document of that realization: a text that allows cooking into the frame of critical enquiry and in which critical enquiry is shaped by cooking. This does not mean exchanging the kitchen for the library; my clothes must become spattered with oil.

In this book I think about how I wear an apron, use a knife and apply heat with the same attention I apply to the world outside the kitchen. I think about cooking without glossing over its complexity such as I have experienced it. This is an epic of desire, of dancing, of experiments in embodiment and transformative encounters with other people. I want to blow up the kitchen and rebuild it to cook again, critically alert, seeking pleasure and revelation.

Recipe for beginning an epic:

Begin the epic by summoning a body. It will take some effort, so a pumpkin or similar may help. Then decide how to clothe yourself for what lies ahead, and how to dismantle the traps you will encounter on your journey.

Table of Contents

Prologue in the Kitchen
 
Apron Strings
 
Semiotics of the Kitchen
 
Cooking is a Method
 
The Kitchen is a Weaving Room

Hot Red Epic
 
Tracing The Sauce Text
 
Unlovely Translations
 
Refusing the Recipe
 
Consider the Sausage!
 
Again and Again, There is That You
 
Every Day a New Dawn, a New Dish

Editorial Reviews

Small Fires is… brave enough to hurt feelings, and delicious enough for no one to care.” — The New York Times

"In Small Fires, Johnson explores how the food we make and the ways we make it—and then the stories we tell about making it—shape who we are. . . . Mixing deeply personal anecdotes with more complex theory, Small Fires is at once relatable and mind-expanding." — Vogue

"In this slim, spicy, genre-defining work, Rebecca May Johnson spatchcocks the division between intellectual and domestic labor... Blending humor and academic citation, poetic lineation, and personal reverie, this inquiry into the nature of cooking is as delightfully messy as the process itself—some serious food for thought." — Oprah Daily

“A gorgeous book…I love to read about the body and I love to read about food, and this tender little book allowed me to do both.” — Saba Sams, The Guardian

“Small Fires is a manifesto for reclaiming cooking as an intellectual... a rewarding book that stayed with me — and, like all brilliant food writing, it made me think twice about what I choose to eat and who I eat it with... a brave, honest book.” — Sunday Times

“Rich in pleasure and revelation.” — Observer
 
“Small Fires possesses an intellectual fleet footedness and exuberance akin to the writing of Deborah Levy or Rebecca Solnit, as sentences skip between mischievous punning and impassioned agitation... the enthusiasm of the writing here is generous, embracing and emboldening.” — i news
 
“I recommend the book for its insightful, radical, beautiful essays – and for all the kitchen dancing.” — The Guardian

“An electrifying read.” — Olive magazine

“Revolutionary… this is a book that wakes up the reader’s senses and delivers critical arguments “spattered” in oil, like the pages of a much-used recipe book, making them palatable.” — Times Literary Supplement

“Just incredible... a real revelation.” — Sky Arts Book Club
 
“An electrifying, genre-breaking mixture of food writing, memoir and philosophy, asking profound questions about desire, community, appetite and the body" — Rebecca Tamás, Observer

"An intense, thought-provoking enquiry into the very nature of cooking, which stayed with me long after I finished it." — Nigella Lawson
 
"One of the most original food books I've ever read, at once intelligent and sensuous, witty, provoking and truly delicious, a radical feast of flavours and ideas." — Olivia Laing
 
"Small Fires is a smart, creative and thoughtful book: it challenges us to think more about how and why we cook, and confounds our expectations of what food writing can be." — Ruby Tandoh
 
"Liberating... a new way to write about food." — Jonathan Nunn
 
"I loved this genre-busting book which made me look differently at every recipe that I cook. Through a mix of memoir and philosophy, Rebecca May Johnson shows that cooking can be a wild kind of magic." — Bee Wilson
 
"Destined to become essential reading for anyone interested in writing about food... Bold, beautiful, daring... It is a book that changed me." — Rachel Roddy
 
"Small Fires is a tender, electric, intimately transformative work. Rebecca May Johnson has written her own glowing epic, reshaping the notion of the recipe as a text alive with possibility. In her hands, recipes become memory objects, acts of translation, expansive spaces full of feeling." — Nina Mingya Powles, author of Small Bodies of Water
 
"Rebecca May Johnson's scintillating soliloquy on cooking adds a whole new dimension to food-writing, and pulls the tablecloth out from beneath a lot of stale (and often male) assumptions about the nature and value of domestic labour. I'll never think of a 'recipe' in the same way again." — Fuchsia Dunlop
 
"Small Fires is like nothing else I have read. Truly unique, truly unusual, it weaves together cooking, dancing, and the Odyssey in a riveting, and moving exploration of what counts as knowledge. It had me rethinking what a recipe is, what cooking is, what is 'I' and what is 'you'. It is a book that asks profound and serious questions while also being musical, erotic, and deeply pleasurable. Being in the company of Rebecca May Johnson's voice — companionable, intimate, questioning — was a sheer delight. I didn't want it to end." — Katherine Angel

“The most compelling book about cooking I’ve read this year, perhaps ever. Rebecca is a writer of extraordinary intelligence and wit, and I would push this book with feverish enthusiasm into the hands of anyone who spends time in the kitchen.” — Jackson Boxer’s Christmas gift guide, Evening Standard

“Brave, funny, thought-provoking, heart-warming, and like nothing else you will have ever read.” — The best food books for Christmas, Club Oenologique

“Cooking is thinking is the takeaway argument of Small Fires, and I can’t tell you how good it felt to read those three words in succession without some kind of qualification.” — Chantal Braganza, Hazlitt

“The creative, bracing essays of Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires redefine the act of cooking and elevate the value of domestic labor... with a combination of intellectual rigor and playfulness, they analyze the emotions, difficulty, and importance involved in offering food to others.” — Foreword Reviews

“In Small Fires, Johnson gives the [recipe] text the epic it deserves, looking at it every which way but prioritizing the living, breathing, hungry eye of the home cook” — N+1 Magazine

“A welcoming, challenging, original meditation on recipes and their use.” — Los Angeles Review of Books

“Keenly aware of the assumptions that have informed so much writing about food, Johnson seeks to restore cooking to its rightful place as a form of knowledge—one through which pleasure, desire, and resistance can be expressed.” — The New Republic

“Johnson peels back the layers, looking at what food, appetite and pleasure mean in a bold and imaginative way.”
— Glamour (UK)

“Rich in pleasure and revelation.” — Guardian, Paperbacks of the Month

“Small Fires put me back in the kitchen. Not just physically, but spiritually. I'm back in my kitchen. I'm making messes. My cookbook pages are splattered with little gluttonies. Food is by no means too good for words, and Johnson's are too perfect a pairing. Read this book or else.” — Stacy Wayne D.

From the Publisher