Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

Product Information

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. 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! 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 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. 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. There’s a psychoanalyst, poet, and nonfiction writer, Nuar Alsadir. She published a book called Animal Joy, and she wrote an essay about going to clown school. There’s a useful bit about a clown: The clown that’s overly fixated on the audience can’t clown. She talks about it in the context of writing: People who have this fantasy of being published in the New Yorker write what they think an editor at the New Yorker would like to read. This strange thing exists between them and this imagined audience, when really, you need to tap into your own freaky clown self to write something that’s truthful and authentic.

Small Fires - An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson Small Fires - An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson

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. 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. Jonathan is so open to Vittles evolving, incorporating new voices, incorporating new editorial practices, incorporating new media. He isn’t one of these founders who is like, “This is my thing and it has to be like this.” Someone has a notion or an idea; we can explore it. 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.

In this electrifying, innovative memoir, Rebecca May Johnson rewrites the kitchen as a vital source of knowledge and revelation. 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.

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

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. 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!) 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 Small Fires is full of intelligence, but also the honesty of what appear to be mental health struggles which are written in a very relatable manner.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? 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'.