Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

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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!

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

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'.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"

Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen - Goodreads Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen - Goodreads

Where I had trouble with the book is the philosophy/poetry. Those two subjects have never been my favored reading; too flowery and roundabout for my taste. It's not to say it's not well written; it is, I just have a harder time immersing myself in. However, it did lend itself to describing the food well, and I can appreciate how those that do like the genre would be completely happy with it. I'll also not describe the act of the author writing the food as 'lovely' (not that I would anyway, maybe it's a regional/cultural thing, but that's not a word that comes to mind when I think of food writing). I will describe it as engaging, descriptive, and balanced. I liked that the author spoke to various themes that underly cooking and how for granted we take recipes and the act of cooking. Throughout Small Fires, Johnson shows us how dynamic the relationship between a recipe and a cook really is. Each performance of a recipe is a translation, in which a cook figures out “what they want to say when cooking.” Not a strict text as we might sometimes consider them, the recipe “makes space for our refusal of it, which is also the insistence on our own appetite,” Johnson writes. With Small Fires, Johnson’s goal is to “blow up the kitchen and rebuild it to cook again, critically alert, seeking pleasure and revelation.” Eater chatted recently with Johnson about cooking, recipes, and how her groundbreaking work rethinks the boundaries of food writing. This joyful, revelatory work of memory and meditation both complicates and electrifies life in the kitchen.

Highly recommended for fans of Relish: My Life in the Kitchen, In the Kitchen: Essays on Food and Life and those who enjoy Nina Mingya Powles writing. Really, you need to tap into your own freaky clown self to write something that’s truthful and authentic.” We work with the writers a lot. Maybe in the second or the third edit, they’ll suddenly find, This is the focus. Sometimes we’re working with people who are writing for the first time or haven’t done professional writing; we want the writer to really find the best piece that they can within the piece. It’s also allowing people’s different styles to exist. Tell me about how you envisioned and sold Small Fires , especially because it is so experimental and form-breaking. 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.

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

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. Small Fires is not like any other food book I have read, in fact, not like any book I've read. Rebecca May Johnson manages to bring the passion of food and ingredients to life using all of our senses, combined with astonishing literature references.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’ve been one of those people who’s flippantly like, I hate recipes , but your book made me think about that differently. It seems like we’re simultaneously giving recipes too much authority — as you write, recipes allow you to refuse them — but we’re also not giving recipes enough credit, in the sense that intellectualizing them feels uncommon. Why do you think that dichotomy exists?