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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”.
Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen - Goodreads
This joyful, revelatory work of memory and meditation both complicates and electrifies life in the kitchen. It shows us the radical potential of the thing we do every day: the power of small fires burning everywhere. 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.
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. 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. 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. If you’re a fan of memoirs, academic infused nonfiction, coming-of-age stories, and writing about food and/or cooking, then this could be for you!
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" 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.
Johnson conducts her inquiry into cooking largely through the lens of a single Marcella Hazan recipe for red sauce, and all the ways in which she has experienced, lived, and “performed” the recipe throughout a decade of her life. Nodding to her own doctoral studies of Homer’s The Odyssey, Johnson transforms her relationship to the recipe into “an epic of desire, of dancing, of experiments in embodiment and transformative encounters with other people,” she writes. 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. 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. This work by Rebecca May Johnson is not only and introspective look at her life but also at how a humble sauce recipe has developed through the different stages of her life. At times this feels like a recitation. But it’s so much more than that. Small Fires is part memoir, part critical (academic) essay, part love story, part feminist lit, part bildungsroman, part classical text, and part ode, and that’s what I loved most: Johnson’s homage to the sauce recipe central to her work of nonfiction.
Kitchen Is a Place In Rebecca May Johnson’s First Book, the Kitchen Is a Place
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? One of the most original food books I’ve ever read, at once intelligent and sensuous, witty, provoking and truly delicious.” -- Olivia Laing It’s a book about a particular recipe, or really an ur-recipe, and the ways in which the recipe, as a performance text, has been performed over time. And it’s very specifically not *just* a book about a recipe, but The Odyssey as well. A pairing that maybe does not naturally suggest itself feels essential, long before the end of the book. 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. Possesses an intellectual fleet footedness and exuberance akin to the writing of Deborah Levy or Rebecca Solnit’ I NEWS
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A BRACINGLY ORIGINAL, BOUNDARY BREAKING EXPLORATION OF COOKING AND THE KITCHEN, FROM A RISING STAR IN FOOD WRITING 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" My writing practice didn’t come from a food writing professional career, so I didn’t have that hampering professionalism. It came out of me writing playful papers during my thesis, doing funny installations, and my poetry clubs. I’d had a career of journalism about fashion, which I found utterly deadening, ultimately, and very repetitious. You write for different publications in the tone they want, the style they want; there isn’t space for you being a freak.
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.An intense thought-provoking enquiry into the very nature of cooking, which stayed with me long after I finished reading it’ NIGELLA LAWSON 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.