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Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

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I requested Small Fires from NetGalley because of the description of this shorter novel, and so I express my deep gratitude to whomever wrote the blurb as it is in no way misleading or misfocused. 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. It’s also kind of a collective voice: Many people have contributed, over very long periods of time, to the knowledge contained in a recipe, whether it be explicitly those processes or an understanding of every ingredient in it.

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

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. Tell me about how you envisioned and sold Small Fires , especially because it is so experimental and form-breaking. 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.

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Spattering is not mentioned in the recipe. The text does not anticipate the liveliness of the process it describes, which spatters wildly" Loved the beginning of this memoir/collection, but the 2nd half felt repetitive to me. I know that's the point with that section given it's about cooking the same dish from the same recipe with infinite variance with every preparation, but I feel like that point was just made again and again and again without a lot of deepening it in the latter half. But Johnson melds food criticism/cooking criticism into our very state of being in a very compelling way to me. I love it when a writer can make me think about a topic in a wholly new way or make me care about something I'm not as personally invested in, and I think this book handily succeeds in that. Loved the essay about cooking/eating as resistance through the worlds of Audre Lorde and the idea of a recipe/cooking as translation. Also love the idea of melding the body and the mind through cooking, though I think there could have been more body in the body-to-thinking ratio in the text. Would recommend as a good entryway into a) criticism broadly and b) food writing. 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!!! 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. 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.

Small Fires:An Epic in the Kitchen The Bookseller - Previews - Small Fires:An Epic in the Kitchen

One of the most original food books I’ve ever read, at once intelligent and sensuous, witty, provoking and truly delicious’ Olivia Laing 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. One of the most original food books I’ve ever read, at once intelligent and sensuous, witty, provoking and truly delicious.” -- Olivia Laing 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.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. 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. 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. Stuff doesn’t get published with the conservative expectations of what food writing is and isn’t. It’s really cool to work somewhere where there’s latitude to push beyond those expectations and to bring my own interests as a reader to commissioning and to pay people a dignified amount of money to do that work.

Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson | Waterstones

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’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. A BRACINGLY ORIGINAL, BOUNDARY BREAKING EXPLORATION OF COOKING AND THE KITCHEN, FROM A RISING STAR IN FOOD WRITING Sayangnya, pekerjaan domestik yang dianggap remeh menyebabkan pendapatan yang rendah. Misalnya, pekerjaan ART yang tidak mempunyai batas secara eksplisit, bahkan tangga karier yang jelas untuk OB outsourcing. Ketidakadilan ini dibahas oleh penulis dengan ringan dan witty, walaupun aku merasa tidak nyambung dengan beberapa jokes-nya yang mungkin segmented.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. The ‘lovely’ chapter also draws into focus this book’s engagement with The Odyssey. And it does make academia’s general failure to take recipes seriously as texts or histories seem absolutely almost impossible to comprehend, a recipe being a catalogue of the ways in which people interact with the land (and supply chains) accessible to them, and the ways in which, through effort and combination, they sought to transform and transcend those limitations. Which is where I think, in the recipe’s smallness and (seeming) simplicity, the ‘epic’ truly enters. 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. 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.

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

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. 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? 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. 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. 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?Perempuan yang mengaku sebagai ibu rumah tangga seringkali diberi tanggapan "ah, cuma ngurus rumah doang". Tapi, emang pekerjaan rumah tangga semudah itu ya? 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.

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