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Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

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Rebecca May Johnson: It genuinely was a moment of revelation in my life. When I first made this recipe, I was living on my own, I was early on in college. It caused a transformation in perspective and it gave me a sense of competence: an unalienating process; the thrill of being able to transform ingredients. It became the foundational grammar for all cooking that followed it, like when you can suddenly understand a language. Perempuan yang mengaku sebagai ibu rumah tangga seringkali diberi tanggapan "ah, cuma ngurus rumah doang". Tapi, emang pekerjaan rumah tangga semudah itu ya? 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. 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. 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.

Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson | Waterstones

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. 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. 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. Why do we cook? Is it just to feed ourselves and others? Or is there something more revolutionary going on?An intense thought-provoking enquiry into the very nature of cooking, which stayed with me long after I finished reading it’ NIGELLA LAWSON 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. It’s interesting stuff! It’s also hard to come up with the sort of insight that’d reel in the big likes (which for me, on goodreads, is anywhere between three and 12) because the book is so refreshingly open and direct about the work it is seeking to do. It treats the recipe as a kind of synecdoche I suppose - a point from which we can look at the way food ties us to certain places, the temporality and atemporality of it all, labour, gender, performance, relationships. It’s a survey, of all the ways RMJ has acted on a recipe and had it act on her in turn. 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. 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.

Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen Paperback Tour Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen Paperback Tour

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

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