Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

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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. 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.” Menurut penulis, cooking is thinking (dan aku SANGAT setuju, cooking is also science). Memasak sama sulitnya dengan pekerjaan lain yang membutuhkan keahlian spesifik. Ya kita bisa memasak dengan cinta, namun bukan berarti kita dapat menyepelekan proses memasak itu sendiri. 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.

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

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. 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. 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. I feel like I am maybe the exact right audience for this book, in an extremely specific way. Like it was written for me to read at this moment in time. Serendipitously I have been working my way through Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey for the last few weeks. Yesterday when I was 1/4 of the way through Small Fires I found a copy of Marcella Hazans 'Essentials of Italian Cooking' in the thrift store. I had always been interested in owning a copy but didn't realize I til today how perfectly timed this discovery was.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.

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

Mungkin kita hanya melihat hasil akhirnya di piring, kita tanpa sadar meremehkan proses memasak. Sejak belajar untuk memasak di kala pandemi, aku menyadari bahwa memasak itu sulit. Dibutuhkan lebih dari 3 jam untuk membuat roti yang habis dalam 5 menit. Belum lagi mata yang berair karena mengupas bawang dan kulit yang terkena percikan minyak panas. Dan yang paling menyebalkan: semua usaha itu sia-sia karena yang dimasakin lebih memilih buat makan indomie. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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 - Goodreads

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. 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. 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. Why do we cook? Is it just to feed ourselves and others? Or is there something more revolutionary going on? 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"An intense thought-provoking enquiry into the very nature of cooking, which stayed with me long after I finished reading it’ NIGELLA LAWSON