Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

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A BRACINGLY ORIGINAL, BOUNDARY BREAKING EXPLORATION OF COOKING AND THE KITCHEN, FROM A RISING STAR IN FOOD WRITING

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

Small Fires membahas salah satu pekerjaan rumah tangga yang seringkali disepelekan: memasak. Misalnya, 1) perempuan yang memasak terlihat bahagia, 2) memasak adalah tanda cinta, 3) dan yang paling sering kita dengar, love is the secret ingredients. Namun, penulis kurang setuju dengan stereotipe ini.

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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. 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. 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! 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. 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.

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One of the most original food books I’ve ever read, at once intelligent and sensuous, witty, provoking and truly delicious’ Olivia Laing 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. 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. I didn’t make any changes. My editor at Pushkin loved the weirdest bits the most. I was expecting to be told off; I sent them a much weirder book than I said I was going to write.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.

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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.Possesses an intellectual fleet footedness and exuberance akin to the writing of Deborah Levy or Rebecca Solnit’ I NEWS Why do we cook? Is it just to feed ourselves and others? Or is there something more revolutionary going on? When it gets to the point of being written down, it’s a form of knowledge that is trying to empower many people to do something. It’s not a text that is jealously guarded; you write it down because you want to spread knowledge. You want to empower many hands to come to a realization of how they can transform matter in their everyday lives and give themselves pleasure and give other people pleasure — I think that’s amazing. 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. 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.

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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. 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. 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 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. 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.An enjoyable book! About how we diminish the 'work' that goes into cooking in the name of 'love'. About recipes—what they bring to the table, what they don't, how we follow a recipe (to the dot, intuition, no measurement cooking etc. I def did not know about the 'no-recipe recipe book by New york Times editor Sam Sifton). Describing each cooking session as a performance. About Nigella Lawson's use of possessives in the way she describes her cooking and food. About MFK Fischer's thoughts on food. About navigating life through different hairstyles and food—the slow transformation. One of the most original food books I’ve ever read, at once intelligent and sensuous, witty, provoking and truly delicious.” -- Olivia Laing 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. 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? Really, you need to tap into your own freaky clown self to write something that’s truthful and authentic.”