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

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

Possesses an intellectual fleet footedness and exuberance akin to the writing of Deborah Levy or Rebecca Solnit’ I NEWS 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.

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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. A bracingly original, revelatory debut that explores cooking and the kitchen as sources of pleasure, constraint and revolution, by a rising star in food writing Radical, liberating, challenging -and at times emotional, this book really does help awaken (and rekindle), the little fires burning within all of us foodie feminists! 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. 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.

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

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.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? 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. 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. 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. 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.