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Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen
Cooking is thinking!The spatter of sauce in a pan, a cook's subtle deviation from a recipe, the careful labour of cooking for loved ones: these are not often the subjects of critical enquiry. Cooking, we are told, has nothing to do with serious thought; the path to intellectual fulfilment leads directly out of the kitchen. In this electrifying, innovative memoir, Rebecca May Johnson rewrites the kitchen as a vital source of knowledge and revelation.
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.
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.
192 pages, Hardcover
Published August 25, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 201 reviews
December 28, 2022
Did i miss smth lol? Why is the general consensus so positive? This book came across as pretentious, grasping at straws of vague arguments that appear—miraculously—out of nowhere. The whole spiel about the misogyny of the word lovely in relation to recipe writing was mind numbing, as well as the random mini essay about misogyny in translation inexplicably crammed in amongst the blabbering about ‘lovely’ and ‘maid.’ I suppose because my academic expertise is in the philosophy of translation of texts this part was especially eye-rolling.
I found a lot of the writing awkward too, “big dick energy” was used an embarrassingly frequent amount of times. The formatting reminiscent of Kaur was a miserable thing to encounter. I don’t like this book at all. For anyone else who is trying to better their relationship with food and fall in love with cooking I advise you pointedly avoid this.
I found a lot of the writing awkward too, “big dick energy” was used an embarrassingly frequent amount of times. The formatting reminiscent of Kaur was a miserable thing to encounter. I don’t like this book at all. For anyone else who is trying to better their relationship with food and fall in love with cooking I advise you pointedly avoid this.
July 24, 2023
Read for a book club, wasn't expecting it to leave such a bad taste in my mouth. I'm all the way down for some sort of novel food-based autotheory, and the memoir sequence that follows 1000 variations on the same recipe over the course of a life was quite nice, but Christ if it isn't overwrought in a lot of other places. Cultural studies concept creep runs rampant throughout (the author did a PhD on the Odyssey, and I believe lifts several paragraphs verbatim from her thesis for sections of this book), leading to absolute clangers such as describing people making food as 'bodies that cook' and one particularly ill-advised section where it is argued that describing food using the epithet 'lovely' 'does violence' to 'marginalised bodies'.
Always liked the idea of a more serious, challenging take on food writing (especially in the UK where the field has historically been dominated by racist posho failchildren) but if you're looking for a big anthropological statement about cooking and food for the general reader (i.e. not just your mates who also write for Vittles) then this unfortunately isn't it. Extra star because I made the pasta al pomodoro recipe from the book and it was fit.
Always liked the idea of a more serious, challenging take on food writing (especially in the UK where the field has historically been dominated by racist posho failchildren) but if you're looking for a big anthropological statement about cooking and food for the general reader (i.e. not just your mates who also write for Vittles) then this unfortunately isn't it. Extra star because I made the pasta al pomodoro recipe from the book and it was fit.
August 21, 2022
very enjoyable and thought-provoking, especially the parts where cooking is not being compared too heavily to rilke poems or the odyssey (we get it, you have a phd, but you don't see me comparing the cooking of pasta to poetic dialogue in the work of pernette du guillet!)
really looking forward to cooking this tomato sauce which is marcella hazan's sugo fresco al pomodoro fwiw. (the internet loves the one with 5 tbsps of butter and onion but it made me throw up. ok bye!)
really looking forward to cooking this tomato sauce which is marcella hazan's sugo fresco al pomodoro fwiw. (the internet loves the one with 5 tbsps of butter and onion but it made me throw up. ok bye!)
February 16, 2023
Deliciously chaotic.
June 29, 2023
Very very tricky to rate this one, but have settled on a solid 3 stars because I enjoyed it more as I persevered. There are some juicy nuggets of writing and on the strength of one essay alone, "Refusing the Recipe" I would definitely read more of Johnson's work (it would be very interesting to read more of her writing on contemporary culture), and I enjoyed the more personal bits about her life. At times though, I found it needlessly bleak, heavy, defensive and overly academic. Sometimes the analyses were so overwrought I felt my eyes glaze over. Johnson was desperately trying to prove the immense complexity and importance of the meanings of food, but did so in a deeply inaccessible, off-putting way. All in all, a mixed bag.
November 21, 2022
Several points for reflection.
Like how we lessen value by adding love into the mixture (or recipe) because love is not reimbursed by money. In our world yes that is to a great extent true but than it is up to each and every one of us to really consider the value of an object or a deed. But a good point to consider.
August 16, 2022
A highly enjoyable and stimulating memoir of how the author's adult life has been shaped by her love of food and cooking. Specifically she focuses on the process of cooking what she calls "the recipe" -- a tomato sauce recipe Johnson found on The Guardian website (by Marcella Hazan) which she has cooked hundreds of times. Incidentally I can't find the link to the actual original recipe - which is funny considering Johnson spends time trying to track down Hazan's original recipe in old, hard to get hold of recipe books - but this recipe seems very similar to the version Johnson uses.
Highly recommended for fans of Relish: My Life in the Kitchen, In the Kitchen: Essays on Food and Life and those who enjoy Nina Mingya Powles writing.
Thank you Netgalley and Pushkin Press for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
Highly recommended for fans of Relish: My Life in the Kitchen, In the Kitchen: Essays on Food and Life and those who enjoy Nina Mingya Powles writing.
Thank you Netgalley and Pushkin Press for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
June 5, 2023
SMALL FIRES was a revelation for this non-cook, through its insights and poetic prose about the culinary life and how cooking has often been viewed as "women's work done out of love," rather than a means to personal growth and insight. The recipes are delicious, the storytelling captivating, the memoir a must-read for anyone who loves cooking, eating, and reflecting. Recommended!
April 11, 2024
this was a wide-reaching yet personal meditation on cooking. i really loved the descriptions of rebecca may johnson cooking the same pasta sauce recipe over and over, and how she connected the way we use recipes with the reception of classical texts (aka how they are read, translated, repurposed, rewritten). it was fun to see the many different ways the dish changed over time, depending on her mood and the people she was cooking for - it reminded me of my own relationship with a specific penne alla vodka recipe (lmao)
i thought a lot of the literary examples and references she brought into the mix were interesting. they almost gave me some familiar footholds within the work and i enjoyed going on the mental journey of thinking deeper about cooking. however, i can see why some reviewers felt some of the arguments and connections made in the book felt farfetched. the majority of the sections talking about the odyssey did not resonate with me, and i felt lost during certain sections of the second half. overall, an interesting experiment that left me wanting to read other food writing.
i thought a lot of the literary examples and references she brought into the mix were interesting. they almost gave me some familiar footholds within the work and i enjoyed going on the mental journey of thinking deeper about cooking. however, i can see why some reviewers felt some of the arguments and connections made in the book felt farfetched. the majority of the sections talking about the odyssey did not resonate with me, and i felt lost during certain sections of the second half. overall, an interesting experiment that left me wanting to read other food writing.
September 25, 2022
I am really torn over what score to give this book. I’m not sure I quite got it in the way it is being raved about here. For the majority it felt overly academic and like notes taken as part of some academic research (which was a struggle to get through) unrelated to this book were turned into a book (I sometimes felt like I was getting the scraps), but every time I almost gave up on it there suddenly were moments of such pure loveliness that I was happy I had continued. Those moments were enough to give me hope to continue, but the cycle kept repeating itself and I really had to force myself to get through it. I don’t think we needed a whole book on this - one newspaper magazine column of the best bits would have been sufficient. Although if she writes a cook book of her recipes I would be interested
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 25, 2025
4.5 stars 🌟
This made me want to cook a nice meal and maybe start a revolution.
No full stop at the end bothered me
This made me want to cook a nice meal and maybe start a revolution.
No full stop at the end bothered me
September 19, 2022
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.
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.
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.
There’s a section here, pretty much dead on half-way, which explores the expectation that a book about cooking, written by a woman, should be (or just would be) ‘lovely’. Which is a sensibility, a rejection of a particular aesthetic, that is threaded through the entirety of the book. I think right down to the grammar. This book often does not contain punctuation where you might expect it, which has the effect of, I think, hardening the prose. It resists being ‘lovely’ by drawing the focus back on the words, removing the softening effect of how punctuation directs or diverts language, that this softening is a means controlling associated the flow of breath. It made me think! Form and content and all that. (and, on which, I think the book’s latter half reads as more relaxed - it’s like the book makes its point, on misogynist receptive frames - and perceptibly untenses. Which is true to how conversations go when you think about it.)
In content as well as the engagement with form - the deployment of a Sophie Collins (a poet who, as a translator, RMJ draws on in the ‘lovely’ chapter) poem as an epigraph feels apt - not just in how RMJ’s prose is frequently poetic, but also in how Collins’s debut demonstrates the ways in which using layout and unexpected injections of space to pace a book can enhance its argument - and also because WIMS interrogates, as Small Fires does, the expectation that female creativity should happen along quite set, controlled lines, which inhibit reception as much as creation. There’s a fantastic poem, from the same collection, ‘Healers’, about the scaffold on the outside of a church in Vladimir. I can’t find a way to really articulate why I find that poem of relevance to this book but I do. It’s a poem about church scaffolding that it also about gendered labour and its elision, I think. It’s a truly great poem in a collection not really short of them. I’m gonna go re-read Sophie Collins now.
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.
——
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.
——
As a digression, Small Fires is an execution of an approach that works so well, in relation to food writing, it made me surprised to have not really come across it before. I want this book but it is about every time someone went to McDonalds, and what they ordered. McDonalds - in the ways in which it is great (never good!, but great) and the ways in which it is terrible - has emerged as I think the UK in the 2010s and 2020s as, kind of, our stolovayas - on top of which too, a strange substitute for the near-absence of any truly public space in our town centres. McDonalds as architecture and a kind of public infrastructure is really interesting I think - it is a *space* in a way a Burger King or KFC quite pointedly are not. As a further digression - really want to emphasise that we - as a culture - have note carved out space to mourn the passing of the imperial era of the double cheese - once they removed the heated racks, which had them sit and congeal for 15-20 mins, it was all over. Maybe *the* classic fast food item no longer exists in its ideal form and we’ve not come to terms with that as a society. I’m half minded to start taking out pocket warmers with me and sandwich the double cheeses between some of those every time I order (which is two-to-five times a week on average).
—-
Also yea right after finishing i made the recipe, or a version of because i messed it up almost immediately. Good shit.
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.
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.
There’s a section here, pretty much dead on half-way, which explores the expectation that a book about cooking, written by a woman, should be (or just would be) ‘lovely’. Which is a sensibility, a rejection of a particular aesthetic, that is threaded through the entirety of the book. I think right down to the grammar. This book often does not contain punctuation where you might expect it, which has the effect of, I think, hardening the prose. It resists being ‘lovely’ by drawing the focus back on the words, removing the softening effect of how punctuation directs or diverts language, that this softening is a means controlling associated the flow of breath. It made me think! Form and content and all that. (and, on which, I think the book’s latter half reads as more relaxed - it’s like the book makes its point, on misogynist receptive frames - and perceptibly untenses. Which is true to how conversations go when you think about it.)
In content as well as the engagement with form - the deployment of a Sophie Collins (a poet who, as a translator, RMJ draws on in the ‘lovely’ chapter) poem as an epigraph feels apt - not just in how RMJ’s prose is frequently poetic, but also in how Collins’s debut demonstrates the ways in which using layout and unexpected injections of space to pace a book can enhance its argument - and also because WIMS interrogates, as Small Fires does, the expectation that female creativity should happen along quite set, controlled lines, which inhibit reception as much as creation. There’s a fantastic poem, from the same collection, ‘Healers’, about the scaffold on the outside of a church in Vladimir. I can’t find a way to really articulate why I find that poem of relevance to this book but I do. It’s a poem about church scaffolding that it also about gendered labour and its elision, I think. It’s a truly great poem in a collection not really short of them. I’m gonna go re-read Sophie Collins now.
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.
——
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.
——
As a digression, Small Fires is an execution of an approach that works so well, in relation to food writing, it made me surprised to have not really come across it before. I want this book but it is about every time someone went to McDonalds, and what they ordered. McDonalds - in the ways in which it is great (never good!, but great) and the ways in which it is terrible - has emerged as I think the UK in the 2010s and 2020s as, kind of, our stolovayas - on top of which too, a strange substitute for the near-absence of any truly public space in our town centres. McDonalds as architecture and a kind of public infrastructure is really interesting I think - it is a *space* in a way a Burger King or KFC quite pointedly are not. As a further digression - really want to emphasise that we - as a culture - have note carved out space to mourn the passing of the imperial era of the double cheese - once they removed the heated racks, which had them sit and congeal for 15-20 mins, it was all over. Maybe *the* classic fast food item no longer exists in its ideal form and we’ve not come to terms with that as a society. I’m half minded to start taking out pocket warmers with me and sandwich the double cheeses between some of those every time I order (which is two-to-five times a week on average).
—-
Also yea right after finishing i made the recipe, or a version of because i messed it up almost immediately. Good shit.
Read
May 3, 2023An 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.
"Nigella's use of possessive pronouns unsettles me too. My chocolate cake, my quick paste, my upmarket mushy peas. They are all declared delicious...The possessive pronouns come across as boastful, greedy, even immodest."
"Spattering is not mentioned in the recipe. The text does not anticipate the liveliness of the process it describes, which spatters wildly"
"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"
-
Thanks to the publisher for a copy of the book
"Nigella's use of possessive pronouns unsettles me too. My chocolate cake, my quick paste, my upmarket mushy peas. They are all declared delicious...The possessive pronouns come across as boastful, greedy, even immodest."
"Spattering is not mentioned in the recipe. The text does not anticipate the liveliness of the process it describes, which spatters wildly"
"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"
-
Thanks to the publisher for a copy of the book
February 5, 2024
This book really was a ride. The first half I found really quite annoying! But the passages about food and describing meals and the act of cooking just pulled me along because those are my kryptonite I just love that shit. Along the way the author’s britishness and academicness went from tolerable to endearing (I honestly loved the essay where she went OFF on Winnicott for being a little bitch who doesn’t understand women or cooking) and in the end it all came together as a love letter to the recipe and the performance score that is cooking from one - something that touched me deeply as a lover of recipes and performance. Ultimately, this book and I were enemies to lovers!! What fun.
April 13, 2024
oh she ate!!!!
this is an english student's dream lol. yeah it is pretentious but it's actually good so it's fine!!!
some parts i had to stop and write down:
'eat it with your beer. when your melancholy begins to lessen, put on a song that cheers you and spin round three times. wash up tomorrow.'
'but on parting you say i have come to see you, and i almost can't bear it. you say you would happily just eat chips and sit on the green table and talk, and it goes round in my head for serval days. i came to see you - the food is lovely - but i came to see you. the thought makes me cry.'
this is an english student's dream lol. yeah it is pretentious but it's actually good so it's fine!!!
some parts i had to stop and write down:
'eat it with your beer. when your melancholy begins to lessen, put on a song that cheers you and spin round three times. wash up tomorrow.'
'but on parting you say i have come to see you, and i almost can't bear it. you say you would happily just eat chips and sit on the green table and talk, and it goes round in my head for serval days. i came to see you - the food is lovely - but i came to see you. the thought makes me cry.'
November 12, 2024
the feminist kitchen read i didnt know i needed
December 6, 2022
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Dari segala perseteruan tentang memasak, aku tetap berpikir memasak adalah caraku untuk lebih dekat dengan orang lain. Tembok bisa runtuh dengan cookies gratis yang ku bawa ke bookclub, cinnamon roll untuk teman yang sakit, dan pudding untuk adik yang pulang kuliah. "Cooking is the tool I use to draw close to other people, though closeness makes me anxious. Cooking is how I manage closeness."
Buku ini mungkin bukan buat semua orang, tapi sebagai orang yang menikmati proses di dapur, aku senang dikenalkan dengan perspektif lain tentang memasak. Untukku, Small Fires adalah kumpulan essay yang mengenalkan cara pandang lain dari buku memasak biasa dan stereotipe pekerjaan domestik yang patut diapresiasi.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dari segala perseteruan tentang memasak, aku tetap berpikir memasak adalah caraku untuk lebih dekat dengan orang lain. Tembok bisa runtuh dengan cookies gratis yang ku bawa ke bookclub, cinnamon roll untuk teman yang sakit, dan pudding untuk adik yang pulang kuliah. "Cooking is the tool I use to draw close to other people, though closeness makes me anxious. Cooking is how I manage closeness."
Buku ini mungkin bukan buat semua orang, tapi sebagai orang yang menikmati proses di dapur, aku senang dikenalkan dengan perspektif lain tentang memasak. Untukku, Small Fires adalah kumpulan essay yang mengenalkan cara pandang lain dari buku memasak biasa dan stereotipe pekerjaan domestik yang patut diapresiasi.
Read
June 1, 2023I 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.
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.
The narrative thread follows a logical trajectory, and readers are given glimpses of Johnson’s life and backstory but not too much insight…Just enough to keep you coming back for more, like a delicious meal you can’t get enough of!
There is a lot to unpack in such a short piece, but I think that Johnson’s execution is pretty appetizing—and I’m not even a fan of personal nonfiction narratives (personal essays, memoirs, autobiographies, etc…)! So imagine my surprise when I finished this, thought back on the work and my enjoyment level while reading it and realized that I was quite impressed with it! I’ve read Nina Mingya Powles short work, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (2020) and didn’t enjoy it, but did enjoy Nigella Lawson’s even shorter work, Eating: Vintage Minis (2017). So I admit that I did feel some trepidation when I requested Small Fires, but am I ever glad that I did.
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!
Now, my mission is to find Marcella Hazan's sugo fresco al pomodoro recipe! Wish me luck!!
Many thanks to NetGalley and Pushkin Press for allowing me to read an ARC of Rebecca May Johnson’s newest title: Small Fires.
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.
The narrative thread follows a logical trajectory, and readers are given glimpses of Johnson’s life and backstory but not too much insight…Just enough to keep you coming back for more, like a delicious meal you can’t get enough of!
There is a lot to unpack in such a short piece, but I think that Johnson’s execution is pretty appetizing—and I’m not even a fan of personal nonfiction narratives (personal essays, memoirs, autobiographies, etc…)! So imagine my surprise when I finished this, thought back on the work and my enjoyment level while reading it and realized that I was quite impressed with it! I’ve read Nina Mingya Powles short work, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (2020) and didn’t enjoy it, but did enjoy Nigella Lawson’s even shorter work, Eating: Vintage Minis (2017). So I admit that I did feel some trepidation when I requested Small Fires, but am I ever glad that I did.
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!
Now, my mission is to find Marcella Hazan's sugo fresco al pomodoro recipe! Wish me luck!!
Many thanks to NetGalley and Pushkin Press for allowing me to read an ARC of Rebecca May Johnson’s newest title: Small Fires.
October 12, 2022
Such a rigorous interrogation of how when we (I) talk, think and write about cooking as an act of love and the unpaid labour and nuance doing so erases. A really interesting counterpoint to my own work. It’s also the most beautiful, scholarly and multi-dimensional exploration of a recipe, treated as an epic, I have ever read. This book celebrates the recipe for all it is on the page and all it becomes when we cook it. If you want to encounter thinking and writing that will light a small fire in your mind, it’s here in this book. Food writing at its finest.
April 16, 2024
I like reading books by people who think about food as much as I do. I like the stuff on a recipe coming alive in a different form each time it is made.
But quite repetitive and pretentious at times, felt like hard work to read. I wanted to be sucked in but was a bit bored
But quite repetitive and pretentious at times, felt like hard work to read. I wanted to be sucked in but was a bit bored
December 7, 2025
v interesting read if a bit convoluted at times, love love loved the building of a memoir around a single recipe + the idea of “translating” the written recipe into food + insisting that the cooking of mothers/grandmothers/wives is work, not just “made with love”
October 8, 2022
At first I thought it was written in too academic of a style to be truly interesting, but once I let go of that I really enjoyed it! Definitely going to make the sauce
January 27, 2023
loved this, so so fervently.
April 27, 2024
She cooked
April 5, 2024
I struggled with this book in the best way.
It's hard to define the premise. It's for sure genre bending. Sometimes, I felt like throwing it across the room because she was getting so caught up in making an academic study of cooking.
But sometimes, she hit on a sustained meditation on cooking as a path of understanding self and as a path toward connecting with others that really made me purr.
I think the reason I struggled so much is because, as an English major(and Aquarius)turned cook, I find myself sometimes wanting to make feeding people into a PHD. I saw too much of myself in her attempts to intellectualize.
But there's so much beauty here, some sentences about cooking to comfort and cooking to know and cooking to reach out even across time and distance that floored me.
A truly unique and courageous and special book.
It's hard to define the premise. It's for sure genre bending. Sometimes, I felt like throwing it across the room because she was getting so caught up in making an academic study of cooking.
But sometimes, she hit on a sustained meditation on cooking as a path of understanding self and as a path toward connecting with others that really made me purr.
I think the reason I struggled so much is because, as an English major(and Aquarius)turned cook, I find myself sometimes wanting to make feeding people into a PHD. I saw too much of myself in her attempts to intellectualize.
But there's so much beauty here, some sentences about cooking to comfort and cooking to know and cooking to reach out even across time and distance that floored me.
A truly unique and courageous and special book.
Read
August 3, 2022I don't think I've ever read a memoir quite like this - a mix of beautiful food writing and musings on greek mythology.
This book will make you hungry! The food writing is extremely evocative, Rebecca May Johnson is very gifted in this department and reading it not only made me very hungry, but made me specifically crave what she was writing about. The chapter detailing the many times she has made a certain recipe throughout her life was an absolute joy to read and I will no doubt be attempting the same recipe since I can't get it out of my head!
At times it did feel a bit disjointed but it wasn't long before I was pulled back in again as some delicious morsel was being described.
Read via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
This book will make you hungry! The food writing is extremely evocative, Rebecca May Johnson is very gifted in this department and reading it not only made me very hungry, but made me specifically crave what she was writing about. The chapter detailing the many times she has made a certain recipe throughout her life was an absolute joy to read and I will no doubt be attempting the same recipe since I can't get it out of my head!
At times it did feel a bit disjointed but it wasn't long before I was pulled back in again as some delicious morsel was being described.
Read via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
June 13, 2023
“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.
“The kitchen is a space for theorizing!”
While completing a PhD on the reception of The Odyssey and its translation history, Johnson began to think about dishes as translations, or even performances, of a recipe. In two central chapters, “Hot Red Epic” and “Tracing the Sauce Text,” she reckons that she has cooked the same fresh Italian tomato sauce, with nearly infinite small variations, a thousand times over ten years. Where she lived, what she looked like, who she cooked for: so many external details changed, but this most improvisational of dishes stayed the same.
Just a peek at the authors cited in her bibliography – not just the expected subjects like MFK Fisher and Nigella Lawson but also Goethe, Lorde, Plath, Stein, Weil, Winnicott – gives you an idea of how wide-ranging and academically oriented the book is, delving into the psychology of cooking and eating. Oh yes, there will be Freudian sausages. There are also her own recipes, of a sort: one is a personal prose piece (“Bad News Potatoes”) and another is in poetic notation, beginning “I made Mrs Beeton’s / recipe for frying sausages”.
“The recipe is an epic without a hero.”
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.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
“The kitchen is a space for theorizing!”
While completing a PhD on the reception of The Odyssey and its translation history, Johnson began to think about dishes as translations, or even performances, of a recipe. In two central chapters, “Hot Red Epic” and “Tracing the Sauce Text,” she reckons that she has cooked the same fresh Italian tomato sauce, with nearly infinite small variations, a thousand times over ten years. Where she lived, what she looked like, who she cooked for: so many external details changed, but this most improvisational of dishes stayed the same.
Just a peek at the authors cited in her bibliography – not just the expected subjects like MFK Fisher and Nigella Lawson but also Goethe, Lorde, Plath, Stein, Weil, Winnicott – gives you an idea of how wide-ranging and academically oriented the book is, delving into the psychology of cooking and eating. Oh yes, there will be Freudian sausages. There are also her own recipes, of a sort: one is a personal prose piece (“Bad News Potatoes”) and another is in poetic notation, beginning “I made Mrs Beeton’s / recipe for frying sausages”.
“The recipe is an epic without a hero.”
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.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
May 22, 2023
*This book was received as an Advanced Reader's Copy from NetGalley.
I went from not being able to sink into this book, to largely enjoying it by the end. When it's tagged as 'an epic in the kitchen' I didn't realize just how literal that would be. But it's not just the food that makes this a standout book, but rather the way the author weaves philosophy, feminism, and sociology, although with a dash of classics into the mix.
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.
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.
If you like highly descriptive books and food, with those that combine serious thought, this is one to check out.
Review by M. Reynard 2023
I went from not being able to sink into this book, to largely enjoying it by the end. When it's tagged as 'an epic in the kitchen' I didn't realize just how literal that would be. But it's not just the food that makes this a standout book, but rather the way the author weaves philosophy, feminism, and sociology, although with a dash of classics into the mix.
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.
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.
If you like highly descriptive books and food, with those that combine serious thought, this is one to check out.
Review by M. Reynard 2023
October 6, 2023
4 stars!
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!!!
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.
Excited to keep exploring food writing as a genre!
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!!!
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.
Excited to keep exploring food writing as a genre!
August 31, 2022
A perfect post Proust respite indeed!
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.
RIGHT ON I SAY !!
The only thing I was a tad disappointed with, was the lack of actual food related chatter (or should I say splatter), which was instead replaced by more “academic” attention -mostly ruminating on poetry and Greek mythology -specifically The Odyssey, which I definitely did not expect, though somewhat enjoyed…
Anyway, I digress.
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!
4 stars
PS thanks again to Pushkin Press for sending me a copy to review !
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.
RIGHT ON I SAY !!
The only thing I was a tad disappointed with, was the lack of actual food related chatter (or should I say splatter), which was instead replaced by more “academic” attention -mostly ruminating on poetry and Greek mythology -specifically The Odyssey, which I definitely did not expect, though somewhat enjoyed…
Anyway, I digress.
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!
4 stars
PS thanks again to Pushkin Press for sending me a copy to review !
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