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Synopses & Reviews
"An intense, thought-provoking enquiry into the very nature of cooking." Nigella Lawson
"One of the most original food books I've ever read, at once intelligent and sensuous, witty, provoking and truly delicious." Olivia Laing
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
This joyful, revelatory work of memory and meditation both complicates and electrifies life in the kitchen.
Why do we cook? Is it just to feed ourselves and others? Or is there something more revolutionary going on?
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 thinking: 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.
Small Fires shows us the radical potential of the thing we do every day: the power of small fires burning everywhere.
Review
"The creative, bracing essays of Rebecca May Johnson's Small Fires redefine the act of cooking and elevate the value of domestic labor... with a combination of intellectual rigor and playfulness, they analyze the emotions, difficulty, and importance involved in offering food to others." Foreword Reviews
Review
"Small Fires is a tender, electric, intimately transformative work. Rebecca May Johnson has written her own glowing epic, reshaping the notion of the recipe as a text alive with possibility. In her hands, recipes become memory objects, acts of translation, expansive spaces full of feeling." Nina Mingya Powles, author of Small Bodies of Water
Review
"Small Fires is a smart, creative and thoughtful book: it challenges us to think more about how and why we cook, and confounds our expectations of what food writing can be." Ruby Tandoh
About the Author
Rebecca May Johnson has published essays, reviews and nonfiction with Granta, Times Literary Supplement and Daunt Books Publishing, among others, and is an editor at the trailblazing food publication Vittles. Small Fires is her first book.