Small Fires

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 freedom and fulfilment, especially for women, leads directly out of the kitchen. In this invigorating, revelatory book, Rebecca May Johnson rewrites the kitchen as a space of infinite variety and infinite potential. Weaving together social criticism, memoir and insights from literature and philosophy, she explores the radical openness of the recipe text, the liberating constraint of apron strings and the transformative encounters enabled by cooking. Undoing binaries 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, BOUNDARY BREAKING EXPLORATION OF COOKING AND THE KITCHEN, FROM A RISING STAR IN FOOD WRITING ‘Spellbinding and completely unique’ Annie Lord ‘Liberating… a new way to write about food’ Jonathan Nunn