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Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen - Hardcover

Johnson, Rebecca May

 
9781911590484: Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1911590480 ISBN 13: 9781911590484
Verlag: ONE, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

“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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Prologue in the Kitchen
I tried to write about cooking, but I wrote a hot red epic.

Not sea spray on my skin, but sauce spattering from a pan. The heat of small fires. Tying and untying my apron strings. A recipe that is both the ship that carries me and the hot red sea. In this book, I tell the complicated story of cooking for ten or more years in ten or more kitchens. I tell of the people I encounter, whose desires and refusals rewrite the recipe a thousand times. I tell of what I have learnt.

The contents of this book might have vanished unrecorded – cooked and eaten and washed up, leaving no trace. Documenting what I do in the kitchen can feel like the task of recording almost nothing. But it is the nothing that I am doing, and do almost every day, and have been doing every day for over a decade. It is the nothing that has been part of almost every social interaction of my life as an adult and through which I have come to know almost all the people I love. It is the nothing through which I have been sustained and transformed.

Ten years or more learning to think and to cook unfold in separate spaces, officially at least. I am taught that the work of critical thinking takes place outside of the kitchen, and that cooking in domestic space is not connected to the endeavour of serious thought. It is an exclusion that has limited the shape of our ideas: an imaginative drought, a half-light. If food and thinking coincide, it is in an image of men who have been served dinner, talking face-to-face over the table.

Slowly I realize that when I cook, I am also researching the relationship between the body and language, between self and other; I am learning how to think against a rationalist and patriarchal history of knowledge. This book is a document of that realization: a text that allows cooking into the frame of critical enquiry and in which critical enquiry is shaped by cooking. This does not mean exchanging the kitchen for the library; my clothes must become spattered with oil.

In this book I think about how I wear an apron, use a knife and apply heat with the same attention I apply to the world outside the kitchen. I think about cooking without glossing over its complexity such as I have experienced it. This is an epic of desire, of dancing, of experiments in embodiment and transformative encounters with other people. I want to blow up the kitchen and rebuild it to cook again, critically alert, seeking pleasure and revelation.

Recipe for beginning an epic:

Begin the epic by summoning a body. It will take some effort, so a pumpkin or similar may help. Then decide how to clothe yourself for what lies ahead, and how to dismantle the traps you will encounter on your journey.

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Verlag
ONE
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1911590480
ISBN 13 
9781911590484
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
192
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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