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A new book by the British academic Rebecca May Johnson urges a radical rethinking of just what goes on in the kitchen. For starters, don’t call cooking a labor of love.
What don’t we talk about when we talk about cooking? When you forward a recipe to a friend, do you mention the spatters of oil, the physicality of wielding a pan, the nagging feeling that you don’t want to cook or the clean satisfaction of tying an apron string?
These ignored conversations inspired the English writer and academic Rebecca May Johnson’s first book, “Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen,” which aims to upend not only the way we cook but the way we think about cooking. The book regards recipes as sites of dynamic, creative engagement across generations — and notes that most bragging about not following a recipe is simply a defensive response to anxiety about originality. “Small Fires,” which is out on Tuesday in the United States, is brave enough to hurt feelings, and delicious enough for no one to care.
Over a video call from her home kitchen in a coastal town in Essex that’s about 80 miles northeast of London, Ms. Johnson made the playful yet provocative argument that we must “blow up the kitchen.” For Ms. Johnson, it’s a “childish but serious” phrase that reflects her genuine interest in dismantling repressive structures as well as finding greater pleasure in cooking. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.
“Small Fires” includes many passages in which you don’t want to cook, or you can’t cook, you’re ordering in, you’re exhausted. This feels unusual in a work about cooking, but very usual in the lives of many cooks. Tell me about your decision to write these passages.
There’s a shamefulness attached to nonproductivity. It was a bit of a nervous moment thinking: “Oh, am I going to put this in the text, that I’ve spent three days on the sofa and I’ve done nothing? I’m eating frozen pizza.” But then I realized that this was valid. This was a valuable part of the picture of cooking as well. It wasn’t planned ahead of time, it wasn’t in my book proposal. I let reality into the book because cooking is an alive and embodied thing. As I grew more confident in writing the book, I became more confident in allowing my fatigue into the book rather than just pretending everything’s fine all the time.
There’s a pressure on people writing food books — especially women writing food books, and people of color writing food books — to perform joy, to perform ceaseless energy, and to be pleasing at all times. You’re visually pleasing, your body is visually pleasing, the food is visually pleasing, and the text is visually pleasing. There’s nothing to disturb or distress. That’s also something that holds back thinking about cooking from getting very complex.
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