So far I’m sticking to my vague plan and reading foodie lit, like it’s 2020 all over again. At the same time, I’m tackling a few books that I received as review copies last year but that have been on my set-aside pile for longer than I’d like to admit. Later in the summer I’ll branch out from the food theme, but always focusing on books I own and have been meaning to read.
Without further ado, my first of 20 Books of Summer:
Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson (2022)
“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. 
With thanks to Pushkin Press for the free copy for review.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 
I read this last summer, and was completely underwhelmed by it. The more it went on, the less I cared. Against expectations.
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Alas, I have to agree: I usually love a food-based memoir, but this didn’t particularly engage me.
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I really wanted to read this but heard a very negative review from a colleague (essentially the same as yours: too much theory) that fully put me off. Shame—it’s a promising premise!
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It does seem like a book for you. Your mileage may vary!
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I get very annoyed with theory-heads on my PhD, so I’m kinda up in the air on this one…
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I failed to mention it’s only 180 pages, in case that’s a consideration.
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I’m sorry to hear that this one didn’t work for you or for other readers in the comments, because the idea does seem so good! I tend to like books with many different formats and wide-ranging essays, but I suspect the focus on theory would put me off too.
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It felt a little bit too niche, spinning out from her own personal obsessions.
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Seems a bit like it could have been left as a diary or a blog or something! Still, one down on 20Books! I’m currently underwhelmed by book number erm in mine (I’m behind on reviewing after a reading spurt) but hoping it will pick up.
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That’s a good point — could have been a blog!
I’ve only finished the one so far, so I’m setting myself lots of catching up in July and August. I’m partway through another several, though, and might get a chance to review them this weekend.
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Five, I’ve read five and just finished reviewing them (have scheduled the reviews). I’m doing better than I usually do but also have a massive Shiny review book, a paperback I asked for from the publisher when I saw it on their email and a book a man emailed me about and I said yes and now it’s 500 pages …
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[…] purge the desire to write like a man,” which on one level is about making tomato sauce (as is Small Fires) but ends with a “found incantation” from Natalia Ginzburg that reclaims the female realm of […]
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