Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

‘Revolutionary… this is a book that wakes up the reader’s senses’

Times Literary Supplement

‘Hypnotically riveting and exhilaratingly thought-provoking… this book will forever change your experience of cooking’

Lara Williams, author of The Odyssey

‘Truly unique, truly unusual… It had me rethinking what a recipe is, what cooking is’

Katherine Angel, author of Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again

‘A truly special, boundary breaking book about desire, friendship, food and freedom’

Rebecca Tamás, author of Strangers

‘A smart, creative and thoughtful book… confounds our expectations of what food writing can be’

Ruby Tandoh

‘Spellbinding and completely unique… made me think about my place in the kitchen in ways I never have before’

Annie Lord, author of Notes on Heartbreak

‘Johnson seeks to restore cooking to its rightful place as a form of knowledge—one through which pleasure, desire, and resistance can be expressed’

The New Republic

‘A welcoming, challenging, original meditation on recipes and their use… bears comparison in style and sometimes philosophy to books by Maggie Nelson, Deborah Levy, Eula Biss, and Claudia Rankine, but is trained on a subject for which we expect the prose of M. F. K. Fisher’

L. A. Review of Books

for Zoë

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue in the Kitchen

Apron Strings

The Semiotics of the Kitchen

Cooking is a Method

The Kitchen is a Weaving Room

Hot Red Epic

Tracing the Sauce Text

Unlovely Translations

Refusing the Recipe

Consider the Sausage!

Again and Again, There is That You

Every Day a New Dawn, a New Dish

Afterword: Notes and Recipes on Tomatoes and Cream

Works referenced

Acknowledgements

Available and Coming Soon From

About the Author

Copyright

The village is always on fire.

Men stay away from the kitchens,

take up in outhouses with concrete floors,

while the women – soot in their hair –

initiate the flames into their small routines.

‘Untitled’, Sophie Collins

Poor fool! His food and drink are not of earth.

‘Prologue in Heaven’, Faust,

Goethe, trans. Anna Swanwick

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.

Apron Strings

I begin on the sofa unable to find a reason to get up; I am rescued by a pumpkin and by apron strings.

AUGUST 2018

9.15 a.m.

On the sofa and I can’t get up. I call you to tell you that I cannot write, and you tell me how I’ve got up off the sofa before and spoon my sentences back to me, reheated. And there’s the pumpkin over there, curing on the sunny windowsill. The grazes on its skin from the rough paving outside have hardened and scarred over, a protective dressing: auto-amour.

9.27 a.m.

In the kitchen I look at my knives. I take the heaviest in my hand and let its weight drop onto the green exterior of the pumpkin that I’ve placed on the wooden chopping board. It is very hard, difficult to cut. I grip the handle firmly and push down, flexing my biceps. The blade slices through the flesh suddenly, shockingly. Each piece rocks back on the board, bright orange.

7.18 p.m.

I put on an apron and stand one leg on the grey-veneer IKEA coffee table. The table is in front of a large mirror that hangs behind the sofa and I look at myself. I feel like I am planting a flag on a mountain, big dick energy; I take a photograph. Underneath the apron, which I am wearing tied tight and close to my body so it resists my expanding chest as I breathe, are baggy trousers and a men’s short-sleeved shirt. After looking at the photo on the phone screen I return to the kitchen and melt a sliver of blue cheese into double cream and check on the pumpkin.

7.59 p.m.

Back on the sofa. Soft now, the orange pumpkin slices fan out on the white plate. Blue cream partly covers them like sheets sliding off a bed.

*

Do you have positive feelings about aprons?

Yes and no.

Strings!

The erotics of tying my apron strings, tightly. I prefer aprons made from pliable cotton cloth. After experimentation I find I need fabric soft enough to wrap round my body and then bind it, an embrace for which stiffer fabrics won’t do. I fold up a little of the lower half of the apron to make a corset and pull the strings taut, cinching in. As I cook, the dig of strings into my skin reminds me to keep thinking with my body. Strings under tension bring me back here again here again here again, now again, now.

Long ago, tying an apron felt like tying myself up (and not in a way I would have chosen). Aprons are still threaded through with the image of ‘natural’ feminine destiny, the kind that makes me uncomfortable, that makes me feel like running away.

Cut your apron strings!

I find pleasure in the movement between masculine and feminine. A perpetual undoing. Clothes underneath constrained by the apron ties on top. I need to occupy more than one position at the same time, to construct a superposition of both and neither and then something else too, an opening elsewhere. I find myself in the unresolved movement between different gendered styles. An outfit that is always undoing itself is the best one for me and for my enquiries in the kitchen.

My apron strings return me to my body in the ways I want them to – a binding I have chosen to play with – they maintain the possibility of both, and, and…

here I am!

I’ve been here in the kitchen for ten years or more –

tying and untying the strings

wearing an apron and making it disappear

at the same time,

trying to weave a different kind of apron

The illusion of essentialized gender shatters for me before I am familiar with the language that dismantles the concept; I feel it. The impulse to break up a sentence in which I cannot see myself and which cannot accommodate the ways I want to move my shoulders. Then philosopher Judith Butler gives me the words to describe my untying, of gender as ‘an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts… bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds’. (Judith Butler) And it feels even better and my joy intensifies and I dance dance dance in the kitchen reciting these words.

Gender is an embodied style, for me at least. Again and again, I untie the strings, and retie them, differently. It takes some practice, some years, but I develop a method for tying that is also an untying, for wearing my apron so that I am not dressing for my own erasure –

THE VOICE OF THE APRON IS OURS,

(after Patricia Klindienst Joplin)

sweats and works and thinks and wants,

has a body

apron is an apron is an apron is an apron

(after Gertrude Stein)

When I cut through the pumpkin my body comes alive. Muscles flex my knife in my hand I feel macho, displaying machismo like the arm-wrestling sailors in Jean Paul Gaultier perfume adverts. I think about the gleaming camp of oil-slicked biceps, their tight t-shirts straining over their muscles and the tight apron strings straining over my chest, the cut halves of pumpkin on the wooden board a sign I have won this match. The pleasure and the difficulty of this physicality, of this work.

What I am doing in this apron is not what you think I am doing

in this apron.

I have been trying to say something about Being in the kitchen,

it isn’t easy:

Over ten years or more I return to the apron, to the pan, to the kitchen, again and again in many different kitchens, but it is not repetition, it is insistence. (Gertrude Stein)

Holding a critical position and tasting the sauce, now that’s quantum physics!

The Semiotics of the Kitchen

In the kitchen

In the rough waters between Scylla and Charybdis between a rock and a hard place

between holding a critical position and tasting the sauce,

there are a lot of questions.

In the kitchen I am standing in between Martha Rosler and Nigella Lawson. Criticism and pleasure enter together, holding hands.

On one side, Martha Rosler –

The artist Martha Rosler makes the argument that a woman might simply become an extension of a whisk, and demonstrates this in the film Semiotics of the Kitchen.

On the other side, Nigella Lawson –

The writer and TV-food-celebrity/icon Nigella Lawson makes the argument that women (and everyone else) should pleasure themselves with what they can produce with a whisk and demonstrates this on television.

*

I tell someone that I am thinking about the kitchen, and she tells me about the artist Martha Rosler and her video, Semiotics of the Kitchen. I find it on YouTube and watch: the video begins with a shot of Martha Rosler holding up a sign on a chalkboard that says ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen’. Then, slowly, the camera zooms out to show her standing in front of a refrigerator and an oven. It’s a modern, electrified kitchen. It is 1975. Rosler puts down the sign and I see that she’s wearing a black polo neck. Her hair is worn loose. She picks up an apron and puts it over her clothes. She takes her time fastening it with a button behind her neck and then with a string around her waist and then she says:

‘Apron’

Rosler does not make any gestures of welcome, which I find interesting and unusual. Her voice is firm, and it is negative. There is no charm, no musicality in her tone. She is not welcoming me, and she is not hosting me in this kitchen. ‘Bowl’ comes next, and she picks up a metal mixing bowl and mimes a stirring action. Rosler works her way through the alphabet in this way, picking up an object, making a gesture, saying its name. Her semiotics of the kitchen begins with putting on an apron: dressing appropriately. It is a garment to wear when using kitchen implements, which give specified movements to the apron-wearer. The implements Rosler picks up make shapes out of her body: they implement her to their purpose in the kitchen. She becomes secondary, the engine that drives the tools. A is first in the alphabet, and also A is for Apron, an article of clothing to be worn in the kitchen at the beginning of a day’s work.

‘They say it is love’ (Silvia Federici)

In Wages Against Housework, published in 1975, the femin ist Marxist theorist