Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson

A bracingly original, boundary-breaking exploration of cooking and the kitchen, from a rising star in food writing.

Small Fires reinvents cooking - that simple act of rolling up our sleeves, wielding a knife, splattering 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 meaning of appetite and bodily pleasure; the wild subversiveness of the recipe; the power of small fires burning everywhere.

[Rebuilds] something epic from morsels of funny memoir, acute social criticism and food writing the likes of which you'll never have read before... Rich in pleasure and revelation - Observer

A manifesto for reclaiming cooking as an intellectual... a rewarding book that stayed with me - and, like all brilliant food writing, it made me think twice about what I choose to eat and who I eat it with... a brave, honest book - Sunday Times

An intense, thought-provoking enquiry into the very nature of cooking, which stayed with me long after I finished it - Nigella Lawson

Destined to become essential reading for anyone interested in writing about food... Bold, beautiful, daring... It is a book that changed me - Rachel Roddy

In Small Fires, Johnson explores how the food we make and the ways we make it-and then the stories we tell about making it-shape who we are. . . . Mixing deeply personal anecdotes with more complex theory, Small Fires is at once relatable and mind-expanding - Vogue US

Insightful, radical, beautiful - Rachel Roddy, Guardian

Revolutionary... this is a book that wakes up the reader's senses and delivers critical arguments "spattered" in oil, like the pages of a much-used recipe book, making them palatable. - Times Literary Supplement

The most compelling book about cooking I've read this year, perhaps ever. Rebecca is a writer of extraordinary intelligence and wit, and I would push this book with feverish enthusiasm into the hands of anyone who spends time in the kitchen. - Jackson Boxer, Evening Standard

Possesses an intellectual fleet footedness and exuberance akin to the writing of Deborah Levy or Rebecca Solnit, as sentences skip between mischievous punning and impassioned agitation... the enthusiasm of the writing here is generous, embracing and emboldening - i news

One of the most original food books I've ever read, at once intelligent and sensuous, witty, provoking and truly delicious, a radical feast of flavours and ideas. - Olivia Laing