At the very opening of her debut book, Small Fires, writer Rebecca May Johnson confesses, “I tried to write about cooking, but I wrote a hot red epic.” While it may sound like a cookbook, the deceptively slender volume—and “hot red epic”—runs a little deeper than that. Small Fires contains only a handful of recipes, and its main star is Marcella Hazan’s tomato and garlic sauce; a beloved dish that first crossed Johnson’s radar not via Hazan’s wildly influential 1992 tome Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, but instead thanks to a 2006 feature in The Guardian, in which it was nominated by the River Cafe’s Ruth Rogers as “best pasta.”
The backstory of how the recipe reached Johnson is just as important as the recipe itself, it turns out. 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. Or, as she says when explaining the point of a prior project, in which she tasked a group of writers with making Claudia Roden’s rice pudding recipe: “to show how a recipe can hold many lives, many inhabitants.” Each writer ended up telling a very different story about making that rice pudding.
Johnson estimates she has cooked Hazan’s tomato sauce—a dish the reader becomes so familiar with, it is often simply referred to as “the recipe”—a thousand times over a ten-year period. She describes the performance of cooking the recipe, whether following the rules (like using five-and-a-half tablespoons of olive oil), or breaking the rules (ripping the basil leaves, rather than finely chopping) in a way that reminds us that the body is at the center of all cooking. “The kind of knowledge that has so often been revered historically is knowledge that is separate from the body,” she says. “If I wanted to write a text against that, I needed to have the body in the frame.”
Johnson, an editor at the cult food newsletter Vittles founded by Jonathan Nunn in 2020, is fascinated by the processes and rituals that surround making food. For her, it’s as much about the eating as the cooking itself; the sharing with another containing stories as rich as the measuring of ingredients. In one passage, she considers the tightness of her apron strings around the body before she begins, exploring the erotics around this, and the fashion: “I fold up a little of the lower half of the apron to make a corset and pull the strings taut, cinching in,” she writes. Her reclamation of the domestic is both comforting and a little sexy. (Johnson attributes her confidence and clarity of voice to lots of therapy and the memorable words of Susan Sontag who, when giving an address to young women graduates adjured: “Be bold, be bold, be bold!”)
Johnson’s own journey with food writing began with the blog she launched in 2011, Dinner Document, serving as a diary of recipes which Johnson credits as the first place she began really “writing for herself.” A viral essay from the blog caught the attention of the food world via Twitter, and in the years since, Johnson has written for the likes of Granta, the Financial Times, and Luncheon magazine, as well as completed a Ph.D. in contemporary literature.
When Johnson first connected with Nunn during the pandemic, she began thinking of new ways to combine her various interests and distill them into new forms. “All the people who are doing these different things are responding to something in the air, a generational shift,” Johnson says of the community of food writers that has formed around Vittles, of which she is now firmly part. “It’s a lack in what the offering had been. It was fairly conservative, there were a few restaurant critics and cookery books. Ruby Tandoh, for example, has written against fatphobic culture and food writing. How wellness culture and stuff like that is being very unhelpful.”
The change, she says, is partly thanks to subscription-based technology like Substack, which hosts Vittles, “so you can actually pay people to do the work—to do the writing in the same way that the internet has given lots of different people space to have a voice.” Interest in Small Fires has already expanded past that community, however, with Lorde writing about Johnson’s work in her newsletter and the original reclaimer of domestic goddess status Nigella Lawson describing the book as having “stayed with me long after I finished it.”
Mixing deeply personal anecdotes—“the sofa is a leitmotif,” Johnson laughs, referring to passages in which she explores those states of depression or exhaustion when beige food is the best food and sinking supine is the only way to be—with more complex theory, Small Fires is at once relatable and mind-expanding. A particularly memorable passage, which Johnson refers to as “the sausage chapter,” slices apart the psychoanalyst DW Winnicott’s description of cooking from a recipe as the antithesis of creativity. “Halfway through writing the book, I had a monster chapter tangled in knots, too much theory,” she explains. “And I was like, why am I not in the kitchen? Then I did the sausage chapter: I transcribed myself dancing around and cooking the sausages.” Sipping beer to a soundtrack of Chaka Khan, our narrator explores her presence in the kitchen, following a recipe while aiming to keep her own creativity intact. Frying up the bangers, she achieves her goal: to blow up the kitchen and then rebuild it, cooking—and thinking critically about cooking—with a generous side helping of joy.
In the period of time between reading Small Fires, then interviewing Johnson, then writing this piece, I myself performed “the recipe” a total of three times. Like Johnson, who wrote the entire second half of the book by hand, I took notes. The book I jotted them down in is now punctuated with red oil stains. As she warns, the sauce spatters and spits, angry and hot on the hob. But the resulting sweet confit of tinned tomatoes slow-cooked in oil and thinly sliced garlic was delicious every time. Don’t just take my word for it, though—if there’s one thing Johnson wants you to do after reading her book, it’s to draw outside the lines of your own favorite recipe.
Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson is out now via Pushkin Press.
