Small Fires

<b>** INCLUDES A NEW AFTERWORD AND RECIPES ** <p/>An intense thought-provoking enquiry into the very nature of cooking. -- Nigella Lawson <p/>One of the most original food books I've ever read at once intelligent and sensuous witty provoking and truly delicious. -- Olivia Laing <p/>A bracingly original revelatory debut that explores cooking and the kitchen as sources of pleasure constraint and revolution by a rising star in food writing</b> <p/>This joyful revelatory work of memory and meditation both complicates and electrifies life in the kitchen. <p/>Why do we cook? Is it just to feed ourselves and others? Or is there something more revolutionary going on? <p/>In <i>Small Fires</i> Rebecca May Johnson reinvents cooking -- that simple act of rolling up our sleeves wielding a knife spattering 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 transformative dynamics of shared meals; the meaning of appetite and bodily pleasure; the wild subversiveness of the recipe beyond words or control. <p/><i>Small Fires</i> shows us the radical potential of the thing we do every day: the power of small fires burning everywhere. <p/>The paperback edition includes a new afterword and recipes for Ten-Minute Tomatoes and Cream Pasta Meatballs with Tomato and Tarragon Cream Sauce plus other ideas for tomato and cream combinations and platings inspired by a visit to the archive of groundbreaking English food writer Elizabeth David.