Small fires

Rebecca May Johnson marshals social criticism, memoir and reflections on literature and film to explore what might be gained from taking the kitchen seriously. What does it mean to experience pleasure and freedom in a domestic space that for many women has been a trap? How might a recipe text provide scope for disobedience, and for finding a voice? Could the ties of the apron strings be liberating as well as constricting? In chapters of lively intellectual enquiry, Johnson brings theory and art into everyday life, and into the kitchen. Evading binaries between abstract intellect and bodily pleasure, domesticity and politics, she awakens us to the richness of cooking as a way of experiencing the self and the world.