Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson

Filling and Emptying

Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson is classed as food writing but that’s a gross simplification of what it really is. It’s one of those books that tentatively agrees to share space with other food writing, then sneaks a whole bunch of other things in alongside thoughts of sausages and the best way to cook tomato sauce. Only Johnson doesn’t really do sneaking. Here, thoughts of sausages sit proudly, side by side with thoughts about Homer and the nature of translation. Cooking tomato sauce is examined alongside clubbing at Berghain. Tying an apron leads to thoughts on gender and containment, bondage and sexuality. Everything here is everything else. Johnson’s narrative fills a tired, empty form with new life. This is a work of examination and elevation.

Johnson looks at how cooking and those who cook are frequently dismissed as artists, thinkers and creators because cooking is traditionally women’s work and therefore valueless.

Exploring where she sits amongst all these thoughts and ideas she revisits a single dish a thousand times over many years of cooking it. Her relationship with it changes depending on mood, place, time, economy, available ingredients and who, if anyone, she shares it with. It becomes a barometer of self.

The writing is full of unresolved tensions with which Johnson plays. Play is something else she writes about. Play lets us try on various realities and figure out which bits we want to keep and which bits we don’t. Play is vital if we find ourselves stuck in a version of ourselves we don’t much care for. Play allows us to challenge the status quo, to find out if this nourishes us, or this, or this? Play feeds the mind as food feeds the body. Together they are powerful, which is probably why the patriarchal narrative around food seeks to diminish or hide it. If the true power of the cook (not the chef) was acknowledged, women wielding spoons would be as feared as men wielding swords.

Johnson looks at ways to nourish the self, both through the physical act of preparing and eating food and the mental act of examining what that feels like and what it means in any given moment. In discussing cooking alongside Homer’s Odyssey and her thoughts on translation she finds a more comfortable place to situate herself than that of a relentlessly happy house elf.

As a domestic drudge, happiness is demanded, whether it is felt or not, in order to create the illusion of the joyful cook who takes pleasure in feeding others. It disguises the hard work and inequality of the social contract between the person cooking and those being fed. It puts the needs of the diners over the needs of the cook.

The cook not only cooks, but also serves. There is an unspoken idea that the cook is nourished by service and work, not by the food they make. Rather like the magic porridge pot, they become the vessel and the means by which it keeps pouring. There is no acknowledgment of the fact that they also have to make the porridge. The happy cook who just makes food appear is the ‘magic’ element that denies the work involved and the potential lack of nourishment for the cook themselves.

In the version of herself that she writes here, Johnson navigates an uneasy path towards the possibility of freedom, empowerment and liberation of self. She cooks through grief and love, through doubt and conviction, through community and isolation. She looks at how she can reclaim the act of cooking and nourish herself from a poverty inducing, patriarchal lack into a more inclusive, diverse, generous abundance.

I found the most powerful parts of Johnson’s writing the articulation of her doubt and confusion. There are times when she ensnares herself in what she is trying to do. It is very difficult to find your own bliss in a medium which has become co-opted by a far more punishing narrative. It reminded me of Claire Ratinon’s fantastic book, Unearthed, in which she attempts to reclaim gardening from her family’s history of enslavement on the land and find a place for herself, liberated from racism and the white, upper class fiction of what gardening is today.

It is hard to find a way through the complexities of what cooking means at an emotional or meta level because for so many of us, cooking is a necessity. We have to find ways to feed ourselves and/or our families which nourish us, the cooks as much as the people we cook for. We often fall short. From my own perspective, there are so many times over the years where this has felt like a thankless task and one in which, with every meal I have put on the table I have felt less and less nourished myself.

I am a good cook. I love food. But in the last few years I have fallen out of love with cooking. My relationship with it has, for a long time, involved putting the needs of others above my own. I have cooked food I do not want to eat and served it on countless occasions, at times I don’t want to eat it. I have fed others at the expense of myself. I have spent untold hours thinking about what to feed people who simply expect the food to be on the table without any thought as to what it took to put it there.

I have lived through the horrors of a flourishing eating disorder in which mealtimes became a minefield and every waking moment was taken up with negotiations about what and how much of anything I could serve. The obsessive need to talk and think about food and the equally obsessive need to reject it outright that tore through our family until we were all mad with it has been hard to recover from, for all of us.

I have come to resent cooking as an act of sacrifice and a love that largely goes unrecognised. It happened when the children were small because there are only so many chicken nuggets one woman can bear. It’s happening again as our family fractures and shifts with the pressures that have shaped it in recent months. When my work was raising a family, cooking for them seemed a necessary part of the contract. Now that my role has changed, I don’t always want to, and yet it feels as if there is a largely unspoken expectation that I should.

Just writing this feels transgressive. It’s not that I get the ‘where’s my dinner?’ speech, but there are times when this seems to be the unspoken thrust of certain conversations. Nobody makes me cook, but there are times when it feels like they want to. Of course, this could be my own internalised guilt here. A good mother feeds her family. If I don’t feed my family, I must be a bad mother.

I spend a lot of time feeling like a bad mother.

As Johnson points out in her brilliant book, nourishment is far more complex than a hotpot served at six o’clock every evening. Nourishment flows through all kinds of activities. It is the way in which we feed ourselves that is as important as what we feed ourselves. We need to feed ourselves emotionally and spiritually as well as physically. Missing out one of the steps means that the others become unbalanced and the threat of starvation looms.

For me, recent events have meant that I feel constantly depleted. I have been pouring the emotional porridge pot again and again, but demand has been so relentless that I have been unable to keep up with the porridge production required. I have been so focussed on getting it on the table that I forgot to to make it. I have stopped cooking, emotionally and physically. And now, even if I wanted to feed others, I can’t. The cupboard is bare.

I need to learn to fill myself up again. I need to learn to feed myself in a way that doesn’t deny who I am and what I need. Johnson writes about how she began to appreciate the radical way in which Nigella Lawson feeds herself as if it is a spell:

‘…as if to seal the effect of her spell, Nigella pours enough double cream over the pudding to half-fill the bowl, takes it away and eats it, alone. I am reminded of Susan Sontag’s ‘BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD!’, said not once but three times in an address to young women graduates. Three times to make it stick. The bad thing is not going to happen if you give yourself three helpings of pudding, if you let yourself exist.’

To let myself exist, I am required to feed myself, for myself in whatever way I need, whenever I choose. Whether that’s having three helpings of pudding or a sausage sandwich is my business. Only I know what it will take to fill me up, but Johnson has given me some ideas as to how to go about it.