The Recipe is an Epic: An Interview with Rebecca May Johnson
A sauce made with tomato, garlic, olive oil, and basil sustains me through life's multiplicities. And when I'm not cooking, I'm reading. Rebecca May Johnson's Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen provides ten years' worth of thought and experiment that cajoles and demands that the recipe be held dearly. Rebecca cracks open one tomato sauce recipe to question the meaning of cooking and life, making space for anyone open to complicated answers.
The fiery sauce runs in my family. It was first introduced to my grandfather, whose family was originally from Ireland, by his step-father, a first-generation Italian immigrant. My grandfather loved it so much his wife learned to cook it to please him. My mother made it because she ate it growing up, and I followed the same way. Sometimes I add capers or chopped olives to sizzle in the oil. The recipe lives in my head and the repetitions of my body. My step-great-grandfather died before I was born, but the sauce stayed alive. It was something on which we could agree, something that was safe.
Like tomato sauce and family, this interview only exists through interconnection. Small Fires came to me because Alicia Kennedy, who writes From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, retweeted the opportunity to get an early copy. I came to Autofocus because I was pointed in their direction during a Morning Writing Club Q&A with Chelsea Hodson. This book and interview accompanied me for almost nine months, a reminder of the power of writing and reading to make life less lonely.
Over the last two years, I've become estranged from the extended family who first served me tomato sauce. Sometimes I considered rejecting the food that bound us together, as it didn't seem like mine anymore. Now the pot of sauce simmering on the stove reminds me of a loss. Is it still comfort food if I remain heartbroken after eating?
Reading Small Fires opened up conversations in my head about appetite and sustenance, cooking as a ritual, and collective and individual pain and desire. The full range of humanity in Rebecca's words left me more at peace with my favorite food. I continue to cook and love tomato sauce, opening my heart to the many feelings it evokes. Small Fires is a book that acts as an oracle, with phrases jumping out as if they knew I was searching for meaning. When I sat down to finish this introduction, the book yet again supplied me with exactly the words I needed:
"The recipe is a siren-text, an 'I' that also speaks as 'we' and 'they' and 'you'.
It draws us in and makes room." (pg 97)
Autobiographical writing can also be a siren-text. Small Fires draws us in and makes room for everything we are and long to be at the moment of reading. Rebecca's thoughtful answers do the same.
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Devin Kate Pope: I’d like to start us off with a quote from Angela Carter that I came across while listening to Between the Covers with Sabrina Orah Mark and David Naimon. They were talking about fairytales, but the quote reminded me of what you’ve written about in Small Fires connected to collectivity and ownership, in particular of recipes:
“Ours is a highly individualized culture, with a great faith in the work of art as a unique one-off, and the artist as an original, a godlike and inspired creator of unique one-offs. But fairy tales are not like that, nor are their makers. Who first invented meatballs? In what country? Is there a definitive recipe for potato soup? Think in terms of the domestic arts. ‘This is how I make potato soup.’”
—Angela Carter
In Small Fires, you write about the myriad ways you made and make the recipe and the ways it made you. Do you still make the sauce? And how is your connection to the sauce and the recipe changing as Small Fires has been out in the UK since August and now is about to come out in the US?
Rebecca May Johnson: I love Between the Covers podcast, and this is such a nice reference – to use cooking to resist the idea of the one-off god-like genius, of knowledge that is not easy to own. I have cooked Angela Carter’s potato soup recipe which was published in a feminist recipe book in the 1980s by Sheba press! It was a starchy joy. I still make the recipe from Small Fires and I still learn new things about it when I make it – have recently been thinking about how having less liquid in the pan makes more of a tomato confit-sauce to coat the spagetti (extracting the tomatoes and not the juices from the tin). And beyond that, I feel the presence of the recipe in so much of what I cook as its lessons underpins so much of how I approach cooking.
It has been so exciting seeing readers in the UK use Small Fires to cook from as well as to read – people have sent pictures or told me about making their own translations of the recipe, which are inevitably all different. It’s thrilling! I am really interested in US readers’ engagement with the recipe, especially as Marcella Hazan lived in US and is better known than in the UK. I imagine more people will have lifelong relationships with the recipe I write about and will have lived out their own epics with it. I hope to hear more stories about the recipe cooked by other people, and to learn new things about it!
DKP: How / where would you place recipes in a culture that has “great faith” in the artist being an ‘inspired creator of unique one-offs?’
RMJ: There is a wonderfully promiscuous quality to the way that recipes spread around in response to their ability to give pleasure, with different people picking them up and cook them. This also gets to the some of the subversive potential of the recipe as a form of knowledge that strays and refuses boundaries and to an extent, commodification. When we cook from a recipe, we simultaneously make a counterfeit / a copy and an original; the distinction is collapsed. This is possibly one aspect of why they have a lower status in culture than art for whom a supposed single artist can be identified.
Recipes themselves are also difficult to restrict legally because of their role in keeping people alive. They do not sit purely in the realm of aesthetics, and this recipes them a different ethical imperative, too: why would you place a legal barrier on people accessing the knowledge to make themselves food?
RE the relatively low status of knowledge produced in the domestic kitchen: there is also the fact that it is in the interest of capitalism to devalue work carried out in the domestic space (and those who do it) so it can remain largely unpaid or low paid – thus saving employers money by keeping wages down outside the house …
DKP: I have a sense that this pressure to create something “unique” drives people away from cooking. What are your thoughts on that?
RMJ: The thing is I do think that each time someone cooks they make something that is both unique and is also a repetition. However, partly because of the worship of the so-called ‘original’ and ‘one-off’ – people have learned to feel inadequate when they cook using a recipe, and gain the misapprehension that they are not doing something that has creative value or interest. There is that phrase ‘I only followed a recipe... it’s not my idea’. In truth, there can be no idea or cultural object whose creation has not depended on the labour and ideas of many other people – whilst also saying something new! I have seen during several workshops and projects when I have asked many people to cook the same recipe that everyone inevitably re-authors the recipe differently – adding their voice to that of the recipe text – the body will speak in its own way through cooking, whether someone feels they are doing something new or not. I hope my book reassures some people who feel anxious about cooking from a recipe.
DKP: As you begin writing about cooking the sauce, you write, “The recipe is a method for responding to things.” And those things have “agency in many directions.” I loved this reframing, and it felt fresh to me. A little bit later, you write, “after cooking it a thousand times, the recipe turns out to be Good Enough.” This is a reference to D.W. Winnicott, who, in addition to condemning us recipe followers as “slavish,” popularized the idea of the Good Enough mother in his research (something I was just reading about in Julie Phillips’ new book, The Baby on the Fire Escape. Phillips points out that while Winnicott’s ‘Good Enough’ is more reasonable than other standards of mothering, it’s still a model where “the child’s needs, not the mother’s, that are being met.”) This makes me wonder, what makes a recipe Good Enough?
RMJ: That’s an interesting question – RE the ‘Good Enough’ mother – I’ve always thought of it as a concept that gives parents space to not be everything, all the time, so that they can be elsewhere, having their needs at least partially met. For me the recipe that I write about is Good Enough for various reasons. Its principles produced a kind of ‘holding space’ within which I could play, be cared for, mess up, fail, learn to think. The recipe is a structure of care but not claustrophobically so – it supported me but allowed me to think for myself. It is not a fair-weather recipe; when I’ve been at my most wretched, it has been stoically present to pick me up. Also: the recipe has always and will always exist beyond me, and its existence is not dependent on mine. There is more to say but this is what comes to me now.
DKP: Around the time of your three-hundred and sixty-fifth performance of the recipe, you begin to write down versions of the recipe as a way to cook for a loved One while physically separated. This struck me as a heart-achingly beautiful reason to write a recipe. This was in my brain when I read Alicia Kennedy’s essay on recipe writing, where she engages with Small Fires in addition to other texts. She quotes Small Fires: “Cooking often hovers at the fringes of serious thought,” and explores the dismissal of the recipe and the importance of context for a recipe in a world that routinely makes fun of the introduction on food blog posts. Do you think the practice of writing recipes (in addition to following them) leads to valuing them as essential texts?
RMJ: When I was eighteen, I wrote about recipes in my statement applying to universities as significant texts that transmit culture; I was naively surprised the medieval German professor who interviewed me did not know who Elizabeth David was. I certainly found that writing recipes, and then engaging with the texts in lots of different ways – as a method for transforming ingredients and gaining deeper understanding of their qualities, as performance texts, as documentation of gestures, as a means to access pleasure, as fragments of culture to be transmitted, as aesthetic compositions, as forms of non-linguistic speech and expression, as containers of memoir (for starters) – led me to value them as essential texts. However, many of these ways of valuing recipes were not immediately obvious to me and had to be found out by study, experimentation, play, and engaging with recipes through creative practice. I have also struggled against a general tendency to undervalue recipes and to miss their manifold potential, it has taken years to overcome that.
DKP: You write about the recipe text being “a framework which constrains and instructs but also nurtures and releases the voice of the cook.” One learns the framework and then experiments with or refuses it. Does this process connect to how you’ve found your voice as a writer?
RMJ: Creative constraint – which can mean any limiting factor such as a place to begin, an object of investigation, a context in time or place, the ingredients that are available – can be useful and essential even. However, this should not lead to fantasies about the ‘creative benefits’ of poverty or the exaltation of austerity politics as they are called in the UK as some kind of good.
DKP: I paired epics: While reading Small Fires, I also read Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer. Mayer’s epic documents her going about life with her partner and children and dreams – one day emblematic of other days. Toward the end of your book, you ponder “how to finish an epic which can have no end.” This spoke to me about how one function of the epic can be showing how big life is – to write into the complexity and ever-expanding nature of even one ‘small’ thing that isn’t small: a tomato sauce recipe or a single day. To close, can you share either about your interest in the epic and how the form of the epic (which you’ve studied intensely) and the content matter of Small Fires shaped/informed each other?
RMJ: I must read Mayer’s epic, it sounds right up my street! The Odyssey is a text that has been widely and deeply interpreted and translated. The actions of figures in the Odyssey, particularly Odysseus have been investigated for their philosophical significance, for what they can teach us about the human condition and have been converted into metaphor and used as allegory – among other things. The Odyssey is always becoming more. In contrast, I felt that everyday actions in the kitchen, particularly the domestic kitchen, are often being made to seem like less, including by those who have spent decades of their lives in the kitchen. I witnessed this tendency in myself and others. The text I wrote my PhD about is a rewriting of the Odyssey – Niemands Frau by Barbara Köhler – places Penelope’s weaving at the centre of the text. Köhler uses weaving to think about time, to think about the poetic structure of her text, to think about non-patrilinear ways of understanding history and more. Her close engagement with weaving as a process makes all of this possible: the thinking is shaped by and flows from the activity of weaving. Weaving becomes the basis of her epic. While I was studying this text, I began to question why I had not treated the kitchen as a space for thinking – and to ask whether ten or so years of cooking in domestic space might be treated as an epic on the scale of the Odyssey. Do we not learn as much about the human condition through a decade of cooking as we might on a sea voyage to many different places? What kind of thinking is cooking? I wanted to investigate activities in the kitchen deeply too, and to claim that the thinking that comes out of cooking has a far-reaching significance.
In addition, I didn’t initially realise the extent to which writing the book would feel like an epic process. But then, I was finding things out as I wrote and I did not know where or how the book would end, and my sense of writing the book as a form of epic also grew. As this realisation grew, I responded and played on it in the text, using images from the Odyssey and Niemands Frau. I allowed chance – real encounters with new things, ideas, recipes, and texts – into the writing process. In that sense, writing the book became an enactment of epic. For example: I only came across the text by Winnicott about sausages halfway through writing and that became the basis of my conducting the sausage experiment and introducing a new way of writing into the book. Writing the book I was (as we all are) on a journey through time and I wanted to find things out and I did find things out I hadn’t known before writing the book and was changed by them – and the kitchen was the setting for the epic.
Rebecca May Johnson
Rebecca May Johnson has published essays, reviews, and nonfiction with Granta, Times Literary Supplement, and Daunt Books Publishing, among others, and is an editor at the trailblazing food publication Vittles. Small Fires is her first book.