** 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 <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 Small Fires, 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/>Small Fires 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.
