May Johnson Small Fires

With a new afterword and recipes
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-911590-50-7
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

A BRACINGLY ORIGINAL, BOUNDARY BREAKING EXPLORATION OF COOKING AND THE KITCHEN, FROM A RISING STAR IN FOOD WRITING 'A manifesto for reclaiming cooking as an intellectual... a brave, honest book' SUNDAY TIMES 'An intense thought-provoking enquiry into the very nature of cooking, which stayed with me long after I finished reading it' NIGELLA LAWSON 'Rich in pleasure and revelation' OBSERVER Small Fires reinvents cooking - that simple act of rolling up our sleeves, wielding a knife, splattering 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 meaning of appetite and bodily pleasure; the wild subversiveness of the recipe; the power of small fires burning everywhere. ________________ FURTHER PRAISE FOR SMALL FIRES 'Brave enough to hurt feelings, delicious enough for no one to care' New York Times 'Smart, thoughtful, creative' Ruby Tandoh 'Destined to become essential reading... Bold, beautiful, daring' Rachel Roddy 'Possesses an intellectual fleet footedness and exuberance akin to the writing of Deborah Levy or Rebecca Solnit' I NEWS 'I loved this genre-busting book. Shows that cooking can be a wild kind of magic' Bee Wilson 'Liberating... a new way to write about food' Jonathan Nunn Vittles 'Revolutionary... wakes up the reader's senses' Times Literary Supplement At once relatable and mind-expanding' Vogue US 'One of the most original food books I've ever read, at once intelligent and sensuous, witty, provoking and truly delicious' Olivia Laing 'Tender, electric, intimately transformative' Nina Mingya Powles

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

May Johnson, Rebecca

Leseproben

The Semiotics of the Kitchen

In the kitchen

In the rough waters between Scylla and Charybdis between a rock and a hard place

between holding a critical position and tasting the sauce,

there are a lot of questions.

In the kitchen I am standing in between Martha Rosler and Nigella Lawson. Criticism and pleasure enter together, holding hands.

On one side, Martha Rosler –

The artist Martha Rosler makes the argument that a woman might simply become an extension of a whisk, and demonstrates this in the film Semiotics of the Kitchen.

On the other side, Nigella Lawson –

The writer and TV-food-celebrity/icon Nigella Lawson makes the argument that women (and everyone else) should pleasure themselves with what they can produce with a whisk and demonstrates this on television.

*

I tell someone that I am thinking about the kitchen, and she tells me about the artist Martha Rosler and her video, Semiotics of the Kitchen. I find it on YouTube and watch: the video begins with a shot of Martha Rosler holding up a sign on a chalkboard that says ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen’. Then, slowly, the camera zooms out to show her standing in front of a refrigerator and an oven. It’s a modern, electrified kitchen. It is 1975. Rosler puts down the sign and I see that she’s wearing a black polo neck. Her hair is worn loose. She picks up an apron and puts it over her clothes. She takes her time fastening it with a button behind her neck and then with a string around her waist and then she says:

‘Apron’

Rosler does not make any gestures of welcome, which I find interesting and unusual. Her voice is firm, and it is negative. There is no charm, no musicality in her tone. She is not welcoming me, and she is not hosting me in this kitchen. ‘Bowl’ comes next, and she picks up a metal mixing bowl and mimes a stirring action. Rosler works her way through the alphabet in this way, picking up an object, making a gesture, saying its name. Her semiotics of the kitchen begins with putting on an apron: dressing appropriately. It is a garment to wear when using kitchen implements, which give specified movements to the apron-wearer. The implements Rosler picks up make shapes out of her body: they implement her to their purpose in the kitchen. She becomes secondary, the engine that drives the tools. A is first in the alphabet, and also A is for Apron, an article of clothing to be worn in the kitchen at the beginning of a day’s work.

‘They say it is love’ (Silvia Federici)

In Wages Against Housework, published in 1975, the femin ist Marxist theorist Silvia Federici argues that housework is not seen as work because it is considered an expression of love. Federici articulates beautifully how domestic work like cooking is a double bind of work that cannot be consented to or refused as work, because of its status as non-work.

When I read this I feel wild,

                                        that, through its definition as a gendered expression of love, cooking (among other forms of domestic labour performed both inside and outside the home) is often not properly viewed as work, as labour. I think of how people, and women in particular, are often encouraged to prepare food joyfully and ‘instinctively’, without breaking sweat or showing signs of fatigue or complaint.

The status of cooking as ‘non-work’ makes it difficult for those doing it to be seen as workers who might refuse to cook at all, who might do it without a reassuring performance of joy, who might gather and strike, or demand an end to zero-hours contracts and low pay, or demand a universal basic income that recognizes the labour of social reproduction… Who might also disentangle cooking from their very Being so that they can occupy a critical, or enquiring position towards it. Who might at some point cook for their own reasons, or for love of their own body – rather than exclusively to serve the appetites of others, or for someone else’s accumulation of capital to the detriment of their own lives.

The continued status of domestic work as barely-work or unskilled work is reflected in the fact that cooking and cleaning and caring are among the most poorly paid and precarious forms of labour in capitalist societies. Low-paid and unpaid domestic work makes it possible to keep wages down in other jobs.

To successfully exploit gendered labour, try using love!

After reading Federici, I realize that what shocks me about Martha Rosler’s video is that she drains the kitchen scenario of love, or rather, the performance of love as part of her labour. By refusing to perform ‘happiness’, Rosler shows the viewer that this is ordinarily also part of the job. ‘More smiles? More money.’ (Federici) Smiling is the work that conceals the work: without it, we realize that it is all work. The movements of Rosler’s body in Semiotics of the Kitchen are jerky and mechanical, as if she is an automaton. There is none of the gladness of 1970s American cookery shows. The happy housewife has become a knife, a fork, a juicer, a tenderizer…

‘We are shelves, we are / Tables’ (Sylvia Plath)

Her body speaks with the grammar of a food-making assembly-line except that, eerily, there is no food. Rosler’s knife doesn’t slice a carrot, she makes a stabbing motion like the shadow in the shower scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The blunting effect of domestication is reversed in that moment, and I am reminded that kitchen utensils contain within them the potential to become weapons. Rosler’s performance becomes a demonstration of how to use them. Kitchen workers are always-already-fully-armed with knives and fire and the skills to poison…

‘So many of us!’ (Plath)

Rosler isn’t making dinner, she’s summoning viewers to smash patriarchy and capitalism with a wooden meat tenderizer!

At the end of the alphabet Rosler uses her knife to slash the letter Z through the air like Zorro the masked liberator. Then she folds her arms and stands still. She has completed the Semiotics of the Kitchen. But there is something more, something after Z. Rosler’s knife cut the fabric of the kitchen, letting in some light: she shrugs.

Rosler’s shrug comes from elsewhere, from beyond the frame of the semiotics of the kitchen. It’s not the gesture of a woman whose movements are determined by kitchen implements. Rosler’s shrug might be the de-alienation of her body, a display of her self-expression, disinterest, ambivalence. The shrug does not display a love of service; it is a useless, almost playful movement. It is unproductive and a refusal of progress-towards-dinner. In another light, Rosler’s shrug is as useful as a stick of dynamite. The possibility of something more than unconsented-to work cloaked in the performance of love.

Labours of love that cannot be refused will eventually taste of pain and fury (even if they are exquisite and delicious).

The secret ingredient is solidarity!

*

In her memoir The Gastronomical Me, published in 1943, American food writer M.F.K. Fisher describes Ora, the woman employed to cook for her family. Ora makes food ‘exciting and new and delightful’ for Fisher and her sister when they are children. Fisher exclaims, ‘There are little stars, all made of pie crust! They have seeds on them! Oh, how beautiful! How good!’ Ora is even frugal and her exceptional food costs no more than that made by blander cooks. However, the dreamy, poetic voice of Ora’s cooking – her pie crust looks up at the stars – is a transgression of her class position in the eyes of Fisher’s grandmother, who takes pleasure in expressing her hatred freely. In response to her children’s delight, Fisher’s mother repeats learned cruelty and tells them not to speak of Ora’s food, ‘especially when the cook could hear them’. Fisher’s mother and grandmother try to keep Ora from knowing her own power, which so explicitly undermines the class hierarchy that divides them. Loyalty to their own class trumps a sense of solidarity with other women. They try to silence the children’s uninhibited enthusiasm for Ora’s cooking.

But Fisher covertly observes Ora’s exquisite knife skills which transform meat, vegetables and herbs into forms that change their flavour. Ora does everything with her beloved knife, ‘as if it were part of her hand’. She is in command of her knife (if little else). Fisher’s Grandmother recognizes its power; she says it is a...