Small Fires Quotes

“Cooking by the recipe a thousand times and more gives me this insight into language and its relation to living things.”
― Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

“Cooking is the tool I use to draw close to other people, though closeness makes me anxious. Cooking is how I manage closeness.”
― Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

“What I want for the people I cook for is for them to enjoy their own perversions at the table, to feel free to exhibit a lack of constraint.”
― Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

“This cook shows that liberation must give dreams earthly form. Her food demonstrates that the purpose of political struggle is to make life materially vibrant and gorgeous for each person.”
― Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

“Documenting what I do in the kitchen can feel like the task of recording almost nothing. But it is the nothing I am doing, and do almost every day, and have been doing every day for over a decade. It is the nothing that has been part of almost every social interaction of my life as an adult and through which I have come to know almost all the people I love. It is the nothing through which I have been sustained and transformed.”
― Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

“Mrs Beeton writes in anticipation of her absence.”
― Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen