Bara genom att läsa den här essän om Rebecca May Johnsons bok Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen får jag lust att laga mat, och läsa om matlagning, och skriva om matlagning.
The book emerged while Johnson was working on a PhD dissertation on German poet Barbara Köhler’s rewriting of the Odyssey, a process that led her to understand cooking as a cousin of translation. She uses the idea of reception—how texts are read and reimagined—to argue for a more serious consideration of the recipe form: “My ‘reception’ of the recipe—my intervention into the tradition of recipe reception—is to translate text into food. Each time I cook the recipe I produce a new translation of the text.” Just as translation has long been undervalued by critical and academic establishments, the recipe is “a form of knowledge that is often denied the status of knowledge.”
“Mother Sauce” av Marian Bull hos n+1, 15 juni 2023