I read this via NetGalley, thanks to the publisher Pushkin Press.

This book is incredible and thought-provoking and I loved it enormously.

I sort of want to say this is a book that is “ostensibly” about cooking… except that it IS about cooking, there’s nothing ostensible about it. But it also uses cooking as a metaphor for many things, and looks at recipes and in-kitchen behaviour both for themselves and as metaphors, and reflects on the author’s life in general as well as her relationship with food and the preparation thereof.

I love reading about food and cooking and, although I feel a little guilty about it, I also love reading about how people feel about food. (The guilt comes because I feel like a voyeur.) This book does that for me, as well as touching on other things I hadn’t realised I would love in connection with a discussion of cooking. Such as…

Johnson has a PhD looking at a German translation of The Odyssey, and I had never before considered how you could make connections between that text and the myriad ways that cooking and food (not to mention gender – although I had thought about that a bit) are used in western society. The way that how we talk/feel about translation can also connect to the way we talk/feel about cooking was absorbing. And then there’s all the other theoretical stuff, like the psychoanalyst who thinks that cooking from a recipe is a sign that the cook lacks creativity… which made me, and Johnson, rage.

This book is at times prickly, at times confronting; Johnson reflects on large chunks of her life so sometimes she is bewildered and struggling while other times doing quite well. There were a LOT of times I responded on a very emotional level with what Johnson was saying: I cook for those I love; I struggle to think about making food for just myself; I have struggled with what my love of cooking says about me in terms of feminism (thank you, third wave feminism, for teaching me about the issues of second-wave feminism).

This is a powerful book. About cooking, yes, and the place of the recipe – and my goodness, Johnson’s exploration of what a single recipe can be, what it does, what it means: all of these things are glorious. It’s also an exploration of life, although I hesitate to call it a memoir and it’s certainly not autobiography. Many people come into Johnson’s life through the book, as she cooks for them and reflects on their relationships, but there’s not a lot of names – there’s a sustained reflection on the idea of ‘YOU’ as the one cooked for, and what body YOU represents changes over time, and exactly who they are and their relationship to Johnson is irrelevant for the purpose of the book. I liked this, too, even though the biography-reader in me kept expecting to understand the various relationships. But it’s not necessary for the book.

This is a book that I may need to own, in paper.