Cooking is thinking! The spatter of sauce in a pan, a cook’s subtle deviation from a recipe, the careful labour of cooking for loved ones: these are not often the subjects of critical enquiry. Cooking, we are told, has nothing to do with serious thought; the path to intellectual fulfilment leads directly out of the kitchen. In this electrifying, innovative memoir, Rebecca May Johnson rewrites the kitchen as a vital source of knowledge and revelation.
Drawing on insights from ten years spent thinking through cooking, she explores the radical openness of the recipe text, the liberating constraint of apron strings and the transformative intimacies of shared meals. Playfully dissolving the boundaries between abstract intellect and bodily pleasure, domesticity and politics, Johnson awakens us to the richness of cooking as a means of experiencing the self and the world – and to the revolutionary potential of the small fires burning in every kitchen.
The Appleman and the Poet, the fifth volume of Hubert Butler’s essays, completes a thirty-year odyssey embarked upon by The Lilliput Press in 1984. Beginning with ‘Russian Dispatches 1932–1946,’ Butler gives an evocative description – from the viewpoint of a bourgeois teacher – of a society in dissolution, before the onset of Stalin’s Great Purge, […]
As part of our An Artistic Eye Series we asked Atsushi Kaga: how did he become an artist? What is the best thing about being an artist? What does he do all day?
Are you in Transition Year? Would you like to know more about art? Do you want to find out about how galleries work? The Douglas Hyde is delighted to announce the next round of our TY Project offering Transition Year students work experience, with the opportunity to learn new skills and get behind-the-scenes of one […]
Artists present us with new perspectives on the world we live in. Explore the exciting ideas behind our programmes, hear more from the artists we work with and discover new ways of engaging with art.
