Annoucing the Winner of the Inaugural Nach Waxman Prize for Food and Drink Scholarship
Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson wins the inaugural Nach Waxman Prize for Food and Beverage Scholarship
The Nach Waxman Prize recognizes a well-written book which is likely to attract new readers to the field of food scholarship or to alter significantly the direction of future research.
Small Fires satisfies that criteria abundantly. In the words of the judges:
Darra Goldstein
Small Fires upends the perception of cooking as a mindless activity, demonstrating instead that recipes can embody intellectual inquiry and even serve as a means of enlightenment. Rebecca May Johnson’s luminous prose offers a profound meditation on the true meaning of kitchen work.
Morna Livingston
If you love food books, the wit of this mind-changing work offers a new way to think about cooking. As an experiment in Small Fires, Rebecca May Johnson decides to make red sauce one thousand times to learn by repetition. As the sauce splashes in the pan, like spray on a "wine-dark sea," she realizes cooking recipes is not a matter for science but holds greater parallels with epics like the Odyssey—changing while "gathering things and words and people together." As recipes are repeatedly cooked and epics retold, she establishes a method in which real spattering over a hot flame is essential.
Mayukh Sen
With great formal risk and narrative invention, Rebecca May Johnson's Small Fires powerfully reasserts that cooking is a pursuit worth taking seriously. I’ve no doubt that this book will inspire young food writers for generations to come, while it may also teach veterans of the practice a thing or two about how to approach their work with spirit and vibrancy—showing us all what food writing can accomplish when we're willing to stretch its parameters.
The Prize is named for Nach Waxman (1936-2021), the founder of Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore, where he ardently championed the work of food and beverage scholars, as well as other authors who explored and illuminated the culture behind cooking, eating, and drinking. More information about Nach Waxman, as well as the Prize judges, can be found here.
