Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook

Edition excerpt from Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook (2025): Bursting with color, flavor, and messy emotions, this unprecedented graphic memoir blends comics with satirical recipes to explore the intersections of food, feminism, frustration, and family. Jennifer Hayden has never liked to cook. She’s not particularly good at it, either. But, like so many of us…she does it anyway. Why is that? Where did these expectations come from? What happens if you don’t live up to the ideal of the perfect wife/mother/chef? And would someone please open a window before the fire department comes? Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook is an accidental memoir from a woman whose comics earn rave reviews around the world but whose meals earn shrugs around the dinner table. Marinating in an unconventional and aromatic blend of formats, Hayden traces the nuances of her complicated relationship to food. Anecdotal comics alternate with wryly ironic “recipes,” peppered with oven fires, explosions, prayers, and incantations. Along the way, all the salty judgments and bitter frustrations just might caramelize into some real wisdom and self-acceptance. In any case, it’s all hand-painted in mouth-watering color as a tribute to Hayden’s love of cookbooks…or at least of the illustrations inside them.