Theme and Variations

A playlist, a very short essay, recipes, and eating notes from the week

Hello! My name is Rebecca May Johnson, I am a writer and cook and this is my Substack. This week’s newsletter is about theme and variations, cooking to run down supplies, recipes for savoury black beans to eat with chips and lemon ice cream, as well as my eating notes from the week.

A note: Substack just made a ‘free trial’ function, so if you want to, you can sign up for free for a week to read all of the paywalled newsletters in the archive (currently, four).

For the next two weeks after this the newsletter will be dispatches from Rome!

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In Brief: Hatred of Washing Up Playlist

Following on from my washing up essay a few weeks ago, here’s a playlist of music to wash up to with songs I like and songs suggested by people on social media. I love to dance and I hate to wash up, so I try make the sink into a dance floor. A drop in a track or rhythm or a bassline helps me to enter the carnivalesque space of the music and leave the prosaic space of the washing up bowl.