Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook
Jennifer Hayden
November 11, 2025
Bursting with color, flavor, and messy emotions, this unprecedented #graphicmemoir blends comics with satirical “recipes” to explore the intersections of food, feminism, frustration, and family.
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.
