Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner

Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner by Jennifer Hayden is a hand-drawn memoir peppered with tongue-in-cheek (but potentially technically edible if you squint) recipes about how much she hates cooking. Every single night. In perpetuity.

I am a big fan of Hayden’s sketchbook style art, and this was a fun, funny read, but, like the best comics and graphic novels, serious issues are raised here such as societal expectations and the unbalanced mental load placed on women to be the primary cooks in a family. This isn’t a food memoir or a treatise about kitchen struggles, it is a memoir about being a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, and a woman using the language and metaphors of food, and it’s not just funny, it’s also charming, touching, and even sad in moments.

Also like the best comics, spending time with the art is rewarding so you don’t miss things like the bits of plastic film clinging to the pork chop or the horns and tails on the deviled eggs or the angry face of gloop on a spoon.

Stray Thoughts:

One of the first pages is a full panel with a knife and the words Anger, Impatience, Bitterness which made me laugh out loud as well as question how many raised eyebrows I would get if I had a print of that hanging in my cube at work.

“Enfierced” lol

Second book I’ve read in two days to mention Mikhail Baryshnikov. Is it time for a White Knights rewatch?

Review copy from IDW Publishing. Unbiased opinions mine. Pub. date: 11/11/25

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