Dowsing for Divinity

Yvonne Aburrow’s blog

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Kitchen witchery

Kitchen witchcraft is basically cooking with magical intentions, or using cookery as the basis of a magical working. There are many ways of doing this, involving both methods and ingredients.

Yvonne Aburrow
4 minutes
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What is kitchen witchcraft?

Kitchen witchcraft is basically cooking with magical intentions, or using cookery as the basis of a magical working. There are many ways of doing this, involving both methods and ingredients.

Gathering and growing

Gathering and growing your food is part of kitchen witchery, whether you are growing herbs in a window-box or a pot on your patio, cultivating a vegetable patch, or foraging for wild plants and mushrooms.

If you are foraging, never gather more than about 10% of a patch of wild plants. This allows the patch to replenish itself.

If you are growing food plants or herbs, you can plant them using the techniques of permaculture or companion planting (the Three Sisters is a classic example of companion planting).  

The four elements in cookery

Cookery is akin to alchemy. We get the name of a kitchen implement, the Bain Marie, from the name of a mediaeval Jewish alchemist, Maria Prophetissa, who invented it.  Food represents Earth. Cooking represents fire. We use water to bind our ingredients together, and air to give them a fluffy texture. The coming together of all four elements brings about the transformation of raw ingredients into cooked food. The word ‘pukka’ is from Hindi and Urdu pakkā, meaning cooked, ripe, solid, from Sanskrit pakva; akin to Greek pessein to cook.

Magical kitchen tools

Traditionally, witches would use everyday household items for magical workings so as not to bring suspicion upon themselves. The witch’s knife was a simple kitchen knife. When the place where you cooked was an open hearth-fire, the cauldron was simply a large cooking-pot, ideally shaped for the flames to lick around its bottom and heat it evenly. The broom was disguised as an ordinary kitchen broom.

Some modern kitchen witches like to make an altar in the kitchen. This is a great place to set aside offerings to your favourite deities. Deities who are particularly associated with the kitchen are Hestia and Vesta, the Greek and Roman goddesses of the hearth. The Romans honoured the Lares and Penates, ancestral spirits of the hearth and food cupboard. Many Scottish homes had a ‘brownie-stane’ – a stone where offerings for the house brownie were placed. In Slavic countries, the stove spirit was honoured. Many cultures had similar customs and spirits.

Magical ingredients

If you are making a ritual meal, then the fresher and more natural your ingredients, the better. If you are planning a magical meal for a particular purpose, consider the magical correspondences of the foods you are preparing. Foods can correspond to different deities, planets, and times of year. Many foods were traditionally eaten for a specific festival, such as bread and beer at Lammas. The look and feel of food also has a psychological impact: for example, yellow food is bright and comforting, fresh green salad makes you feel summery and at one with nature, and so on. In the magical novel, The Sea Priestess, the priestess cooks a moon feast for the protagonist, consisting almost entirely of white food.

Magical methods

According to Scottish folklore, friends should know each other for seven years before stirring the pots on each other’s stoves. This is because stirring a pot is a magical act. If you stir widdershins, you can banish things; if you stir deosil, you can summon them. As you stir a pudding or a soup or a custard, you can chant runes or other magical incantations over it to imbue it with your magical intent. Kneading or rolling pastry can also be done with magical intent. Any repetitive process can be used as the basis for building up magical energy. Pickling, canning, and drying can be used to preserve a mood or an intention.

Further reading

Recipes

Kitchen deities

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