A Kitchen Witch's World of Magical Food

An incredible resource for anyone at any level of cooking and/or witchcraft, A Kitchen Witch's World of Magical Food by Rachel Patterson is indispensable for any kitchen witch, hedgewitch or a witch who cooks.  Patterson has organized this book into sections beginning with The Magic of Food and The Magic of Tea.  In the Food chapter she talks about the little things we can do while cooking to make it magical such as stirring clockwise or counterclockwise, ways to banish or charge while chopping and whisking, etc.  She also discusses a magical kitchen and kitchen deities.  In the Tea chapter Patterson talks about how relaxing having a cup of tea can be, she includes a wonderful bit about how she is influenced by the Japanese tea ceremony and includes a brief bit about tea leaf reading.

After these lovely introductory chapters we go into a section on seasonal recipes.  This section is organized by the agricultural holidays (Beltane, Lammas, etc).  Here Patterson gives a short introduction for each holy day and then gives two or three recipes.  For example, for Imbolc she gives recipes for a chai tea cupcake and a peppermint fizz.  What's lovely is that for every recipe she gives she includes both metric and standard temperatures and measurements and also includes little personal notes about how she does it.  After this there is a small section on cooking with the moon.  This is a lovely little section, however I would have enjoyed it being slightly longer. 

The next section; Magical Food for Intent, I find to be very important for the beginning kitchen witch.  Here we find discussion, correspondences  and recipes organized by intent such as health and healing and sex.  The next two sections include basic, all-purpose recipes and magical spells.  These two sections are good resources for anyone.  These recipes and spells can be used as is, or altered for anyone's personal intent and spiritual/witchcraft practices. 

The following section is really the meat of the book, no pun intended, and is a wonderful resource for anyone at any experience level.  This chapter is full of magical food correspondences and Patterson includes some great information.  Not only does she include the name of the food item, eg - broccoli, but she also includes the scientific name, eg - brassica oleracea.  In addition she includes a good sized paragraph about the food item with fun tidbits of information, such as broccoli being a very important food ot the Roman Empire, that it's sacred to the god Jupiter and you can eat it for it's protective properties.  She also includes ruling planet, element and gender. 

Patterson ends the book with a concise section filled with correspondence charts for easy reference and a nice conversion chart.  All in all this is a wonderful book that has me itching to get the rest of her kitchen witchcraft books.  It's written with the voice of an experienced practitioner but in a way that anyone can understand.  I highly, highly recommend this book.

~review by Jessica Elizabeth

Author: Rachel Patterson
191ppg; $16.95
Moon Books; 2015