This a comment from a review first posted on http://www.witchhazelsmagick.com/2014/10/book-review-kitchen-witchs-world-of.html - the reviewer is a book lover and a witch, and clearly really got on with the book.
This a comment from a review first posted on http://www.witchhazelsmagick.com/2014/10/book-review-kitchen-witchs-world-of.html - the reviewer is a book lover and a witch, and clearly really got on with the book.
Spiral Nature is a fantastic website exploring magic and spirituality. The quote is from there review of A Kitchen Witch's world of Magical Food - you can read the rest here -
http://www.spiralnature.com/reviews/kitchen-witchs-world-magical-food/
And then you can go on and poke around the rest of the site, because it's well worth exploring.
From the Magic of Tea (quoted above) to a Happy Cake Filled Ending, this is a celebratory sort of book for bringing magic into your everyday life. Lots of recipes, lots of correspondences between foodstuffs and all manner of things - ideal for your sympathetic magic. Magic for hearth and home.
The kitchen is traditionally the woman's domain, as wife, and mother, as domestic servant. I should perhaps give a nod to the sinister witches kitchens where children may be cooked, but there's none of that here! This is a book of benevolent, family friendly magic where nothing is going to object to going in the oven.
it's very readable, and accessible, the recipes are pretty straightforwards, and can be used as acts of seasonal celebration, or as food magic. Food preparation is a great focus for intent, it gives you enough to be doing, it gives you a delivery method, and if you want to bring any kind of joy, encouragement, romance or good fortune into the world, something charming and edible will help that process on its way.
This is a charming book, with an array of simple, practical and magical uses for herbs. Much of the book is concerned with correspondences, so if sympathetic magic especially appeals to you, this is an ideal text to pick up.
It's pleasingly responsible as a text.I picked the above quote because it illustrates this. I find it curious that anyone could confuse bluebells and harebells - bluebells are a Beltain flower of the woods, harebells a late summer flower belonging to grassland. they do however look very similar, and colloquial names for plants can vary a lot one place to another.
Rachel includes a helpful set of folk names for herbs and the plants they connect with - all that eye of newt stuff may not be as gruesome as first imagined! This is a really interesting list. I was also fascinated to see a list of Victorian flower associations - the language of flowers being more associated with sending secret messages than with magic. But that's the thing about this kind of pragmatic approach to witchcraft - is something is interesting, appealing, if it works in some way, it really doesn't matter how old it is. What matters is the inspiration and where that takes you.
- Tanith Lee