Ironically, I only got into it when I realized I was honestly sick of all the ordinary every day dinners my family use to make since we were a big family and it was impossible to please everyone. From my impressive collection of mugs and teacups to my love of staying up late into the night to bake morning treats or scrumptious desserts or experiment with a new recipe. (Fans of The Great British Baking Show, yes, that Chetna! Her recipes are flawless, and the book is a visual delight.) One of the recipes called for masala, pounded in a mortar and pestle. Last week, I made a few dishes from Chetna Makan’s gorgeous new vegetarian cookbook. One step, two step, open the fridge, twirl, raid the spice drawer, step step, stir stir, chop chop chop, STIR! And cooking involves so much movement, at least when I do it, that it might as well be dancing. My bat-brain gets to take a backseat to my nose, to the color of the tomatoes, to a certain instinct, honed over time, as to whether the spell-dish is coming together the way that it ought.
Just because you don’t have a plan doesn’t mean it won’t come together beautifully. There’s something strangely comforting in creating a satisfying dish from chaos. You know you’ve found a true match when you use it so much that the scent of the spices rises from the pages because your fingers have anointed them with sesame oil and paprika.Īdmittedly, I have just as much fun winging it, crafting a dish from whatever’s left in the fridge and tipping seasoning into the pot willy nilly without consulting a teaspoon. No matter what I did, I couldn’t balance the heat, and my poor husband had to call half-time during dinner to eat a popsicle.)Ĭook books are spellbooks to me. (Though there was one time I used a habanero instead of a jalapeno. Mostly, the ingredients cooperate and coalesce into their desired shape. When I’m in the kitchen, I cast a spell of transformation. All manner of life, mammal, aquatic, vegetable, seeds and nuts pass through their hands and are transformed by spells – some secret, some written in books annotated with splashes of grease and broth.” They must be, for they are capable of powerful acts of transformation.
She says that “the very best of cooks are sorcerers, wizards, shamans and tricksters. Something that comes closer to alchemy than anything else I’ve ever experienced. I can let the busiest part of my brain just relax for a while and do something creative, something a little messy. I’m a witch firing up her cauldron because she knows just the spell the evening calls for. When I step into the kitchen, I’m not a haunted house. I’m a queen surveying her domain, drawing the unruly pots and pans in line. Few things are as comforting to me as a cup of miso soup on a cold day or as intoxicating as the first bite of my family’s carrot cake recipes, smothered in cream cheese icing (the secret to taking it from “great” to “licking the bowl like an animal” is to add a little lemon juice!)
My first-ever folklore paper dabbled in foodways – my family’s unconventional Thanksgiving celebration – so perhaps it’s not a surprise that food has always been a path into folklore and identity for me. There’s a whole branch of folklore called foodways, the study of the culture and tradition of what we eat and why we eat it. Worst.)īut nothing seems to help quite as much as cooking. I’ll grudgingly do a yoga video here and there (cursing at the perfectly lovely Adrienne whenever she moves into Downward Dog. I love to dance, and the video game Just Dance has been a lifesaver these last few months. There are things I do to reconnect the pieces of myself.
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