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Like any good kitchen witch worth her salt (snort), I know what to add to my tea for its healing properties, that to boil a whole chicken when I make my chicken noodle pesto soup can add to its curative properties, that if I form my 10-year-old’s favorite beef empanadas with intention (and with extra green olives), I can infuse her meal with comfort and grounding and nourishment.
Like any good kitchen witch, I love cooking, and I love cooking for others. Making the recipes learned from my mother—who learned them from her mother—helps me feel connected to my past. To my childhood and to my lineage. Serving these dishes to my family and friends is a form of care.
Cooking and baking are so important to me, so it’s not surprising that I’ve always loved food writing. Cookbooks, food memoirs, the annual edition of Best American Food Writing: I love them all.
But as a kitchen witch who also loves genre fiction, there’s just something special about works of magical realism—or other works of fabulism—that infuse their descriptions of cooking with literal magic.
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
I remember going gaga for The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender, in which a young girl discovers she can taste the emotions of the person who made a dish (a power that, for her, strips eating of all pleasure). Then, a few years ago, I read Esquivel’s 1989 classic Like Water for Chocolate, in which the power lay with the cook herself. In this novel, a woman infuses everything she makes with her emotions, from passion to joy to heartbreak. Throughout this story, we follow Tita, who is relegated to a life of loneliness by her hateful mother, unable to marry the man she loves. Too fearful to push back, it is through food that she is truly able to express herself. The descriptions of cooking and eating are so deliciously sensual. The series created last year for HBO Max is just as sexy.
Swords and Spaceships
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Crumble by Meredith McClaren and Andrea Bell
Sixteen years after Like Water for Chocolate, the trope of the emotion-infused dish is alive and well. In this recently published middle grade graphic novel, a girl, her mom, and her aunt all have the power to bake emotions into the goodies they sell at their family bakery. And of course, they focus all of their efforts on positive emotions. But when our protagonist’s aunt dies, she feels so awful that she pours all her grief into a crumble. The crumble tastes terrible… but it also numbs her pain. And so, she keeps baking it and eating it, baking it and eating it. Eventually, she comes to realize that eating her emotions can’t make them disappear.
Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle
Another new title (out this month), the protagonist in this novel has a special connection to the ghosts that have been swirling around him since he was ten. He can’t exactly see them, but he can taste their favorite foods. For the longest time, he does nothing with this ability. But then it occurs to him that if he prepares these dishes for the loved ones who survived, he can momentarily reunite the living with the deceased, providing them with a sort of closure. Unfortunately, good intentions aren’t everything.
With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo
This YA novel-in-verse isn’t marketed as a work of magical realism, but it definitely leans into it. Emoni is a high school senior with big dreams of someday becoming a professional chef. The only problem is that, as a single mother, she feels pulled between her dreams and her responsibilities. But the things she makes in the kitchen make people feel things. Is it possible that she can somehow have it all? Acevedo is always a must-read for me, and this one was no different.
A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher
Finally, let me close things out with another of my favorite authors, and with her absolutely delightful YA fantasy about a 14-year-old baker who has the (seemingly useless) power to make the gingerbread men she bakes dance. But when she finds a dead body on the bakery floor and comes to realize an assassin is on the loose, she’s determined to help. Luckily, her ability to bring baked goods to life may not be so useless after all…