Kitchen Witchery is an approachable and accessible branch of witchcraft, ideal for those looking to weave a bit of magic into everyday life. In this post, I’ll share everything you need to know about kitchen witchery to start making magic at the hearth of your home.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- What is Kitchen Witchery?
- What is Kitchen Witchery Good For?
- The Role of Intention & Mindfulness in Kitchen Witchcraft
- Incorporating Magical Ingredients in Your Kitchen Witchery
- Rituals & Practices in Kitchen Witchcraft
- Setting Up Your Kitchen Witch Altar
- Connecting with Seasonal Cycles through Kitchen Witchery
- Practical Kitchen Witchery Tips for Beginners
- Resources & Further Reading
As the witches of my generation move into our own homes, start our own families, and begin growing our own gardens, it’s only natural to look for ways to weave magic into the rhythms and routines of everyday life.
Many of us don’t want to live generally disenchanted lives with magic merely sprinkled here and there via the odd spell jar, crystal grid, or candle. We don’t want magic as a rare and fleeting escape from our otherwise mundane lives. We want a magical life, interwoven with intention and enchantment from breakfast to bedtime. We want to romanticize our lives and infuse them with magic throughout – every bit of them, even the cooking and the cleaning.
This is where the kitchen witch shines! It is the domain of the kitchen witch to turn the sometimes Sisyphean tasks of cooking, cleaning, and homemaking into everyday magic. As I like to say, making magic every day is easy when you make the everyday magical.
One of the great things about kitchen witchery is that its rituals fit naturally into the existing rhythms of daily life. You don’t have to carve out a bunch of time and space especially for kitchen witchery; instead, you can weave the magical practice of kitchen witchery into the activities you already do in your kitchen and throughout your home.
You already cook, or prepare food in some way, since you have to eat. You already clean, unless you hire it out or live in your own filth. You already make tea, or coffee, or add electrolytes to your water, or maybe mix cocktails. Perhaps you even stir up salves and potions for health and wellness. Kitchen witchery is doing all those same things, but with a magical spin on them. Kitchen witches make the mundane magical by infusing everyday actions with magical intention.
In this blog post, I’ll explain everything you need to know to start witchin’ in the kitchen! Whether you’re wondering how to know what herbs to add or which way to stir, we’ll cover it all.
What is Kitchen Witchery?
Kitchen Witchery, or Kitchen Witchcraft, is a form of magical practice centered around the kitchen and cooking. In its most basic form, kitchen witchery is simply cooking, baking, or potion-making with intention. This can be anything from thinking positive thoughts while you stir your coffee, tea, or soup to concocting an elaborate feast to enthrall hearts, attract abundance, or welcome wellness.
Kitchen witchery often crosses paths and intermingles with herbalism, green witchcraft, oil magic, hearth witchcraft, cottage witchery, traditional witchcraft, and various branches of folk magic. While someone who practices kitchen witchcraft may also practice forms of high magic, kitchen witchcraft itself is considered a form of low magic. It doesn’t tend to involve a lot of elaborate evocations, intricate rituals, or circle-casting, and tends to focus more on infusing magical elements, energy, and intention into practical everyday items and activities.
While kitchen witchery is often practiced in the kitchen, the phrase is often used interchangeably with terms like cottage witchery and hearth witchcraft, to mean any sort of low magic practiced in or around the home and meant to infuse magic into the home and into everyday life.
What is Kitchen Witchery Good For?
While any intention can technically be woven into kitchen witchery, it’s better for some things than others. In my experience, food magic is gentle magic. It works low and slow, and it’s best when used consistently over time towards long term goals.
It acts mostly upon those who consume the products of the craft (usually by eating food or imbibing beverages, but this could also include smelling a simmer pot or massaging in some witch-whipped body butter), so it’s not typically very good for spells that need to work across long distances, unless you plan to mail someone a box of cookies.
These qualities make kitchen witchery great for health and healing magic, beauty and glamour magic, spells for strengthening love and friendship, and really any magic where the goal is to effect a change within yourself, in a group of people sharing a meal, or in anyone you know well enough to feed them.
This also means, however, that kitchen witchery is probably not the best method for situations where you need drastic and speedy results, where you’re trying to affect someone who is far away, or when you’re trying to affect anything other than yourself, your home, or people you know well.
For example, if you’re trying to get a job, you could use kitchen witchery to create something to inspire confidence in yourself and make yourself seem like a good candidate during an interview, but kitchen witchery would not really be appropriate for securing the interview or the job offer directly.
On a different note, kitchen witchery is great for anyone who is new to witchcraft and wants to dip their toes into something magical without needing to dive too deep, as well as for anyone who already practices magic at special times but wants a way to weave magic into the fabric of their everyday life.
Since kitchen witchery is a rather “low and slow” form of witchcraft, it’s also pretty safe for new witches to start experimenting without risking too much going terribly wrong, although it’s still a good idea to have magical protections in place before you begin.
The Role of Intention & Mindfulness in Kitchen Witchcraft
Like in many other forms of magic, while intention isn’t everything, it counts for a lot in kitchen witchery.
Intention is the main thing that differentiates chicken noodle soup from a healing potion that happens to contain all the same ingredients as chicken noodle soup. Intention is what transforms a mundane cup of coffee into an elixir of vital energy, or a hand-mixed cleaning solution into a potion of energy cleansing.
You know how there’s just nothing quite like the way mama or grandma made that one particular dish?
Sure, part of why you like it is because it’s what you grew up with, but part of it is the memories around it and the bottomless well of love that was poured into it. Even if not all our mamas were great cooks or even great mamas, we’ve hopefully all experienced the difference between food made with love and food made just to get it on the table.
Water Stores Intention, So Does Food
Dr. Masaru Emoto’s experiments with water demonstrate how the power of human thought, speech, and prayer can affect the energy and structure of water. A lot of food is mostly water. To my mind, this should be enough to convince any witch of the possibility, if not the certainty, that our emotions, intentions, thoughts, and prayers can affect the energetic (and possibly also the material) qualities of the food and drink we consume and serve to our loved ones (or our enemies, I suppose; I’m not into the dark side of kitchen witchery myself, but I suppose that path is there).
Gong Fu Cha, Intention, & Kitchen Witchery
Personally, I have always believed in the power of intention to enhance or alter the quality of food and drink, but I have come to experience those differences most noticeably through practicing and enjoying the art of gong fu cha. Gong fu cha is a Chinese style of preparing and enjoying tea with skill and great care.
Several years ago, one of my friends was pouring a perfectly delightful pot of tea when someone walked into the room with whom she had a particularly unpleasant history. She immediately reflexively came to be affected by anger, fear, and other such shadowy emotions, and though she had great skill in pouring tea, the next infusion was bitter and unpleasant. She tasted the tea in her own cup and immediately apologized for pouring and serving “angry tea,” inviting us to pour our own cups out into the shui fang if we didn’t want to drink the angry tea.
On the flip side, one of the greatest compliments I have ever received was from another tea server who insisted that whenever I poured tea, no matter what tea it was, “Vervain’s tea always tastes like flowers.”
Gong fu cha was my first real foray into plant magic, and deepened my interest in and dedication to kitchen witchery. Since the day I first tasted angry tea, I have made a point to be mindful of my thoughts and emotions whenever I am preparing or serving any sort of food, drink, lotion, or potion.
Infusing Food with Intention
You can infuse your own kitchen creations with intention simply by focusing your mind on love, gratitude, positive thoughts and visualizations, or prayer while you add and mix ingredients. I like to always stir clockwise to stir my positive thoughts and intentions in. If I happen to notice that my thoughts have strayed from the positive, I’ll throw in a couple stirs counterclockwise to draw out the undesirable thoughts and energy before refocusing my intention and resuming my clockwise stir.
Since even the most mundane food and drink is meant to nourish our bodies and provide joyful experiences, kitchen witchery is particularly well-suited to magical workings supporting general health and wellness, healing, boosting energy or inviting rest, creating a positive atmosphere of joy and gratitude, and inviting or enhancing love, friendship, and camaraderie.
For example, you might visualize all your friends from different areas of your life getting along splendidly when they share the pitcher of orange blossom lemonade or sourdough pizza you’re preparing for all of them to share.
Or, you might imagine a romantic evening in with your lover while you simmer scallops in white wine to serve them during a candlelit dinner.
Or perhaps you envision your family in perfect health as you stir lemon and ginger into the chicken soup you’re brewing to nourish their bodies and support their immune systems.
Incorporating Magical Ingredients in Your Kitchen Witchery
Simply visualizing your intended outcome while you prepare your recipe of choice can make a world of difference, but if you want to take it a step further, you can enhance your practice by mindfully choosing recipes with ingredients that support your intention. Some ingredients may support your intentions nutritionally with their practical material properties, and some ingredients may support your intentions with their magical correspondences. Of course, some ingredients will do both!
Practical Properties of Food
Before you think magically, think practically: If you want to devise a meal that will leave whoever eats it feeling full of energy and ready to take on the day, a hearty salad with plenty of protein is probably a better choice than a heavy pasta dish or a bunch of potatoes (no matter how much we love pasta and potatoes).
If you desire a romantic evening with your lover, probably don’t include a lot of beans or Brussels sprouts (both delicious, but you may find the side effects distracting).
If you want to help someone heal, an aromatic soup is going to be a much better bet than a sugar-loaded cake.
If you want a joyful celebration, though, a cake may be the way to go!
Magical Correspondences of Kitchen Ingredients
Then you can start to think magically: are there certain herbs, spices, fruits, or vegetables associated with your particular intention? If you want someone to remember you, feed them something flavored with rosemary. If you want to bring peace and relaxation, consider lavender or chamomile. For love, nutmeg, cardamom, or rose; for protection, salt and pepper; for healing, lemon and ginger; for wealth, cinnamon or mint.
There are plenty of reference books and online resources for learning which ingredients traditionally correspond to which intentions, but your own personal associations can sometimes be even more powerful.
For example, if you have vivid childhood memories of your mother always cooking with a particular ingredient, that ingredient may make you feel loved, safe, and secure, regardless of what published sources have to say about it.
Intuiting Magical Properties from Physical Properties
If you know something about the material and practical properties of an ingredient, that may also help you to intuit its magical properties. For example, you may notice that walnuts look kind of like brains – and you’ll find that, correspondingly, magical and scientific sources agree that walnuts may support mental acuity and cognitive health. Or, you may know that salt is used in fermentation to encourage the good microbes and prevent growth of microbes that are dangerously for human consumption, and this may lead you to intuit that salt could be used for protection magic; you would be correct.
Adding Ingredients with Intention
When adding an ingredient with a specific magical intention, I like to focus on that element of my intention and perhaps speak it aloud during that part of the recipe. For example, I might just say the words “strawberries for love and sweetness” while adding them to a fruit cobbler before baking.
Or, I might visualize sharing the strawberry cobbler with my husband, and peace and love and sweet thoughts filling both of hearts and minds. Or perhaps I might do both! Both is usually better, if you can manage it.
Rituals & Practices in Kitchen Witchcraft
You may like to incorporate some simple rituals and magical practices into your kitchen craft. Many common or traditional magical practices can be seamlessly incorporated into kitchen witchery, such as magical cleansing, energetic protection, the use of affirmations and incantations, and sigil and rune craft.
If you’re just getting started with kitchen witchery, you may find it easiest to incorporate some of the magical practices you’re already familiar with into your work in the kitchen.
For example, you could light a candle and say a blessing before you begin your day’s work in the kitchen.
You could mix up a household cleaning solution with herbs or oils associated with energetic cleansing and purification to use throughout the day and during your nightly kitchen cleanup.
Whenever you deep clean any part of your kitchen, you could incorporate smoke cleansing or a brief banishing spell as well.
Rune & Sigil Magic for Kitchen Witches
If you already work with runes or sigil magic, carve runes or sigils into root vegetables like carrots or potatoes before you cook them. Carve or burn runes into a wooden spoon to use as a sort of kitchen witch wand, directing energy and intention into your recipes.
Crystal Magic for Kitchen Witches
Or perhaps you’re more into crystals and crystal magic. In that case, you could create a small crystal grid or place a single charged crystal somewhere in your kitchen where it can enhance the energy of your workings there.
Fashion Magic for Kitchen Witches
Is fashion magic more your vibe? Consider embroidering a stylish kitchen apron with meaningful words, symbols, or imagery (visible or hidden) and wearing it whenever you work your magic in the kitchen. If you’re particularly crafty, you could even sew one up from scratch, choosing colors and patterns to enhance your kitchen witchery.
Kitchen Witchcraft & Candle Magic at the Dining Table
People all around the world with many different spiritual and religious beliefs pray over their food before a meal. Lighting a candle with intention or blessing food at the table before you eat it can be a powerful way of infusing it with intention and preparing your body to receive it in the best way. Blessings at the table can even be totally inconspicuous if you’re still in the broom closet!
Kitchen Witchcraft Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated
Just picking one or two little practices or rituals to incorporate into your kitchen craft can really go a long way towards creating a magical atmosphere in the kitchen. Once you’re feeling the magic, adding a little more magic here and there becomes natural and easy.
If this all sounds like too much, remember: You really can get started practicing kitchen witchery just by being a little more intentional as you craft your kitchen concoctions. A little mindfulness as you sort through recipes and select ingredients, a positive thought as you stir, a little visualization over your pots and pans of food, a magic word here and there… it’s okay to start small! Even small changes can make a big difference.
Setting Up Your Kitchen Witch Altar
In most types of witchcraft, an altar is a place specifically dedicated for magical workings. In kitchen witchery, magical workings are done all throughout the kitchen: at the sink, on the cutting board, over the stove. However, if you want to have an altar set up in your kitchen, there are several ways to go about it.
Altar Option 1: Kitchen Witch Altar Separate from Workspace
One way is to find a spot in your kitchen that is both convenient for you to access and unlikely to be disturbed by others. It should not be an active cooking workspace, but rather is a magical focal point within the greater magical and mundane workspace of the kitchen as a whole. This could be a small shelf, a windowsill, a cake stand on the counter, or a lazy Susan on the kitchen table. It could even be a pull-out altar inside a drawer if that’s what works for you! If there’s a particular deity you work with who feels appropriate to include in your kitchen witchcraft, you could include a representation of them. You could also include a candle (as long as it’s in a safe space to burn and is never left unattended), and you could even keep the salt and pepper there. If it feels right to you, it’s probably right, and you can always switch it up later if you change your mind.
Altar Option 2: Functional Kitchen Area as Kitchen Witch Altar
A second option is to treat one functional area of your kitchen – the stove, the sink, or perhaps the chopping block – as an altar. Then choose functional items from your kitchen or acquire a few special new ones to double as magical items (such as a trivet in the shape of a pentacle, a wooden spoon wand, or a favorite pot to call your cauldron), and add a few magical or spiritual decorations where they won’t be in the way of the work.
Altar Option 3: The Whole Kitchen Is Your Altar
A third alternative is to think of your whole kitchen as your magical workspace and therefore your altar. Nothing in the kitchen is truly purely mundane since it can all be incorporated into your practice of kitchen witchery. Hang decor (such as this Kitchen witch doll) that adds to the magical atmosphere you want to create.
Add magic and beauty to every element of your kitchen, and accept that there is magical potential even in items that are not obviously magical. Consider principles of feng shui and your natural workflow when arranging items throughout your kitchen, and infuse magical intention into all your choices.
Which Kitchen Witch Altar Setup Is Right for You?
Personally, I have a combination of all three options. If I were to call one space in my kitchen my altar, it would be the windowsill over my kitchen sink, but I strive to create a magical vibe throughout my kitchen (and indeed, my whole home), and my kitchen is still a long way from magazine-ready! At the end of the day, while my kitchen is sacred space, it needs to be functional for feeding my family above all else, and so it is.
You might also choose not to have a dedicated kitchen altar, and that’s okay too! If you do choose to create one, don’t expect it to necessarily be perfect and complete right away. You may already have everything you need to create the kitchen altar of your dreams, or, more likely, you may want to start with something small and collect pieces to add to your witchy kitchen over time.
Connecting with Seasonal Cycles through Kitchen Witchery
So much of witchcraft is centered around connecting with nature and her cycles. Kitchen witchery is a great practice for connecting with the solar cycle – the cycle of the seasons. Of course, kitchen witchcraft is also great for connecting with the lunar cycle, astrological events, and celebrations such as birthdays and back to school!
Cooking & Eating Seasonally
You can connect with the magic of the four seasons as they come and go by cooking and eating seasonally. In the modern world, we tend to believe that we can just eat anything at any time of year, since the grocery store in Texas will still have Hawaiian pineapples and Californian avocados in December. Our ancestors, on the other hand, ate seasonally because they had to, so cooking and eating seasonally is also a good way to connect to your ancestors.
General examples of seasonal produce include Brussels sprouts, kale, winter squash, and citrus fruits in Winter; spinach, asparagus, radishes, strawberries, and mushrooms in Spring; corn, tomatoes, peppers, summer squash, melons, cherries, and peaches in Summer; and root vegetables, brassicas, apples, pears, and grapes in Autumn.
The Closer to Home, the Better
If you can get seasonal produce grown locally, or even grow a garden yourself, that’s even better, since it will also help you connect to the local land. If you can’t get locally grown produce or harvest from your own garden, you can often tell what’s in season based on what’s on sale in the grocery store, or you can research online to find out what’s currently in season where you are.
Celebrating the Seasons Around the Wheel of the Year
Whether or not you choose to cook and eat seasonally day to day, a fun and exciting way to incorporate seasonal eating into your kitchen witchery is to cook seasonally themed meals or even entire feasts to celebrate the wheel of the year or the turning of the seasons.
Practical Kitchen Witchery Tips for Beginners
- Don’t get too caught up in the details, and don’t let perfectionism prevent you from getting started! If you’re feeling the call to start making magic in the kitchen, just do it! I’ve suggested a bunch of simple ways to get started above, so pick one or two that resonate with you and feel easy, and start there!
- Don’t feel like you have to go out and buy a bunch of expensive new things to start practicing kitchen witchery – you probably already have everything you need, except maybe next week’s groceries! One of the best things about kitchen witchery is that it IS a super accessible and approachable branch of witchcraft. You don’t need a bunch of fancy supplies or special ingredients. Start by learning about the magical properties of the ingredients you already love to cook with, and working with the tools you already have.
- Start with simple spells, like stirring morning affirmations into your coffee or tea, speaking blessings over your stews and stir fries, and perhaps putting together a simmer pot to fill your kitchen with delicious smells and the magical intention of your choice.
- Keep a record of spells and recipes you’ve tried and loved, as well as ideas for recipes and spells you want to try. This could be anything from a Pinterest board to a beautiful handmade journal – or you can do both, or start one now and the other later. Just keep a record! There are so many things we think we’ll remember (like what went into that salad dressing or which blog that cookie recipe was from), and so often time passes and then we forget. Write it down!
- If you’re in the broom closet, or even if you’re not, don’t worry about your practice needing to “look witchy.” It doesn’t. Witches don’t have to wear cloaks and pointy hats to make magic, and magic doesn’t have to be complicated or “aesthetic” to work.
Resources and Further Reading
- Click here to view my playlist of YouTube videos related to Kitchen Witchery.
- Click here to browse all Kitchen Witchery-related posts on this blog.
- I’m not personally a Wiccan, but I still refer to Scott Cunningham’s books. They’re pretty much all classics, and Wicca In the Kitchen is a great resource for learning about magical correspondences of everyday kitchen ingredients.
- Kitchen Witchery is a practice I’ve personally come into mostly intuitively, so I don’t currently have any other books to recommend. However, I’m looking into some kitchen witchery books to see if there are any I would recommend! Check back later to view my recommendations.
Kitchen Witchery is a great way for people who are new to witchcraft to start experimenting, or for people who already practice witchcraft to incorporate more magic into the flow of their everyday lives. You can get as fancy as you want with it, but it all starts with incorporating mindfulness and intentionality into what you’re already doing in the kitchen… and then your practice can grow from there!
- What questions about kitchen witchery do you still have?
- Is there anything you’d like to see me cover in greater depth in another post?
- Do you have any recommendations for other resources to learn about kitchen witchcraft?
- Would you like to share any kitchen witchcraft tips and tricks from your own experience?
I’d love to hear from you in the comments below!
Until we meet again – be well, seek beauty, and leave a little magic wherever you go.
Blessings,
