Enchanting foods

By SARA WILDBERGER
Special to The Journal

     For most people, Halloween means Snickers fun-size bars and a good scare. But for many who follow the Goddess path, it means roasted squash and a good prayer.
    Wiccans, Druids, witches and others who practice Neo-Pagan spirituality call Halloween Samhain (pronounced sow-win). It's a sacred holiday - sometimes a solemn one. Some call it the Celtic New Year.
    These nature-centered religions mark the year's passing with eight holidays aligned to the changing of the seasons and to the natural life cycle. When the nights get longer and the weather gets colder, they look back to how their ancestors in the pre-Christian age marked time.
    For them, late October was the time to bring in the last harvest, gather close together at home with friends and family, preserve food for the long winter and remember the deceased. The year was seen as a magical woman who in the spring was a maiden, in the summer a mother, and in autumn, a crone.
    So Samhain, according to many Neo-Pagan books and Web sites such as The Witch's Voice www.witchvox.com, can be a time to think about death: loved ones you've lost to death, facing your own fears of death and clarifying your beliefs about death.
    Since the 1960s, when Neo-Pagan religions began to gain popularity in the United States, many such Wiccans and witches kept their beliefs secret. They worried that people would brand them ``Devil-worshippers" - they're not; in fact, they don't believe that Satan or the devil exists.
    In the past 10 years, there have been thousands of new books on Goddess and nature-centered spirituality. Study and meditation groups abound, along with ``Wicca 101" classes at a growing number of magical retail stores. People trade folklore and simple ``spells" casually on hundreds of thousands of Neo-Pagan Web sites. Witchcraft and Goddess spirituality is becoming part of popular culture: Even the cynical quartet on HBO's ``Sex in the City" took in a class on ``Goddess Yoga" in one episode.
    Among modern-day witches are lawyers, health-care workers, teachers, police officers, and, of course, cooks. And cookbook writers.
    Take ``The Kitchen Witch's Cookbook" (Llewellyn, $17.95). Patricia Telesco, 40, a prolific New York writer with about 35 books to her name, put this together to celebrate her favorite kind of magic - practical, everyday, homey stuff. Telesco, who leads ``Goddess tours" to sacred locations in Hawaii and Italy, is an ordained minister with a Unitarian denomination who has the title of ``Reverend" or ``Priestess" but prefers to be known simply as a ``folk magician" or ``kitchen Witch."
    Such witches find enchantment in cooking, gardening, sewing and weaving, animal care, raising a family and other home arts.
    ``Our ancestors were pragmatic folk," she says. ``They found magic in everyday things. The symbolism of `whipping up something' in your kitchen, then eating it to internalize the positive energy, is pretty potent."
    So a ``kitchen witch" is doing what the fictional cooks in books and movies such as ``Like Water for Chocolate" or ``Woman on Top" do - or what many home cooks do, but without such dramatic results - infusing what she or he prepares with strong love or intention.
    ``For anyone onto the Goddess path, it's just such a natural thing," says artist and writer Karri Allrich, 46, of Massachusetts (not Salem, by the way) and author of ``Recipes from a Vegetarian Goddess" (Llewellyn, 17.95). ``Just stirring a soup, or adding spices and herbs that bring in what your household needs at that time - whether it's comfort, love, or protection. We call that energy 'intention,' and you can enhance it with certain spices and herbs.
    ``Since food is so associated with love and nurture, it's the perfect way to bring these things into your family."
    She's currently working on a book about dream interpretation and another cookbook that furthers her ideas on eating seasonally. ``Cooking seasonally, we get tuned into the wisdom of the Goddess. We begin to see that we need to protect the earth, because she does sustain us."
    Her cookbook is redolent with Mediterranean-inspired risottos and polentas, as well as lots of Latin American and tropical dishes and ingredients.
    Of Samhain, she writes in her cookbook: ``As the Wheel of the Year turns to autumn, the Goddess has welcomed the harvest and given freely of her summer bounty. As Hecate, and Kali, she is a wise woman and priestess. She beckons for us to let go of the past, the old and outdated parts of our lives that no longer serve us. She urges us to prepare for our night journey that surely lies ahead.She is familiar with sorrow. Her robe is black. And each silver strand of hair bespeaks of her hard-won wisdom. It is time to prepare for introspection and savor the bittersweet joys that autumn brings to us."
    In Allrich's book, those bittersweet joys include Roasted Acorn Squash Risotto and Rosemary Cheese Biscuits.
    She plans to spend this Halloween at a Jungian lecture on the goddess Kali.