Junk Food Fantastic
I had what I could only describe as a weird food-related spiritual experience last week and I'm still not sure what to make of it.
To try to improve my health, I'd decided to force myself to cook and bake instead of subsisting on canned food , TV dinners, and Little Debbie snack cakes out of depression. First thing I made was a big pot of Chili a La Sonic. This recipe wasn't all that great as a chili dog spread because it's WAY too tomato-y with too subtle of a chili flavor to be able to spice up a hot dog.
The chili only lasted about a week once I tried pairing it with Kraft macaroni and cheese. I grant that that's still not the healthiest... but it's a hell of a lot more filling than the mac on its own, and with delicious veggies mixed in instead of just cheese product. Next time I'll use a homemade mac and cheese; by the time I thought to do that the chili was almost gone so that's on me.
My food-related spiritual experience, thankfully, did not come from making a Sonic the Hedgehog chili recipe from an early 90s comic book, though judging by my own practice that wouldn't have been too unusual. Instead, it happened a few days later when I decided to bake a cake.
I have all sorts of old stuff lying around thanks to my hobby as a collector, and at one point I acquired a cookbook from the 1920s called Reliable Recipes simply because it had a certain illustration style in it. Recently I'd taken to leafing through it in search of unusual "forgotten" recipes. In the middle of the cakes section was a deceptively simple-looking recipe titled "Gertrude's Favorite Cake." It didn't specify a flavor, though you were supposed to add "flavoring" (presumably extract? I used vanilla extract.) to it. Intrigued by this mystery cake, I got my ingredients ready and set to work.
All in all, it took five hours to bake the cake, and looking over the recipe I'm not exactly sure what took so long. I was constantly in motion for half the day sifting flour, creaming shortening, doing everything I could to make sure that I didn't screw anything up. And all the while, I found myself muttering, "Gertrude, this better be the best damn cake I ever ate."
When the cake popped out of the oven I placed it in the refrigerator to chill for half an hour, then took it back out to cut and decorate it to look like... Noisette from Pizza Tower, because I'm apparently a simp for ugly girls. (Which is what happens when The Noise is one of your main kintypes, by the way.)
Tastewise, Gertrude's Favorite Cake is, quite simply, fantastic. I've never had a cake quite like it before but I'm more than willing to bake one again when I have the time.
I'll admit that I'm a foodie and eating anything delicious tends to have an effect on me. Typically after I've had a good meal or a satisfying dessert I'll be overcome with a kind of warm feeling of well-being and lie there all happy and content. But that's not what happened with this cake. As I laid there on the couch with a sore back from the busy day, listening to my 80s New Wave playlist (my second most listened to playlist), I suddenly had this bizarre sensation. It felt as if my inner energy had somehow been transported back to 1993 while my body stayed in the present. I honestly have no idea how to describe it other than it felt like my soul was paying the past a visit. It was an uncanny feeling, but not unpleasant. I had to put my phone down as it felt unnatural. The feeling lasted a full 24 hours and I'm still not sure what happened.
I've asked around at my local metaphysical shops what this could mean but have not gotten any good answers. One person said I was simply feeling nostalgic which is a similar but distinctly different feeling. I've more than half a mind to ask Reddit.
Of course, my brain went absolutely wild at the idea of inducing this feeling again, and in a fit of mild hypomania (spurned on by accidentally taking my lithium two hours late) I went on a weeklong baking spree in which I made five other dessert recipes. Now that my mind's cooled off and gone back to stability, I'm pretty sure that most of that was just me latching onto an idea and not letting go. But who knows? You can't always tell with the metaphysical world...
Real or not, being in the kitchen all day did leave me with a chaos magick question: what would happen if you invoked the energy of a 1950s housewife? I'm not talking about ancestral work or calling upon anybody from our world, but rather the imaginary, idealized "happy homemaker" archetype so prominent in advertising during that time. I don't doubt it's possible.
I'm so curious I just might try it.