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So, here's the story of the cabbage.

A while back I came into a number of cabbages, so many that I didn't have room for them all in my refrigerator. So I asked Aura if I could store one in hers.

“Sure, go right ahead,” she says.

A week later, I get a call.

“There's a cabbage in my refrigerator,” she says. Clearly, our conversation of the previous week had slipped her mind.

What's truly funny was her tone: exactly the same tone of mingled horror and disgust that one would use to say, “There's a dead rat in my refrigerator.”

“Oh, that's mine,” I tell her. “I'll get it this afternoon when I'm over.”

So that's the cabbage that I made the cabbage rolls from.

Magic Most Sympathetic

Here, try some of my grandmother's lemon-poppy seed cake.

If you don't, the Sun may not rise in the morning.

If you're reading this, I'm betting that you probably have a food that it wouldn't be Yule without. What's yours?

For me, it's my legacy poppy seed cake. I only bake it at Yule. Bright with lemon zest, dark with poppy seed: a dark-light balance of bitter and sweet. (Very much like life, that.) It's got a lovely gritty texture, and as for that melting lemon glaze over top....

And seriously, if you don't have some at Yule, the Sun will not come up.

One year, I had dental surgery in early December. Afterward, they gave me the list of post-surgical food taboos: no nuts, no seeds.

Seriously? Hey, man, I'm from Pittsburgh. F*cking Yule is coming, and you're telling me that I can't have poppy seed?!?

At this remove of time, I can no longer remember whether or not I followed the doctor's orders. In retrospect, I'm guessing that I probably had at least the obligatory ritual bite.

After all, the Sun did come up the next day.

Poppy seed: black as rich, dark Earth, bitter as love, plentiful as stars or grains of sand.

As symbols of abundance go, it doesn't get much better than that.

According to Lady Svetlana of Feraferia, the signature foods of Samhain are the “gnomic” ones: i.e. roots and tubers.

Simultaneously bright and dark, this hearty, satisfying melange of above- and below-ground crops welcomes the season when, in the words of her longtime partner, visionary Fred Adams, “as seeds and litter settle to earth, dreams and All Souls rise from the dense, rooted underground to soft[en] and fuse them.”

Also known as wheat gluten, mun cha'i ya, and seitan, mock duck is a traditional meat substitute in the cuisines of East Asia. Sliced into “coins”, the carrots (gold) and parsnips (silver) betoken—or, by the power of sympathetic magic, induce—a year of prosperity to come.

Boss Warlock's Mock Duck with Roasted Root Vegetables in an Orange Glaze

I always make baked beans for Beltane.

There are reasons and reasons. Beltane is often our first outdoor feast of the year, and baked beans are quintessential picnic food. Beltane is also a busy time and, benefiting from long, slow baking as they do, you can make them well before festivities get underway. They're cheap, nourishing, and good food. Everybody likes them. They likewise guarantee (as I make them, anyway) at least one vegetarian entree on the Beltane board.

Another seasonal connection: a friend once suggested, only half-humorously, that with the advent of Outdoor season, breaking wind becomes somewhat less socially problematic.

(The secret of good baked beans? Easily told: be generous with the sugar. For years, health-conscious kind of guy that I am, I skimped on the sugar, and my beans suffered as a result. To be everything that they should be, baked beans need plenty of sweet, paired with a nice, healthy dollop of cider vinegar.)

Baked beans were always one of my father's favorite foods. Not long before he died, I finally thought to ask him why.

My father grew up hungry: in a large family, during the Depression. “When you had baked beans for supper,” he told me, “the pot would go around the table and, by the time it got back to you, there were still enough left that you could have more.”

Indeed. Even after a hungry coven has eaten its fill—witching is hard work—there are usually enough baked beans left over for one of my very favorite breakfasts, beans on toast, next morning.

Beans on toast is part of the classic British full breakfast. This is not, I gather, a tradition of long-standing—dating, as it does, to the era of rationed food after World War II—but oh, it's good.

My friend Zoa and I once traveled to Malta to visit the megalithic temples there. I can truly say that Maltese food was some of the worst that I have ever eaten: bad Italian and bad British, mostly. No whole grains, no fresh fruit, no fresh vegetables. (Hopefully, in the intervening years, things have changed for the better.) For days, we lived basically on bad pizza and pasta with insipid red sauce. (Spaghetti sauce, on the other hand, does not benefit from generous sugaring.) After a week, we were both hopelessly constipated.

Then one morning, there on the breakfast menu, salvation: beans on toast. We were both so excited at the prospect that the waitress thought we were making fun of her.

Praise be to Mother Bean. Together with her partner, Father Grain, she maketh complete our proteins: Complementarity writ large.

 I wonder what the old North European ancestors would have called asparagus, had they known of it. Considering the ways along which the old tribal imaginations were wont to run, I'm guessing, probably, “spear-grass.”

It even kind of sounds like “asparagus.”

Oh asparagus, most ephemeral of seasonal delicacies. The Red Crests savored it back in old Romeburg days, of course: “quick as boiled asparagus,” Augustus Caesar was wont to say.

(Anyone who has ever tried to poach asparagus will understand that this means very quickly indeed.)

Things look different now, of course. Driving through rural Germany in the Spring some years back, I saw fields and fields and fields of asparagus, mostly for the domestic market. Per capita consumption of asparagus (spargel) is higher in Germany than anywhere else in the world.

Just about every restaurant where we ate that Spring had a separate asparagus menu tucked into the regular menu. You could put together an entire meal for yourself from one of these, with asparagus in every course—appetizer, soup, salad, entree—even, incredibly, dessert.

Savor while ye may, O ye lovers of Spring. Like Spring herself, asparagus season will soon pass by … just as quick as boiled asparagus.

February on the wane. Snow lies deep, but underneath, the rich earth waits.

It's a month yet until Equinox and calendar Spring: still plenty of time to stoke up the oven and savor the dark, warming foods of Winter.

Think of it as sympathetic magic. The lentils' pebbly texture and loamy, over-seasoned umami pair beautifully with the mashed potatoes' creamy blandness.

Beneath the snow, the rich, dark earth awaits.

Boss Warlock's 'Spring's a-Comin', But She Ain't Here Yet' Lentil Shepherd's Pie

Child of the Bog

Sacred to the Moon, wearing her colors, named for her totemic bird—reputedly, the stamens of the cranberry flower resemble a crane's bill—the cranberry is a perennial seasonal favorite.

Oh, but its signature tartness partners best with sweetness, for balance.

Bright with orange, dark with date, crunchy with toasted almond, this fruit-sweetened preparation makes a fine natural alternative to the old-style cranberry-orange relish that you grew up with, minus the truly toxic amounts of refined sugar.

Thank Goddess.

Boss Warlock's Fruit-Sweetened Cranberry-Orange Relish