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FILE 020 · VOL II · Something Answered

Grandma's Recipe Book Was Full of Curses

Every dish feeds two people. The one who eats it, and the one who made it.

Based on: Folk Magic and Kitchen Curses

Intake record

Recovered file

In English farmhouses, under floorboards and behind hearths, archaeologists keep finding the same strange object. A stoneware jug, stoppered, filled with bent pins, iron nails, human hair, fingernail clippings, and urine. They are called witch bottles. Hundreds have been found. [1] They were made by ordinary families, in ordinary kitchens, from the 1500s into the twentieth century, to turn a curse back on whoever had sent it.

What most people never think about, looking at them in museum cases, is who made them. Not wizards. Not witches in pointed hats. Housewives. Grandmothers. Women who did their magic where women were allowed to do anything at all: in the kitchen, in plain sight, written down as recipes.

Sometimes the recipes worked too well. In seventeenth-century Italy, a woman named Giulia Tofana sold a clear, tasteless liquid to unhappy wives, packaged as a cosmetic. A few drops in a husband's wine or soup, over a few days, and he would weaken and die of what looked like natural causes. Historians still argue about the numbers, but by some accounts more than six hundred men died before she was caught. [2]

Callie Ashby inherited her grandmother's recipe box in October.

Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.