The Secrets I Associate with Baking

I remember the day that altered everything. It feels like it was only yesterday, but in truth, it was decades ago.

The kitchen air filled with cinnamon scented steam. Nana and I were having a baking marathon, filling another empty Saturday afternoon with our favourite pastime.

 “Darling, would you get me the brown sugar from the pantry?” Nana asked.

I loved baking with her. It had always been predictably fun. It was when I felt my most carefree. Nana had a knack for baking, and she loved involving me in it. She never seemed to mind if I made a floury dust coating over all the kitchen surfaces. She said it was part of the experience.

“What’s the point in baking without making a mess?” she’d say, with a smile.

She was always so effervescent and cheery. That was what made the item I discovered in her pantry so surprising. I went to the walk-in cupboard I knew so well. I’d spent hours, or even years, gazing at its contents, so I knew what was on every shelf. I liked to memorise all the ingredients, even if I didn’t know what each of them was for. They fascinated me. I hoped I would become half the cook my Nana was as an adult.

I reached for the bag of brown sugar. It was secured shut with a clothes peg, so I lifted it down with care. As I moved it, I noticed an item stowed away behind it. It was an object I knew but that I never would have associated with Nana. It was a cauldron – one of those cast iron ones; the kind that only a witch would own. I almost called Nana into the room, but then I thought better of it. Why would she have it hidden away if she wanted me to know about it? I covered it up with some spare bags of flour, hoping she wouldn’t notice they’d been rearranged.

“Mimi, did you get the sugar?” she called in her syrupy sweet voice.

There wasn’t a hint of anything menacing about her. There never had been. How could this perfect person have such a dark secret? I knew what I’d seen and there was no explaining it away. It wasn’t a plastic cauldron substitute that she filled with sweets for trick or treaters. It was the real thing. It had a strange, herbal smell that permeated the air, and it lingered in my nostrils. It was sickening. I suddenly didn’t have much of an appetite for cookies. I couldn’t find the words I needed to act like my normal self.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, taking the sugar from me. “Cat got your tongue?”

I looked around me, half expecting to see a black cat leaping out of nowhere, but there was none to be found. She must have been a cat-less witch, I reasoned. I moved towards her, regarding her tentatively. I’d never felt unsure of my grandmother before that moment. She was Nana until she had become a stranger with one small revelation. My mind ran away from me, like a careening vehicle. Who was the person standing before me? What other darkness might live inside her – invisible and unspoken to everyone that thought they knew her intimately?

At that stage of my life, my knowledge of witchcraft was extremely limited. It was limited to Sabrina the Teenage Witch and the television depictions presented of comedic witches or satanic sorcery. It was one extreme or the other – laughably innocuous or dangerously demonic. I didn’t know which force lived inside my Nana. She had always had a remarkably clear complexion. She was almost too perfect looking. She seemed to age in reverse. She had energy without bounds. For her physical age, she was as energetic as an excitable child. Maybe that was all she used it for. I desperately wanted to know more, but I didn’t dare ask her.

What if it was a secret she planned to carry to her grave and my exposure of it led to her sending me to mine too? I tried to picture her performing spells, or curses, or whatever it was she felt inclined to do, but I couldn’t. It just didn’t add up.

“Why are you behaving so strangely?” she asked me. “You’re acting like you don’t know me.”

I laughed her words off, but I was beginning to understand there was nothing I could hide from her. It seemed that she could see through me like I was made of glass. She knew my fears and she knew my intentions. There was no point in trying to be secretive about it. She was the queen of secrets. You can’t fool someone like that.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You found something you shouldn’t have in the pantry.”

“How do you know?”

“Just a hunch. I get tingles that tell me these things. Some people might call it intuition.”

“Why do you do it, Nana?”

“It’s a family tradition. It’s carried through the generations. Your mother highly disapproves of course.”

“Why does she?”

“She doesn’t like it whenever I tamper with the natural course of things.”

She was using big words with me, but she always had, and I fully understood every one of them. She had exposed me to an adult language that enabled me to grasp concepts I should have been too childlike to comprehend. It was a skill that proved useful in that moment.

“What is it… that you do?” I asked, stumbling over the words.

“I stop people doing bad things. Isn’t that what everyone wishes they could do?”

“How do you do it?”

“By whatever means I find necessary.”

“Do you kill them?”

“I wouldn’t say that – not directly no.”

I knew I was physically backing away from her, but she grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me closer to her.

“I can protect you in ways no one else can,” she said. “You know that girl that was bullying you in school?”

“Lucy?”

“Yes, I solved that problem for you. Didn’t I?”

“She moved away.”

“Yes…,” she said, meditating on what I said.

“Isn’t that what happened?”

“Does it matter? It solved a problem of yours and I will always do that for you. Maybe I’ll even show you how to become one yourself. It feels like the time is right."

I nodded, more to please her than because I had any interest in doing that. But whenever you’re a child, you’re easily led, and you’re influenced by the most powerful adults around you. That was exactly what she was.

After that, we baked the most delicious gingerbread that we’d ever made. Nana threw in some ingredients I couldn’t identify. Maybe that was what made her baking so addictive. Then, she got out the cauldron and she showed me a potion she liked to make, she showed me how she chanted, and we put a curse on the nasty downstairs neighbour – the one that always complained about the smells issuing from her apartment.

That was the moment when I grew up, when I received my initiation into the world of witchcraft from which there has been no exit since.