Magic Cooking (Just Add Magic)

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**Magic Cooking** occurs in the live-action television series *Just Add Magic* from Amazon Studios, based upon the book of the same name by Cindy Callaghan.

## Explanation

Magic cooking makes it possible to perform magic spells through the creation of dishes. It is performed by cooking a dish while including some inherently magical ingredients along with the normal, non-magic ingredients, and then consuming at least part of it in a way relevant to the spell being performed.

While a magic dish is created with a specific in mind, most such spells comes with a catch or price that the cook has to put up with when performing the spell. While magic cooking has some clear rules and good practices, the magic does not always act in a way that the cook intended or could have predicted, like the magic is having a mind of its own.

There exists magical spice plants that can be used to make magical ingredients the same way ingredients can be extracted from normal plants. Magical plants and the ingredients that can be made from them (called magic spices in the show, though not all ingredients seems to be spices) belong to groupings called families.

Each magic spice family has its own speciality, a specific attribute or concept that they can influence when ingredients belonging to that family is used in a spell. Combining ingredients from different spice families in one recipe modifies the properties and effects of those ingredients, often in ways that can be difficult to determine without cooking the recipe to see what happens.

Given that many different types of cooking ingredients are created from each of the spice families used in magic cooking instead of just one ingredient type from each family, and the importance given to making unique full dishes with precise recipes in the show, it can be inferred that it is important for the act of performing the spell that the magic ingredient mesh well with the normal ingredients in the dish and with the dish as a whole, as opposed to just adding any ingredient from a given family to any random type of dish (like using magic salt in a cream cake dish).

Also, given that all the formulated magical recipes used in the show have been given names that makes use of puns, and often displays indirect lateral associations between the dish, its ingredients and magic effect, and that different recipes that use the exact same magical ingredients but are distinctively different dishes and produce different magic effects when eaten, like the *Big Mussels and Spinach* recipe whose dish confers temporary super strength (obviously a wordplay on "mussels" and "muscles", along with the use of spinach that is associated with strength, populary through the classic cartoon character Popeye the Sailor), it can be further inferred that in magic cooking, it is an essential part of producing a desired spell to make clever uses of imagination and associations when deciding what type of dish one should make involving the magic ingredients that have been chosen for their family's influence over what concepts are involved in the spell.

Examples of magic recipes include *Settle the Beef Stew* that compells people with a complaint toward the eater to search them out and express their complaint ("beef") and *Lost and Found-ue* that mystically compells items (or pets) that have been lost to appear before the eater though the eater can only find what they were looking for after they have attracted and then returned the lost items of other people.

## Magic Spice Families

When storing magical ingredients together, it is a good idea to separate ingredients from ingredients belonging to a family which speciality does not go well with the speciality from that ingredient, otherwise it may cause the ingredients to exhibit spontaneous movement. It is mentioned for example that Livonian ingredients, that holds influence over the mind and intellect, does not get along well with Merewaldian ingredients, that holds influence over unpredictability. Also note that there are additonal spice families that are mentioned in the show but are never used or elaborated upon.

## Interpretation

A way to look at magic cooking could be that the cook tries to communicate to an outside force what effect they desire to happen through the medium of combining ingredients with different conceptual meanings, which the outside force might understand as intended but which it also might interpretate in another way than the cook meant to, like a person with poor or impaired skills in a language trying to communicate with fluent speaker of that language.