“Cheese Magic” is your new cooking bible

What does it mean to be a good cook? Sure, there’s the technical stuff: the knife skills, the timing, the intuitive moment when you know a chicken breast is cooked through but not yet dry. Beyond that, though, there’s a subtler set of talents, the ones that can’t be measured in tablespoons or minutes. The instincts. The confidence to riff. The quiet, practiced awareness of how flavors talk to one another — the way lemon steadies cream or how a drizzle of honey can round off a salt edge.

Cookbooks that teach that kind of fluency — sharpening not just your knife skills but your sense of season and taste — are rare.

Perhaps that’s why I recently keep returning to “Cheese Magic: Seasonal Plates, Recipes, and Pairings” by Erika Kubick, a former cheesemonger and practicing witch. On paper, it sounds almost too specific: a witchy cheese book, niche on niche. The cover alone could sit on an altar; black, with the phases of the moon rendered as delicate illustrated wheels and wedges. But inside, it’s both a spellbook and a manifesto for how to think like a cook — one grounded in curiosity, sensuality and the simple act of paying attention.

And what better medium than cheese? Long before dairy science, cheesemaking was considered near-mystical work. Dairymaids were said to have a kind of second sight, transforming milk into something alive and lasting with nothing more than time, touch, and faith in invisible powers.

“Many of us are first drawn to cheese by a seemingly magical force,” Kubick told me in a recent email. “In her 1970 tome ‘The Complete Book of Magic and Witchcraft,’ Kathryn Paulsen said, ‘You may fascinate a woman by giving her a piece of cheese.’ That’s gotten the meme treatment a few times, which I think speaks to the unusual pull cheese has on our psyche — from the sensuality of its textures, aromas and flavors to the actual physical power to charm our reward centers into releasing dopamine.”

Over the course of 270 pages, “Cheese Magic” unfolds like a calendar of appetites. Its hundred-plus recipes and rituals are arranged around the Wheel of the Year. Each section offers eight dishes, three cheese boards and two drink pairings — thirteen small invitations to locate yourself in time through recipes ranging from raspberry-brie love tarts, to sleep and love potions (made with cardamom, honey and rose water), to blue cheese ice cream with caramel ribbons.

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“I’ve always loved the seasons, especially as a child,” Kubick said. “I am so excited when a new season begins, and you see that manifest in the world around you. That’s what first drew me to food: watching our journey around the sun play out in fruits, vegetables and the dishes they became.”

“Cheese is also such a seasonal product, anchored by Mother Nature,” she continued. “The fresh spring grasses make the best chèvre, peak-season blades of summer make the most flavorful wheels and the dried hay of autumn make the richest cheeses. It‘s this ever-shifting nature that has enchanted me the most.”

In this book — Kubick’s second after her 2021 debut “Cheese Sex Death: A Bible for the Cheese Obsessed” — she wanted to focus on simple recipes that respond not just to the season, but to the energy of the sabbath, the seasonal festivals that mark the year in many pagan traditions. “For example, Imbolc marks the end of winter, when resources were scarce,” Kubick said. “Our ancestors had to use everything they had, even the scraps.”

(Ashlie Stevens ) “Cheese Magic” by Erika Kubick

That’s how she conceived of the idea for one of her favorite recipes from the book: Raclette Bread Pudding with Caramelized Cabbage and Caraway. “It transforms cellared vegetables and stale bread into something absolutely magical,” she said.

“Cheese Magic” uses cheese and fruit, one of the most universal culinary pairings, to teach, well, pairings. “Cheese is salty and rich by nature, whereas fruit is sweet and crisp,” Kubick told me. “They’re the perfect contrast, and balance each other out. Think sweet watermelon and briny feta.”

Sometimes in this book she leans into that contrast; other times, she plays up harmony. In her Lugnasadh Plate, Gruyère’s faint stone-fruit notes meet a handful of cherries to echo that flavor back. Some of her pairings feel classic, even rustic — the kind you’d find on a farmhouse table: strawberries with chèvre, pears with blue. But others get delightfully weird, leaning into the tension between sweet and sharp, lush and savory. There’s a pecorino plum crumble, for instance, and a gouda apple galette, combinations that sound mischievous until you taste how naturally they click.

Others still might make you pause (burrata with chili crisp and scallions) or raise an eyebrow (lemon pizza with pesto, prosciutto and smoked gouda), but that’s part of the lesson: each combination, however surprising, follows an internal logic that can be applied far beyond the cheese plate.

What Kubick is really teaching, beneath the moon cycles and cheese boards, is a framework for flavor. Her language of season and pairing maps neatly onto the fundamentals of cooking: balance, contrast and restraint. A well-built cheese plate isn’t so different from a well-built meal — every element has a purpose. Salt wants acid. Fat wants crunch. Sweetness wants something bitter or sharp to keep it in check.

Once you understand those dynamics, you start to feel them everywhere. The instinct that pairs chèvre with strawberries is the same one that tells you to finish a bowl of lentils with lemon juice, or to scatter pickled shallots over roast chicken. It’s why anchovies belong in brown butter, why bitter greens crave a drizzle of honey, why even a humble weeknight pasta can be transformed by something that cuts — a squeeze of citrus, a crackle of heat, a splash of vinegar.

In that way, “Cheese Magic” does more than celebrate seasonality and clever pairings. Kubick never loses sight of the kitchen’s most essential lesson: practicality. Case in point: a single slice of American cheese in her stovetop mac keeps the sauce perfectly smooth, and suddenly, mastery feels delightfully achievable.

“American cheese is made with sodium citrate, an emulsifying salt that keeps the cheese creamy and smooth when melted,” she said. “Throwing in a slice or two into a cheese sauce is an age-old trick, and while I absolutely can’t take credit for it, I do love that this little bit of science works like magic. I think there’s a huge misconception that people in the cheese industry don’t like American cheese, but that’s not my experience. We know there’s a time and place for it and a lot of us will still snack on it straight up! It’s nostalgic and melts like a dream.”

So what does it mean to be a good cook? Maybe it’s less about precision and more about presence — the willingness to let instinct and delight guide your hand. That’s the secret spell Kubick offers, tucked between her cheese boards and lunar phases: a reminder that good cooking, like good magic, begins with paying attention to what’s right in front of you.