We've been taught to think of the kitchen as mundane. A chore. As domestic in the diminishing sense of the word. Something that happened before the real work began. But if you go back far enough, before the separation of the sacred and the everyday that Christianity introduced into European folk practice, the kitchen wasn't separate from the altar at all. It was the altar. The hearth was the ritual center of the home. The act of feeding people was an act of power.