“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