Pow-Wows; or, Long Lost Friend

If the Key of Solomon is cathedral magic, Pow-Wows is kitchen magic. Compiled by Johann Georg Hohman and first printed in Pennsylvania in 1820, this slim volume of Braucherei — Pennsylvania Dutch folk healing — reads like a home-remedy book with the veil pulled slightly back: charms to stop bleeding, to cure a burn, to protect the house and the cattle, each braided with scripture and plain German piety.

It is proudly practical. There is no grand cosmology here, only the conviction that a few right words, spoken with faith, can mend what needs mending. That intimacy is why the book survived: it was a working-class text, passed hand to hand, quoted from memory. It belongs to the same broad family as our own rootwork — traditions that trusted ordinary people, in ordinary kitchens, to tend the sacred themselves.

The scholarship is delicious once you go looking: the tangled printing history, the German antecedents, the way American folklorists rediscovered it in the twentieth century and argued over what it meant. But the pleasure of the book is its voice — earnest, unbothered, sure.

Our verdict: charming and genuinely important. Read it as social history and folk poetry, and keep it near the recipes where it has always belonged.