Epicurean

Corrine Kenner's second deck in this catalog is her most domestic invention: the Epicurean Tarot through U.S. Games, where each card pairs its meaning with a recipe, the arcana as menu, divination and dinner planned in one draw. The conceit is less whimsical than it looks from Kenner, whose talent, the Impressionist deck shows it too, is translating tarot into vocabularies people already live in; and food, as the Chocolate and Cacio e Pepe decks elsewhere here agree, is symbolism everyone speaks fluently. Recipe cards make the deck genuinely usable in two rooms of the house, and the pairings do interpretive work: what dish suits the Tower is a real hermeneutic question with a delicious answer. It suits cooks who read and readers who cook, Kenner completists, food-deck collectors assembling the pantry shelf, and gift-buyers who know someone with cards in the kitchen already. Ascetics have been excused from this shelf twice before; third time is policy.