Carrington never ate according to a single grid: her table overlays three heritages. The Anglo-Irish tea-time of her childhood (teapot, fruit bread, divination), the peasant cooking of the Ardèche from her years with Max Ernst, and the ritual Mexican cuisine of her final exile. With her, the meal is not divided into starter-main-dessert but into threshold-moments: tea time (ritual and omen), the studio meal (frugal, shared between two canvases), and the festive offering (where cooking becomes ceremony). The common thread: the pot treated as an alchemist's crucible.

Carrington saw cooking as an alchemy laboratory: to macerate, infuse, transmute. Her signature is not a single ingredient but a gesture — the slow transformation of humble elements (tea, dried fruits, orange blossom water, herbs) into something charged with symbols. Orange blossom and tea recur as two red threads between England, France, and Mexico.