FEATURE: Divine inspiration fuels cookbook success

Sister Anastazja is pictured in the kitchen of WAM publishing house in Krakow, Poland, on Jan. 23. PHOTO: AFP

The aroma wafting out of Sister Anastazja's kitchen is divine.

With military precision, the matronly Catholic nun surveys pantry shelves laden with home-made preserves. After selecting her ingredients, she whips up a recipe she may well include in her next cookbook -- following her first four blockbusters.

"Many of my recipes come to me in dreams," she says, citing "divine inspiration" for her near-million copy sales status, an extraordinary success by Polish standards.

"The hard part is remembering to write down the recipe when I wake up -- before I forget!" she says.

With a total 559 recipes, Sister Anastazja's cookbooks include saucy little numbers like "The Drunk," "The Coquette" and the "Mother-in-Law's Breast," reflecting the wry sense of humor she shares with her Jesuit publishers.

"One lady wrote me with a complaint that I'd been disrespectful to a certain part of the female anatomy," she chuckles. "She must have been a mother-in-law."

With her porcelain complexion from decades spent over steaming pots, 58-year-old Sister Anastazja went a step further in December, becoming the first nun in Poland to release a DVD.

Her Perfect Cakes gives easy-to-follow tips on baking tarts she insists will turn out right every time, like her trademark "Nun's Secret" which she says was revealed in a dream, or the "Happy Highlander," drenched in spirits.

Printing presses whir madly just down the hall from her ground-floor kitchen. Upstairs her tomes are among thousands of others sold in the airy bookshop of the Jesuit Fathers' WAM publishing house.

"Sister Anastazja has been cooking for us for years," says Father Henryk Pietras, director of the 136-year-old publishers. "We came to the conclusion her food is so delicious we should share this treasure."

Her tome, 103 Cakes of Sister Anastazja, was published in 2001 and the most recent hit the shops last year. The glossy, hard-covered books have become popular wedding gifts, as well as a hit with time-strapped women who say Sister Anastazja's instructions make recipes easy.

"All told, about a million copies have sold," Pietras says proudly.

Only by the late Polish-born pope John Paul II, the memoirs of his right-hand man Polish Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz and J.K. Rowling's blockbuster Harry Potter series have sold more in Poland, according to publishers Web sites.

"She creates a lot of recipes and she's extremely picky about the ones she'll publish. She checks each one about 15 times and we have to test it -- to eat it all!" Pietras says.

In Catholic Poland, Sister Anastazja's success has sparked a wave of copycat publications by nuns cooking for other orders of Polish priests. Most notably, Krakow's Salvatorian Fathers, who run a rival publishing house, have launched a series of cookbooks by their very own Sister Aniela.

"So far, Sister Aniela is the only nun in Poland who has her own [culinary] TV program," reads a line highlighted in red on the Salvatorians' Web site.

The craze of "nuns-tell-all" cookbooks has broken a centuries-old taboo by religious orders that maintained strict secrecy over their recipes, Pietras says.

But Sister Anastazja says: "Cooking is a pleasure and it makes me happy to share my recipes -- I certainly don't won't take them to the grave."

The nun says her love for kitchen work began when she lost both her parents to illness and was left an orphan at 17.

The first recipes she learned to cook, simple peasant dishes like zurek sour soup and galabki cabbage rolls, remain her own favorites.

And confesses she never imagined she would be a best-selling cookbook writer -- or release her own DVD.

"Really, I thought it would just be a kind of brochure," she says of her initial effort.

"My life hasn't really changed. Sometimes I have a little less time, but I make sure I have time for prayer -- it's the most important. The books are just secondary, really," she says.