This article considers the ways “sensuous ethnography” can illuminate the dynamism of embodied religious perception and behavior. It discusses the author's ethnographic research in an African-American community of Lucumi/Santeria practitioners on the South Side of Chicago, and explores the sensorily attentive methodological approach adopted to engage with this house of worship, Ile Laroye. The kitchen of Ile Laroye became the author's main fieldwork site, and this article historicizes the kitchen in Lucumi tradition as a woman-centered space that has privileged complex forms of labor defined as generative of virtue and ritual competence. It is argued that post-sacrificial food preparation in particular has served to prepare the uninitiated for the rigors of Lucumi priesthood, and proven necessary for the internalization of dispositions and sensibilities that lead to initiation. The author contends that kitchen work has played a key role in transmitting somatic knowledge indispensable for the practice of t...