Halloween

Barmbrack, from the Irish bairín breac, “speckled loaf”, is a fruit bread eaten all year in Ireland, but at Halloween it hides your future. Small objects are baked inside, and each one tells a fortune: a ring for marriage within the year, a coin for wealth, a pea for no marriage that year, a stick for quarrels and a scrap of cloth for bad luck with money.

Bakeries in Ireland still sell Halloween barmbracks with a ring inside. This is the quick “tea brack”: instead of a yeast dough, the fruit soaks overnight in strong tea, which makes the loaf dark, moist and easy to bake at home.

Colcannon, mashed potato with kale or cabbage, was a traditional Halloween supper in Ireland. As with barmbrack, small charms were hidden in it, usually a coin or a ring wrapped in paper, and finding one promised luck or a wedding.

There was even an old custom for unmarried girls: put the first and last spoonfuls into a sock and hang it on the front door handle. The first man to walk through the door would be your future husband. The old song “The Skillet Pot” remembers it: “Did you ever eat colcannon, made from lovely pickled cream?” The butter well in the middle is not optional.

Long before trick-or-treating, there was “souling”. Around All Hallows’ Eve and All Souls’ Day in England, poor people and children went from door to door singing and offering prayers for the dead, and were given soul cakes in return. Each cake eaten was said to free a soul from purgatory.

The cakes were small, round and spiced, sometimes with currants or saffron, and marked with a cross. The souling song survived in Cheshire and Shropshire into the 20th century: “A soul, a soul, a soul cake, please, good missus, a soul cake…”

In Ireland and Scotland, Halloween was once called Snap-Apple Night, after its apple games. In “snap-apple” an apple hung from a string or a spinning stick, and players tried to bite it with their hands behind their backs; in “bobbing” they fished apples out of a tub of water with their teeth. The Irish painter Daniel Maclise painted the whole noisy scene in Snap-Apple Night in 1833.

Toffee apples carry that tradition on. Glossy and blood-red, they are sold at Halloween and Bonfire Night fairs across Britain and Ireland, and in America the same idea became the candy apple.

The first jack-o’-lanterns were not pumpkins. In Ireland and Scotland, people carved frightening faces into turnips and swedes at Halloween and lit them from inside, to scare off wandering spirits. The name comes from the Irish tale of Stingy Jack, a trickster refused by both heaven and hell, who wanders the earth with a coal glowing inside a carved turnip.

Irish and Scottish immigrants in America found pumpkins bigger and far easier to carve, and the pumpkin lantern was born. This soup is the delicious part of the tradition: carve the face, then cook the inside.

Boxty, from the Irish bácstaí, “poor-house bread”, is a potato pancake from the north-west of Ireland, especially Leitrim, Cavan, Fermanagh and Mayo. What makes it special is the mix of raw grated potato and cooked mash, which gives a crisp outside and a soft, slightly chewy middle.

In those counties boxty was the food of All Hallows’ Eve, cooked on the griddle for the Halloween supper, and an old rhyme warned the girls of the house: “Boxty on the griddle, boxty in the pan, if you can’t make boxty, you’ll never get a man.”

Pumpkins came to Europe from the Americas, and early English cooks baked them in pies with apples and spices. The first American cookbook, Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery of 1796, already has a “pompkin” pudding of stewed pumpkin, cream, eggs, sugar, mace, nutmeg and ginger, baked in a crust: the pumpkin pie we know today.

By the 19th century pumpkin pie was the taste of autumn in New England, made from October harvest pumpkins for Halloween parties and Thanksgiving. You can find Amelia Simmons’s book among Latlight’s heritage recipe books.

Pan de muerto, “bread of the dead”, is baked in Mexico for Día de Muertos on 1 and 2 November, the days right after Halloween when families welcome the souls of their dead back home. The loaves are set on the ofrenda, the home altar, among marigolds, candles and photographs, and then shared by the living.

The dough strips on top are bones, laid in a cross, and the little ball in the middle is the skull; some say the round loaf itself is the circle of life. The scent of orange blossom is meant to remember the departed. Like the English soul cake, it is bread baked to be shared for the souls.