This recipe round-up of Hallowed dishes, sweets, and treats is not meant for October 31st but for November 6th when the traditional Celtic festival of Samhain (Summers End) was celebrated. On this night the veil between the worlds was at its absolute thinnest and carving ghoulish gourds, donning scary costumes, and trick or treating were a protective magic to keep evil spirits at bay.  In this post, however, I explore the remnants of an ancient cuisine once devoted to welcoming the dearly departed, ensuring their blessings and favors to the living left behind. For me, there is little sense in observing these old rituals on the wrong night! 

The period between the end of October and the beginning of November has long been a time for ancestor veneration across the globe, possibly coinciding with the visibility of the Pleiades constellation in both hemispheres, I’m not going to delve into that here. My point is the belief that properly satiating the dead with foods they once enjoyed in life grants them the strength and goodwill necessary to answer our prayers and assist us from the other side – is extremely widespread. 

Originally the timing of Samhain (like Imbolc, Beltane, and Lammas) was determined by cross-quarter days. These midpoints between equinoxes and solstices indicate Earth’s orbit around the sun, and the cycle of seasons. During these celestial alignments, the boundary between this world and the next thinned, allowing denizens of the otherworld to walk the earth.  

Samhain fell on the cross-quarter day when the sun reached the midpoint between the autumn equinox and winter solstice, signaling the beginning of the dark half of the year. This was when fairies, spirits, and souls of the hungry dead ‘came a-callin’. Across Ireland, Scotland, Britain, Wales, Brittany, Galicia, and the Isle of Mann, doors were opened to invite them in and a special place was set for them at the Feasting table.  Bread and cakes like bannocks, and barmbrack (a type of fruitcake) were served and also left outside on doorsteps, in village and farm fields as offerings to the fairies and ancestral spirits. 

In Brittany, Galicia, and the Isle of Man,  milk was poured on graves, feasts and candles were set out, and fires were lit to welcome departed spirits. During the festival known as “Gouel an Anaon” or the “Feast of Souls,”  dishes of clotted milk, pancakes, and cups of cider were laid out on fine white cloth. After retiring for the night families “sometimes heard the scraping of stools and clatter of plates and forks, as the spirits enjoyed their meal. A cuisine of the dead may seem ghoulish today but Brid Mahon tells in The Land of Milk and Honey, that “the Halloween Supper was the most enjoyable feast of the year.”

Cakes were a favorite dish. According to food historian Tamra Andrew, round cakes symbolize the sun, the wheel of the year, and the eternal cycle of life in many pagan traditions.  “People used them as offerings to the gods and spirits who exercised their powers at particular times of the year” and “the types of ingredients used to make these cakes contributed to their symbolism.” During Samhain that meant using plenty of apples and roasted hazelnuts.

Petrified remains have been found in graves, and burial mounds as early as 5000 BC and were likely part of rites of ancestor veneration – the “laying food and wine on the tumuli of the dead”.   Max Dashu’s wonderful book Witches and Pagans Women in European Folk Religion 700 – 1100 inspired me to make the cake pictured below for the Haliorunna, women with oracular powers, who whispered and sang over these graves and barrows “to make the dead speak or send something out.” The recipe for Cake of the Priestess of the Dead is found here.

By the 9th century, Pope Gregory ended these pagan celebrations and decreed Hallowmas or Hallowtide  (Oct. 31st to Nov 2nd) as a special time for honoring the dead with a Feast of Souls. By the 16th century, small round soul cakes (filled with spices, fruits, and nuts ) were given to children as they went door-to-door “souling.” For each cake the child received, a prayer was said to release the souls of the recently departed from purgatory. Today the custom of making soul cakes is still observed in some Catholic communities. Below are two recipes for soul cakes, the recipe for the top photo is found here, and the second below is found here. 

While apples, cream, and hazelnuts were long considered foods for the dead in Scotland, Ireland, and Britain, in the Iberian peninsula, chestnuts and almonds were the food of the dead.  During the Castañada or Magosta festival, families still harvest chestnuts in the afternoon,  then gather around a fire and roast chestnuts to welcome the spirits of deceased family members. In Spain, almonds are crafted into Ossos de Sant (saint’s bones), a traditional sweet for Dia de los Muertos on November 2nd. Panellets, small cakes made with sweet potato, marzipan, and almonds, are also popular, often adorned with pine nuts and shaped in various forms. The recipe for the Pannelets picture below is found in the Autumn Collection at Gather Victoria Patreon. It’s free if you become a member!

Food also played a role in divination. Hidden rings in cakes could predict marriages while tossing apple peels over one’s shoulder might reveal the initials of a future spouse. In Scotland’s Western Isles, the dish Fuarag, made with oats, sugar, and cream, contained trinkets predicting family fortunes. By the 20th century, these traditions evolved into the Halloween Cake, filled with charms and whipped cream. Scottish bakeries continue this tradition, offering charm-filled cakes ‘a plenty’ for “Cakin Night”.

Barmbrack is a spiced cake from Ireland filled with tea-soaked dried fruit often eaten for Halloween and charms are hidden inside — coins meant you would be rich, a ring meant you would soon be married, but a thimble designated your fate as a spinster. Dumb cakes, also part of a vast tradition of divinatory foods, were made in silence by young girls hoping to dream of their future husbands, which is why they were also called dreaming cakes. By the 18th to the mid-20th century, accounts of dumb cake–making proliferated through the press and folklore

Girls marked the cake with their initials, then set it in the oven to bake without speaking a word. After pulling it out of the oven, the girls break the cake and walk backward to their beds. After setting the cake under their pillows, they dream of their husband-to-be.  While the dumb cake was pretty plain, a recipe from Handy Household Hints and Recipes (1916) describes a triangular-shaped dumb cake, to be baked on Halloween or Thanksgiving. It was filled with butter, sugar eggs, spices, and brandy and decorated with English walnuts and autumn leaves.

Another delicious custom associated with gloomy castles, ghosts, and all things that “go bump in the night is the gothic novel. I created Red Velvet Mystery Cake below in honor of the insatiable gothic appetites of 18th-century women who retired to their boudoirs to read spine-chilling novels while having a wee bite of cake.  You can find the recipe here.

All these cakes, treats, and sweets bring me back to “Trick or Treating” the custom of appeasing the dead with food offerings. Historian S. V. Peddle suggests that trick-or-treating “evolved from a tradition whereby people impersonated ghouls, ghosts or the souls of the dead, and ” the old spirits of the winter, who demanded reward in exchange for good fortune”.  The Rowan Berry Caramel Treats pictured below should do the trick and the recipe found here.

While we still observe these sweet traditions we’ve forgotten their potency for bestowing protection divination and good fortune once depended entirely on the right timing. Samhain was when the denizens of the otherworld walked into ours. So I ask again – what good are these ancient customs if practiced on the wrong night? 

So this year the night when the veils between worlds dissolve (November 6th), I hope you will remember the recipe links here and practice a little food magic in honor of your dearly departed. May they give you plenty of protection and blessings this coming winter!

Sources

• Mahon, Brid. The Land of Milk and Honey. 1998.
• Kelly, Ruth. Book Of Hallowe’en. 1919.
• Peddle, S. V. Pagan Channel Islands: Europe’s Hidden Heritage. 2007.  
• Hole, Christina. British Folk Customs. 1976.
• Andrews, Tamra. Nectar & Ambrosia: An Encyclopedia of Food in World Mythology. 1959.
• González, Juan. The Culinary Traditions of Dia de los Muertos. 2017.
• Smith, Emily. Soul Cakes and the Tradition of Souling. 2002.
• Macfarlane, Ian. Scottish Food Traditions. 2015.
• Murray, Fiona. The Evolution of Halloween Cakes. 2020.
• Wehrley, Mattie Lee. Household Hints and Recipes. 1916.
• Gisborne, Thomas. “An Enquiry Into the Duties of the Female Sex”. 1797
• Dashu, Max,. Witches and Pagans Women in European Folk Religion 700 – 1100. 2016  

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