Halloween Tricky Treats

Editorial

It is one of those oversubscribed Americanised holidays but it’s something I can’t help writing about. Halloween, celebrated on October 31, originated from the name of the festival kept by the Gaels and Celts which means ‘summer’s end’. While this holiday is not as prolific as what you can find in America, I have noticed a few ghoulish groups roaming the streets and the number have since increased in the recent years.

In honour of the Celts who traditionally celebrated this holiday with a human sacrifice, Halloween is a time when we embrace all haunted traditions. Houses are adorned with carved pumpkins and other props that are akin to that found in a cemetery. It is the one day of the year where people celebrate the macabre and empty ‘threats’ of tricking unless treats are provided, becomes a customary celebration for children.

The traditional treat associated with this holiday is candy apples because it coincides with the wake of the annual apple harvest. Some other sweet treats associated with Halloween are, Barmbrack (a light fruitcake), caramel corn, candy pumpkins and pumpkin pie. Halloween parties now incorporate more haunting recipes like ‘frozen eyeballs’, ‘witches brew’ and ‘jellied eyeballs’.

These days, high end chefs around the world are creating ghastly concoctions and it is the one time of the year when the presentation of your dish can be as appalling, as messy and as creative as possible. Forget the costumes; here is my short list of ghoulish and tricky treats to feast on for this Halloween.

Chef Nigel Slater describes Halloween as ‘our autumn festival, with its undertones of darkness and evil, are best celebrated in the light of glowing pumpkins and crackling fires. The food must reassure and take those intimidated by the unwelcome knock of trick-or-treaters to a safe place’. His answer to this is a cauldron of steaming chicken and black-eyed beans ladled and shared amongst friends, family, hobgoblins and fairies, then finished off with a pudding of the stick-to-your-spoon variety.

Culinary magician, Heston Blumenthal creates a Dracula-inspired risotto (made with spelt risotto, beet juice and horseradish), an edible graveyard, butter-sautéed leeches and Doctor Hyde’s potion. This probably takes years to perfect so if you are looking for something a little sweeter and a tad easier then the Queen of shortcuts, Nigella has a gloriously rich ghoul-graveyard cake which is literally, a simple devil’s food cake (what else?) topped with some Halloween themed lollies.

And if you are carving that proverbial pumpkin, here are some inspirations for what to do with all that pumpkin flesh – Bilson’s marron, butternut pumpkin and mandarin, District Dining’s spiced pumpkin, marinated feta, honey and walnuts, Nigella’s pumpkin and goats cheese lasagne, Jamie Oliver’s spiced pumpkin soup and Gordon Ramsay’s pumpkin risotto with roasted mushrooms.

To quote Nigel Slater again, ‘Halloween may be a time when the Celts would have expected a human sacrifice, but let’s take comfort instead, in bowls of warming stews and plates of sticky, sweet, gooey desserts’. If you were to plan a Halloween dinner, what would you serve?
 

Alvin Quah for Citysearch, September 2011