Soul cakes

            A lot of our own Halloween traditions might owe their roots to Scottish guising (treating neighbors to little performances (in costume so as to be safe from wandering spirits) on Halloween night, (in exchange for sweets) but it wasn’t always so.  Holidays in early America were like crazy frat parties (look up New England towns actually banning Christmas because of excessive, gross drinking…). and Halloween was no different.  I remember my grandma talking about waxing windows on Halloween, a concept I completely didn’t understand- kids carrying hunks of wax around town, rubbing it against windows would be so…I don’t know, noticeable.   It was windows they were waxing, after all!  But apparently, before towns got the idea to sanction trick or treating as a safe, fun way to celebrate Halloween, kids were waxing windows like there was no tomorrow, releasing cows to wander through main streets, throwing chickens off of buildings and actually tipping over outhouses.  Not so much tricking, as in your face obnoxiousness.  It was a night of (relative?) danger for towns people and it just got too rowdy by the 1920s.  Anoka, Minnesota claims to be the first place to organize activities to keep hooligans off the streets, and they had a wealth of traditions from around the world to organize things around.  So, whether you wear a costume to fool the spirits floating about, or to honor the sabbath costumed dancing witches did to promote animal fertility, you are tapping into centuries of human creativity and celebration.  This year might call for harking back to some lesser followed traditions if trick or treating just isn’t a safe option…luckily, there are a lot to chose from:

From Scotland: burn some nuts! Toss some shelled nuts in a small fire- if you are in a couple and the nuts spit and hiss and don’t go down without a fight, you might need to break up.  Quiet, easy burning nuts mean you are a match made in heaven.  There are actually loads of burning nut couple prediction games, and now I can’t help but wonder if my nut allergy has been a bad omen my whole life in the love department!  Luckily, they also pulled kale from the ground and used that to predict love lives.  Clearly, I am doing something wrong as this makes as much sense to me as waxing windows.

Also from the Celts: try carving a turnip! It is way more time consuming than carving a pumpkin, kind of has a shrunken head feel to it, and it actually is the more traditional thing to carve for All Hallow’s Eve.   This tradition was meant to ward off a kind of scary guy named Jack, who would lure, or warn?, victims with shining bursts of light out into the bogs.  Probably just an overly creepy explanation for methane flare ups that are not unusual around bogs, but don’t tell any modern day pumpkin patch that!  When Irish and Scottish immigrants came to America and saw pumpkins they were like screw these turnips, let’s use these giant, easy to carve orange things!  And the rest is history.  Or carve some peeled apples into spooky faces, dip in a cup of lemon juice with 1 tbs salt and let them dry out on a window sill.  Better yet, one Halloween superstition from Scotland states that a young woman who peels an apple in one long piece can then throw this apple peel over her shoulder, it will land in her future mate’s initials.  Maybe not the best way to keep your teenagers sheltering in place on Halloween, but it can’t hurt.

During Samhain, or the festival for the Lord of the Dead, Druids built huge bonfires and jointly celebrated the dead and good harvests.  The Romans had Feralia, or an orchard festival around the same time.  Maybe take this year to make a woven wheat wreath?  And then burn it?  Or not, just seems like a long time ago they were a bit burn happy this time of year.

Or simply make a soul cake, which were once given out to beggars in England by towns people wishing to save the soul of a departed family member.  It can’t be a bad idea to make and share these this year of all years.  This soul cake recipe is adapted from one from NPR, which had a story about this tradition that inspired me to give it a try.  Even NPR mentions that long ago, an unlucky citizen who picked a burned soul cake would, you guessed it, be the burnt human sacrifice that year!  We do not need to carry on all parts of traditions, thank goodness, but make sure you take yours out of the oven as soon as they are a bit golden to avoid any possible misunderstandings! And maybe, we should be thankful for living now a days, even with the crazy year we have had. 

This old-fashioned recipe reminds me of Sleepy Hollow, which is the kind of movie that lets you feel crisp leaves right under your feet.  The constant battle of scientific rules against magical thinking is mixed with great costumes, atmospheric lighting and a pleasant Tim Burton eeriness.  I love this part of New York and the history there, and if this movie had an official cookie, it would be these soul cakes.