Tricks & treats: 'Soul cakes' and food folklore spice up All Hallows Eve

Modern Halloween celebrations — costumed kids, spook alleys and store-bought treats — evolved over hundreds of years. It started as a Druidic festival in Ireland, with bonfires to thank the sun god for the harvest, said Ashley Gorrell, a Thanksgiving Point cooking-class specialist who last week taught "All Hallows Eve: Old Traditions, Recipe and Lore." Gorrell also studies folklore and how food fits in to stories and legends that have been passed down.

She said the people believed that Oct. 31 was the one night in the year where ghosts and witches were most likely to walk abroad. Another belief was that Saman, the lord of death, summoned together the evil souls that had been condemned to inhabit the bodies of animals.

"Everything that wasn't harvested by November first would be cursed by the fairies, and you couldn't eat it," Gorrell said. "So there was a big rush to get in the harvest. People would also give thanks to their ancestors by cooking food and leaving it at their grave sites to feed all the souls roaming about. They still celebrate this in Mexico as the Day of the Dead."

In the eighth century, the Catholic Church changed the date to All Saints Day, or All Hallows — a commemoration for all those saints who didn't have a specific day of remembrance.

"The church wanted to get rid of all these festivals which they thought were evil, so all these holidays were changed," Gorrell said.

The night before became known as All Hallows Eve and shortened to "Halloween."

Poor Irish people would beg for food (known as "going a-souling") and receive pastries called "soul cakes." In return, they would pray for the dead. The church encouraged the practice of distributing soul cakes instead of leaving food and wine for dead spirits. Over time, "going a-soulin" eventually became "trick-or-treating."

Gorrell doesn't have a soul cake recipe but instead shared a recipe for Raisin-Filled Cookies that her grandmother makes every year for Halloween.

Many of the traditional Halloween games first revolved around foretelling the future, especially who will marry whom. Apples are often involved in many of these games, probably because they were in season.

In "bobbing for apples," girls used to name each apple for a different suitor. The girl would kneel over the tub, shut her eyes, put her hands behind her and try to catch an apple with her teeth. The one she could bite would be her future husband. A variation was to hang apples from a doorway (also done today with doughnuts). The first one to finish eating the apple gets married next.

In another tradition, at midnight on Halloween, a girl would stand in front of a mirror and brush her hair three times while eating an apple. The image of her future husband was supposed to appear in the mirror over her shoulder. Once she saw his face, she was supposed to peel an apple in a single strip. She would the toss the peel over her left shoulder using her right hand. The peel would form the first initial of his name.

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