Halloween is supposedly a spooky time of year, but it is also very much the time of year when food is important. So I dusted off my attempts to get creative and involved and try my hand once again at a full 7 course meal. The theme was of course Halloween, but short of putting pumpkin, pumpkin spice, toffee and apple in everything, it's hard to know what to put in a Halloween themed meal. So I went to look at the many variations of an autumnal festival of spirits that exist across the world, regardless of where they came from for inspiration.
The final planned menu along with the festival it comes from.
APPLE AND GOUDA TAMALES Hors d’oeuvre - Steamed Corn Rolls, Día de Muertos - Mexico
DAL PALAK RABBIT Soup - Spinach Lentil Soup in a Pumpkin roll, Pitru Paksha - Hindu
COLCANNON Appetizer - Mashed potato with bacon and cabbage, Samhain – Celtic
AUTUMN NUT SALAD Salad - Edible Nuts on a bed of Lettice, Allhallowstide
TEOCHEW & PENG KWAY Main - Braised Duck on a fried rice cake, Zhongyuan – China
CRANACHAN Dessert - Oatmeal Cream Pudding, Samhain – Celtic
SOUL CAKE Mignardise - Spiced Current Short Cake, Allhallowstide
Each of these dishes didn't go according to plan, quite, as usual, but the details of how they ended up are in the individual entries in the blog.
Some of these holidays you may have heard of: some of these holidays you may not. Here is a very brief summary of them with my lay understanding and a single line.
Día de Muertos: South American "day of the dead". People have ornately painted skulls painted on their faces to make the dead, coming back from the afterlife, feel they can join in the fun. Food is given to the dead during the party.
Pitru Paksha; Hindu, India. It seems that this time is granted so that three generations of the dead, waiting to get to heaven, can return to present food to honours the older ancestors so that they are not cursed in heaven for all eternity. Cheery bunch of people, but at least you only have to cope with your great-grandfather/mother returning from the grave.
Samhain: Celtic. Where most of the current Halloween traditions come from, in some form, including carving pumpkins and dressing up in costume. An attempt to scare and confuse the general array of fay spirits that might be about.
All hallows' tide: The traditional name for the English Halloween period of All Hallows Eve, All Hallows Day, and all souls day. Basically, another Christian tradition based around a late autumn folk event to eat the food that appeared but didn't keep. All hallows eve is when demons come to this earth, cause the next day the holiness repelling them is renewed for the year.
Zhongyuan: Chinese festival of the Hungry Ghosts. The dead get a month-long season ticket to return to the world of the living for a visit. The Ghosts are kept happy by little gifts of food, because apparently the catering in hell is awful.
OVERALL REVIEW
In general, I was quite happy with how this went. I had been more organised, though the washing as I went was a bit stalled by the sink in use. I made some assumptions about small things that left me making up stuff that wasn't to the recipe (see CRANACHAN). It should have been that I cooked way too much of each course, but in the end, my test group was a hungry bunch so I do think that I need to review how I think portion sizes should go. I killed a saucepan (it did get revived) and finally, I think each course lacked a flourish, for presentation. It was something I noticed as I went through that it is worth just poping something on to stop it from looking plain.
Comments