If you can believe it, mashed potatoes are the original Halloween treat
Double, double, boil and bubble
Everyone has a favorite Halloween candy — Snickers, Reese’s, Fireballs, or if you were that kid who sat alone at lunch, Smarties. Most Westerners can’t imagine Halloween food that doesn’t contain ladles of sugar.
But the next time you mash a potato, ask whether the ghost in the attic takes extra butter. Because Halloween used to be all about fruits and veggies.
In early 20th century Scotland, party hosts would mash a giant tub of potatoes and bury objects inside: a button, a thimble, and a ring. Guests would gather around the dish, turn the lights off, and dip their spoons inside the mashed potatoes, which the Scots called “champit tatties.” If a boy got the button, he would remain a bachelor his whole life; a girl would remain a spinster if she chose the thimble. The lucky person who got the ring was destined for marriage and happiness. Pretty high-stakes tatties.
Variations on the game included a three-penny bit for wealth, a heart-shaped charm for passionate love, a shell for long journeys, and a key for great success.
In Ireland, Halloween called for “colcannon,” mashed potatoes mixed with parsnips and chopped onions. They mixed in a small china doll. Whoever got that would be the first to have children.
Starches aside, apples are also a long Halloween tradition. In the 10th century, Celts tied apples to evergreen branches and burned huge bonfires to encourage the sun gods to return the following year, in the Gaelic festival known as Samhain — considered the origin of what we now celebrate as Halloween. Observed from dusk on Oct. 31 to dusk on Nov. 1, the holiday marked the end of the harvest season, the beginning of the dark half of the year, and perhaps “the extinction of life itself.”
Today we murder apples with caramel and stab them with sticks (I had a bad candy apple experience wearing braces), but apple-bobbing is drenched in centuries-old theories of immortality and fertility. “Apples, apple peels, and even pips have long been used to peer into the romantic future,” fruit historian Joan Morgan told NPR. Before dunking apples into water barrels, each girl would mark her fruit. The boy to bob her apple made the match.
When peeling apples around harvest time, girls would toss apple skins over their shoulders; the letter the peel formed matched the name of her future mate. As British poet John Gay described it in 1714:
I pare this pippin round and round again,
My sweetheart’s name to flourish on the plain;
I fling the unbroken paring o’er my head,
My sweetheart’s letter on the ground is read.
And the next time you find yourself debating salad, consider this sexy trick: In Wales, Halloween celebrators cut open cabbage or kale and examined the stalks “to glean insight into future mates,” according to Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. Or if that wasn’t enough, young people would combine a walnut, a hazelnut, a nutmeg, butter, and sugar into a pill and swallow it before bed on Halloween to dream of love.
Turns out, Halloween used to be a lot more like Valentine’s Day — even when you factor in all the veggies.
