On Soul Cakes + Halloween

a reflection, a prayer, and a recipe to start your week

Oct 27, 2024

This coming Thursday, children across the country will don costumes and meander from door to door collecting candy. Some Christians will eagerly participate in the week’s festivities, and others will purposefully abstain. Instagram influencers will write diatribes about how the holiday is satanic in origin and we ought to stay far away.

But contrary to popular opinion, Halloween is Christian in origin. All Saint’s Day or All Hallow’s day, which falls on November 1, was established in the 8th century as a day to honor the many saints who did not yet have official feast days within the church year. Many church holidays officially begin at sunset the evening before the feast day—Hallow’s Eve (like Christmas Eve) or Hallow’s evening was shortened to Halloween, which is how our contemporary day got its name.

In Bake & Pray, I provide recipes for every season of the liturgical calendar drawn from Christian traditions throughout history and around the world. I also provide some food history and folklore behind each recipe. As I share in the book, many of the holidays in the Christian calendar were established by pre-industrial societies who were dependent on following the rhythms of the sun and moon in order to situate themselves in time.

Halloween is one such day. It falls right as the weather turns to winter, as the days shorten, trees begin to die, and the harvest draws to an end. It’s a poignant time to remember the never ending cycle of life and death that keeps our world in motion. As such, Pope Gregory IV found it to be an appropriate day to remember the many unnamed saints who faithfully passed on the faith from generation to generation.

There are myriad traditions throughout Christian history that paved the way for the traditions popular in American Halloween celebrations today. For instance in medieval Britain, the poor would go “souling”, walking from door to door offering to pray for one’s deceased in exchange for a soul cake—a spiced cookie made on Halloween. This practice is an early version of our contemporary trick-or-treat.

Martin Luther was quite purposeful in his choice of Halloween as the day to nail his 95 theses to the Wittenburg Door. The story is fascinating, but rather than tell it to you here, I recommend you listen to the podcast episode I made on the topic back in 2022!

Listen to Kitchen Meditations

If you’ve received your copy of Bake & Pray, would you do me a huge favor? We really need to hit 50 Amazon review this week to help kickstart momentum after two weeks of shipping delays! Would you go leave a quick review—just a sentence or two about the book is enough. It would go a long way to helping this book succeed in the weeks to come!

Leave a Review Here

A Halloween Prayer, from Bake & Pray: Liturgies and Recipes for Baking Bread as a Spiritual Practice

God who is behind and before all things,

you are not bound by the limits of space or time.

Yet you called each of us to the time and place
in which we were born.

In every bite of bread, remind us that we
are inextricably linked to those who’ve gone before
and those who will reside in your world after we are gone.

Protect us from the powers and principalities
of greed, of violence, of polarization
that harm and divide your beloved creation.

Make us instead
instruments of peace,
passing down your love to the next generation.

Amen.

Soul Cakes

from Bake & Pray: Liturgies and Recipes for Baking Bread as a Spiritual Practice

8 tablespoons (4 ounces) unsalted butter, softened and cut into 1/4- inch cubes
1/2 cup (3.6 ounces) granulated sugar
2 egg yolks
2 cups (8.5 ounces) all-purpose or bread flour
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon turmeric
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ginger
1/4 teaspoon coriander
1/4 teaspoon allspice
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons milk

egg wash
1/4 cup golden raisins

1. In a medium-sized mixing bowl, mix butter and sugar until thoroughly combined. Add egg yolks and mix until fully incorporated.

2. In a small mixing bowl, sift together flour, spices, and salt.

3. Fold flour mixture into the butter mixture. Add the milk when the flour is almost fully combined. Mix just until the ingredients are fully incorporated and the dough is smooth. It should feel like a sugar cookie dough. The goal is not to build up gluten in this recipe, so be careful not to overmix.

4. Let the dough rest in the refrigerator for 30 minutes to allow it to rest and chill.

5. After the dough has rested, preheat the oven to 325°F. Roll the dough onto a lightly floured kitchen counter to 1/4- inch thickness.

6. Using a 4- inch circular cookie cutter or the lid of a wide-mouthed mason jar, cut as many circles as you can out of the dough. Gently knead the scraps back together, roll out, and cut again. You should get about 16–20 circles out of this recipe.

7. Place the cakes on two baking sheets, 8–10 on each. Brush each cake with egg wash, then place golden raisins on the cakes in the shape of a cross.

8. Bake the cakes for 10 minutes, let cool, and enjoy. I like to serve these to the friends who come over to help me pass out candy to the neighborhood children.

I’ve spent the last few legs of my road trip listening to the audiobook of Ina Garten’s new memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens. I’m always fascinated to hear how those that have shaped contemporary food media arrived to their work. I’ll admit it was not the ideal week for me to listen to her share that her first book unexpectedly sold out of it’s first 25,000-run printing in just 3 days (for those not familiar with publishing numbers, this is an insane number of books for a first printing of a breakout author. It is an even more insane number of books to sell in just three days. In three books published over the course of 5 years I have not come CLOSE to selling a combined total of 25,000 books!). This small detail aside, I’ve enjoyed the book and recommend it for those curious how Ina became Ina.

I’m also listening to Sharon McMahon’s book, The Small and the Mighty. I’ve followed McMahon on Instagram for the last three years and have been fascinated by her ability to intersperse educational content with just enough humor to diffuse the tension that arises in discussions of policy. Her book is brilliantly written and, as my friend Kaitlyn Schiess notes in her interview with McMahon, is far more thoughtfully and responsibly written than it “needed” to be in order to sell. This book has increased my respect for McMahon significantly—if you aren’t yet a part of her “governerd” community online, I highly recommend giving her a follow.