D       Be notified of updates to The Capital Scot		About Capital Scot Search this Site Site Map FAQ Notices Subscribers (Links) ICRA Checked

Scottish Halloween Food Magic

by
Jack Campin

"We had a discussion last week about Halloween lanterns; I mentioned the older Scottish form of these, made from turnips (a.k.a "swede" in England, 'rutabaga' in America). But there were many other magical practices at Halloween that used food in one way or another, and vegetable lanterns only played a small part in the celebration. (These are taken from an old multi-volume reference on British calendar customs, which has three volumes about Scotland; I didn't look up the other volumes). Most of the customs are common to Highlands and Lowlands with only minor variations (and, obviously, different words).

"Almost all of the customs were performed by young people for divining who their future husbands and wives would be. (An exception; sometimes gangs would go about pelting doors with cabbages or turnips - unpopular people could get their doors shattered this way). So here are some suggestions:

• Eat salty food and go to bed without drinking; the future spouse will appear in a dream. There are two variants of this: the salty food is either a specially-baked barley bannock with a colossal amount of salt added, or else it is a whole stolen herring; for that it is essential both that the herring be stolen and that the whole fish - head, tail, guts and all - should be eaten.
  
  
• Another way to induce a prophetic dream of one's spouse: make a bannock with soot added to eat - this could either be eaten like the salty one or else put under the pillow.
  
  
• Steal an egg and break it into water, reading the image of the intended in the shapes the egg white makes.
  
  
• Steal kail stocks in the dark, and carry them home walking backwards; a future husband's height could be foretold from the length of the stalk and his wealth by the amount of dirt clinging to the roots. Girls often kept stocks taken this way behind the front door. Again, if the kail isn't stolen it won't work.
  
  
• Hang a pea pod or apple peeling over the door; the first person of the appropriate sex to walk in beneath it will have the same first name as the one you'll marry.
  
  
• Sow hempseed, repeating the rhyme -
  'Hempseed, I saw thee,
  Hempseed, I saw thee,
  And he who is my true love
  Come after me and pu' thee.'

"Then look over your left shoulder and you'll see an image of the man you are to marry following behind, bending over and pulling the hemp up.

• To see if a relationship will last, place two hazelnuts side by side to represent the couple and burn them over a fire; if they stay together as they burn, so will the couple stay together; if the nuts burst and fly apart, so will the relationship break up.
  
  
• Make a meal for a number of people out of some mushy food (in some places this was _stapag_ or crowdie, made with cream and oatmeal; in others it mashed potato) and hide a ring in it; the person who gets the ring in their portion will be next to marry. An elaboration of this added a sixpence and a thimble; again the ring-finder would be married first, but the sixpence-finder would marry into money and the thimble-finder would remain single.

"One explanation of the food-stealing was that commemorated a former time when all property was in common on Halloween."

---

Memberships
Member of                      of the FOSI

Awards
                    

Accessibility