48 Fun Facts About Halloween Food

What was candy corn called in its early days, when it was pitched at America's farm families?

Chicken Feed: about half of Americans still worked on farms, so the kernels were sold as a sweet that looked like the hens' dinner.

As of the mid-2020s, which company is the largest maker of candy corn?

Brach's pushed single-serve packets of candy corn as trick-or-treating took off after the Second World War. Since a 2012 merger it has belonged to the Ferrara Candy Company.

Which wartime measure put American trick-or-treating largely on hold in the early 1940s?

Sugar rationing ran from 1942 to 1947 and left few treats to hand out. Once it ended, children's magazines and radio shows carried the custom nationwide.

Which company, renamed Jelly Belly in 2001, began making candy corn in 1898?

Goelitz Confectionery was started by brothers newly arrived from Germany. It took its modern name from the Jelly Belly jelly beans it began making in 1976.

What are the spiced treats handed to door-to-door singers at Allhallowtide, ancestor of trick-or-treating, called?

Soul cakes: the 'soulers' who received them promised to pray for the givers' dead relatives, and later the visitors were mostly children asking for food, money or ale.

In which country did children ask door to door for 'bread for God' at Allhallowtide?

Portugal: Pão-por-Deus, 'bread for God', sees Portuguese children collect cakes, sweets and nuts door to door on All Saints' Day; the Philippines has a similar custom, Pangangaluwa.

What is the traditional Irish Halloween fruit bread with charms baked inside called?

Barmbrack may take its name from the Irish bairín breac, 'speckled loaf', for the fruit that dots it, or from barm, the froth of fermenting ale once used as yeast.

In Ireland's Halloween fortune-telling loaf, what did finding a thimble foretell?

Staying unmarried: the thimble marked a future spinster or bachelor. Shop-bought loaves have since dropped it and the other charms, keeping only the ring.

Colcannon, an Irish dish served at Halloween, is mashed potato mixed with what?

Cabbage or kale: the Irish name, cál ceannan, means 'white-headed cabbage'. A cheap year-round staple, it was dressed up for the Halloween feast with a pool of melted butter in the middle.

In Scotland, bobbing for apples is known by what name?

Dooking is Scots for ducking. Players who would rather keep a dry face can hold a fork in their teeth and drop it to spear an apple instead.

Why do the apples float in the bobbing tub?

They are less dense than water: about a quarter of an apple's volume is air held in its flesh, which is why it bobs at the surface instead of sinking.

A Newark candy-maker is said to have invented the red candy apple in 1908 while testing a coating for which holiday?

Christmas: as the story goes, William Kolb was trying out a red cinnamon candy for the festive trade, dipped a few apples in it for his shop window, and sold them at five cents each.

What is the Commonwealth English name for the whole fruit dipped in a hard red sugar coating on a stick?

Toffee apple is the name across Britain and Ireland, where the treat belongs to Halloween and Bonfire Night because both fall just after the apple harvest.

Botanically, what kind of fruit is a pumpkin?

A berry: botanists class pumpkins and other squashes as pepos, berries with a hard rind, which makes the pumpkin a fruit rather than a vegetable.

Candy apples stopped being handed out to trick-or-treaters largely because of rumours about what?

Razor blades hidden inside: from the late 1960s reports of blades and pins in Halloween apples spread, though sociologist Joel Best found nearly all were hoaxes or caused only minor injury.

T'anta wawa, the 'bread babies' eaten with a thick purple drink on All Souls' Day, come from which mountain region?

The Andes: families in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia shape the sweet loaves like babies, swap them with friends and godchildren, and carry them to the cemetery for their dead.

In Scotland, which sticky food is strung from the ceiling beside the apple-bobbing tub at Halloween?

Treacle scones are smeared with extra treacle and strung up just out of reach, so players have to jump for a bite.

Before pumpkins, jack-o'-lanterns in Ireland and Britain were carved from which vegetable?

Turnips were hollowed out, given faces and set in windows to scare off wandering spirits. Irish and Scottish immigrants carried the custom to America and took up the native pumpkin instead.

Roasted pumpkin seeds are known by what Spanish-derived name?

Pepitas, from a Spanish word for a seed or pip, are toasted with salt as a snack in Mexico. Ground up, they thicken the mole known as pipián.

Pumpkin pie spice is generally a blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and which other spice?

Cloves round out the classic blend with cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger; allspice is sometimes added, and the mix contains no pumpkin at all.

Which coffee chain launched the pumpkin spice latte nationally in autumn 2004?

Starbucks sold the drink for more than a decade with no pumpkin in it: real pumpkin only joined the recipe in 2015.

Most canned pumpkin in America is Dickinson pumpkin, which belongs to the same species as which squash?

Butternut: both are Cucurbita moschata, and the Dickinson shares its cousin's sandy-tan skin, so it looks little like the round pumpkins carved for Halloween.

In old Halloween nut-burning divination, each pair of nuts on the fire stood for whom?

A courting couple: in Burns's 1785 poem 'Halloween', nuts named for two sweethearts are set on the fire; burning quietly side by side promises a happy match, spitting apart a stormy one.

Pan de muerto, baked in Mexico for the Day of the Dead, is usually decorated with dough shaped like what?

Bones: crossed strips of dough stand for the bones of the dead, and the sugared loaf is one of the offerings set on the family altar for returning souls.

Alfeñique, a moulded sugar paste, is shaped into which famous Day of the Dead decorations in Mexico?

Skulls: the calaveras are cast in moulds and decorated with coloured icing, and when one is bought as a gift the name of the person being remembered is often iced across its forehead.

Pan de muerto, Mexico's Day of the Dead bread, is often scented with anise and the zest of which fruit?

Orange, as zest or as orange-flower water, perfumes the dough. After baking, the loaf is coated in sugar, which some bakers dye pink or red.

Which company makes the 'monster cereals' that come back to shelves each Halloween season?

General Mills launched the first two monsters in 1971. They sold all year until 2009 and have been an autumn-only treat since.

An early Franken Berry recipe had which alarming side effect in 1972?

It turned children's stool pink: the dye passed through the gut undigested, a 1972 Pediatrics paper named the harmless result 'Franken Berry stool', and the recipe was changed.

Which discontinued monster cereal turns up as a visual Easter egg in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs?

Fruit Brute, dropped by 1982, turns up in both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. It came back in 2013, respelled Frute Brute, after 31 years away.

Reese's Peanut Butter Cups were created in 1928 by a former employee of which chocolate magnate?

Milton S. Hershey: H. B. Reese ran one of his dairy barns until it was shut to save money, then set up on his own in the same town. In 1963 Reese's sons merged the firm into Hershey's.

By what name were H. B. Reese's peanut butter cups first sold in the late 1920s?

Penny Cups: they sold for a cent apiece, and by 1935, in the depths of the Depression, they had paid off the mortgages on both Reese's house and his factory.

Italy's All Souls' Day biscuits, fave dei morti, are named after which food?

Broad beans: fave dei morti, 'beans of the dead', are small biscuits shaped like them. Ancient Romans treated beans as food for the dead, and offered black ones to restless ghosts at the Lemuria festival.

Catalonia's All Saints' Day feast, the Castanyada, is named after which roasted food?

Chestnuts, castanyes in Catalan: street sellers roast them and hand them over hot in cones of newspaper. The feast is said to descend from old funeral meals shared in memory of the dead.

In an old Halloween charm, an apple peel thrown over the shoulder revealed what?

The initial of a future spouse: the apple had to be pared in one long strip, and the letter the peel formed where it fell was read as a first initial.

Sicilian children wake on All Souls' Day to frutta martorana, lifelike fruits moulded from what?

Marzipan: the sweets are said to go back to a Palermo convent, where the nuns shaped fruit from almonds and sugar to dress their bare garden for an important visitor.

In Ireland, what phrase did trick-or-treating children traditionally call out until the 2000s?

'Help the Halloween Party': Irish children called it at each door while collecting fruit, nuts and sweets, before the American 'trick or treat' took over in the 2000s.

Northern England's Allhallowtide 'harcakes' were a thin version of which regional cake?

Parkin is made with oatmeal and ginger because oats, not wheat, were the staple grain of the northern poor. Baked thin it became the 'harcake', and it is the cake of Bonfire Night too.

Which Central American country marks All Saints' Day with fiambre, a chilled salad of dozens of ingredients?

Guatemala: the story goes that families carried their dead relatives' favourite dishes to the cemetery, and over the years the shared offerings merged into one enormous salad.

Which colcannon-like Irish dish was left in a spoon under a hawthorn tree for the fairies at Halloween?

Champ: on Samhain night, when the fairy folk had to be kept friendly through the winter, a share of the buttery scallion mash was set out for them.

The word 'pumpkin' goes back through French and Latin to a Greek word for which fruit?

Melon: Greek pepon was a large melon, probably from a word for 'ripe' or sun-cooked. English first took it as pumpion, and the ending -kin crept in later.

Which apple variety, often used for candy apples, was first grown near Sydney in 1868?

Granny Smith: by the best-known account, Maria Ann Smith found the seedling by a creek on her farm, where she had tipped out the remains of some French crab-apples.

Which thick Mexican drink of corn masa and chocolate is served warm on Día de Muertos?

Champurrado is an atole thickened with corn masa and whisked to a froth with a wooden molinillo. It is served with tamales on Día de Muertos and again at the posadas of December.

Roughly how many pieces of candy corn do America's confectioners turn out each year?

9 billion, about 35 million pounds, by the trade association's count in the 2010s. Nearly all of it sells around Halloween, though it began as a cheap year-round bulk candy.

Candy corn is credited to George Renninger, who worked for the Wunderle Candy Company in which city in the 1880s?

Philadelphia, by most accounts, though histories call this the accepted story rather than a proven one. A rival firm took up the recipe around 1898 and carried the kernels nationwide.

In Ireland and Scotland, the 'monkey nuts' handed to Halloween callers are what?

Peanuts, sold still in their shells: guisers were traditionally paid in fruit, nuts or a few coins, long before packaged sweets took over.

The confectioner's glaze that gives candy corn its shine is made from lac resin, a secretion of what?

A bug: the female lac insect coats tree branches in India and Thailand with resin, which workers scrape off and refine into the shellac that glazes sweets and varnishes wood.

As of 2025, which US state grows more pumpkins than any other, most of them for canning?

Illinois grew about 533 million pounds in 2025, more than the next four states combined, much of it for Libby's cannery at Morton. When rain ruined the 2009 crop, the whole country ran short of pie filling.

In Spain, eating a buñuelo de viento, an All Saints' Day fritter, is said to do what?

Free a soul from purgatory, one for each fritter, the old saying goes. Pastry shops across Spain sell the puffed-up balls in the first days of November, often filled with cream.