Secret Recipe: Lab Samples Drink (Halloween is a Playground!)

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As someone rather obsessed with playful approaches to food, Spooky Season always fills me with glee. It’s at this time of the year that normal rules can be broken, that people of all ages are encouraged to play with their food, and that just about everyone seems to be at their most creative when making holiday (especially Halloween) recipes. Tables are filled with spaghetti and eyeballs, swampy puddings, jack-o-lantern pancakes, ghoul-topped pizzas, frankenstein pasta, dirt-as-dessert, candy bones, and so much more. This is the time of year that you can get away with making food that purposefully looks unappetizing (bloody bandaid cupcake, anyone?), where disgust and deliciousness meet at the intersection of glee. It’s a time to be as weird as you want to be, for self-expression is collectively encouraged when the spooky nights begin. In the more somber tones of autumn and its reminder of life’s cycles, the wild proliferation of play is a welcome reprieve. 

Though the word “play” might seem frivolous, playing is a deeply important part of our humanity. As Rebecca Solnit so wonderfully words it in her book Deep Play: 

“But why play at all? Every element of the human saga requires play. We evolved through play. Our culture thrives on play. Courtship includes high theater, rituals, and ceremonies of play. Ideas are playful reverberations of the mind. Language is a playing with words until they can impersonate physical objects and abstract ideas” (4) She goes on to explain, “For humans, play is a refuge from ordinary life, a sanctuary of the mind, where one is exempt from life’s customs, methods, and decrees. Play always has a sacred place -- some version of a playground -- in which it happens. The hallowed ground is usually outlined, so that it’s clearly set off from the rest of reality.” 6

That all-important Hallowed ground for play is, in this instance, Halloween. Based on Solnit’s definition of play, I think it can be said with a great deal of certainty that Halloween and the rituals leading up to it are a particularly playful time of year in our culture! It certainly fits the criteria:

“The world of play favors exuberance, license, abandon. Shenanigans are allowed, strategies can be tried, selves can be revised. In the self-enclosed world of play, there is no hunger. It is its own goal, which it reaches in a richly satisfying way. Play has its own etiquette, rituals and ceremonies, its own absolute rules.” 6

What other time of year can you revise yourself through the use of costume quite so effectively? What evokes the thought of shenanigans more than the classic “trick or treat?” Picture a Halloween party, full of guests in strange costumes acting the part. Picture the snack table, full of questionable trompe l’oeil dishes meant to lead your mind in less-delicious directions. Even the Queen of Domesticity, Martha Stewart herself, admits that this is her favorite holiday, and shares her own recipes for sophisticated takes on frightening foods. Halloween’s play is not a free-for-all, though, it has rules: If someone gives you a really good candy bar, their house should be safe from egging. You have to finish your plate of dinner before you go gather candy. Don’t go in the cemetery at night, for the ghouls are governed by different rules on this night as well. And if you dare to show up to a Halloween party in normal clothes, it is you that is now breaking the rules of the game. 

Often, the playground of Halloween allows us access to otherwise “taboo” subjects; blood and gore, creatures that inspire fear, what happens after you die, thoughts of the undead (whether they be ghosts or zombies), frightening experiments, and more. While wet formaldehyde samples belong in the cabinets of biologists or mysterious mad scientists the rest of the year, in this playground they can become both party decor and something delicious. Even I recoil a bit at the thought of sticking a straw in a jar full of preserved mystery creature (and you should never, ever, ever sample a real wet specimen in formaldehyde, in case that wasn’t abundantly clear), but by offering a delicious reward for doing so, your guests might just be brave enough to shake off their pre-conceived notions and dive in. 

Elderflower and Pear Wet Specimen Jars 

It was important to me when developing these recipes that all of the contents be edible - even delicious! - and that they be a fun, alcohol-free option to serve to guests of any age who abstain from drinking from one reason or another. (As someone who doesn’t partake in alcohol because of my health conditions, I often notice a lack of fun alcohol-free drinks at adult parties. We want to have fun too!) I also wanted the jars to look as realistic as possible, making use of some unusual fruits and handmade creatures to add a level of detail that might give one second thoughts about diving in…

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