It's the Great Salad, Charlie Brown!

Halloween is coming! If you really want to horrify your little trick-or-treaters, how about making them some Halloween-themed salads to fortify them before they terrorize the neighborhood in search of sugar?

The 1950 classic 300 Ways to Serve Eggs (edited by Ruth Berolzheimer) suggests Halloween Egg Salad.

It's not regular egg salad, with chopped hard-cooked eggs and bits of celery in mayo. The hard-cooked eggs are supposed to be manually shaped into pumpkin-ish shapes while they're still hot and then soaked in orange food coloring so they'll look like tiny pumpkins. They're even supposed to be painted with green coloring for the stripes on the sides and served in a watercress pumpkin patch. It's a pretty cute idea, though I'm not sure how enthusiastic the kids will be when they realize it's just a boiled egg on salad greens...

Body Building Dishes for Children (also from 1950 and edited by Berolzheimer) suggests a possibly more-acceptable salad: a Jack-o'-Lantern fruit salad.

I wish the book had a picture because an orange peel cut to look like a jack-o-lantern and filled with fruit salad (maybe containing the orange's own guts?) sounds pretty cute.

Or, if you're the fight-fire-with-fire school of thought, you could just forget the salad and send the kids out with a belly full of sugar that has at least some nutritional value from the fruit, you could make this offering from Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers Americana Cookery: An Illustrated Cookbook of Regional America's Traditional Recipes (1971).

I'm not sure what baked apples have to do with the headless horseman, but the name makes them sound Halloween-appropriate. Plus, the prune stuffing might mean you will have to cut trick-or-treating short! (And maybe you'll have to figure out how to clean shit out of a T-Rex costume, but Halloween is supposed to be scary, so that's seasonally appropriate.)

No matter what your jack-o-lanterns are made of, have a spooky Halloween!