A '90s Halloween party!

I tend not to find a lot of Halloween-y recipes in the old collections. Maybe it's because by Halloween, home cooks were already planning for Thanksgiving and Christmas? (Fruitcakes could take months of work, and fall veggies from the garden might need to be preserved.) Luckily, I have some relatively recent (less than 40 years old!) cookbooks to help correct this oversight, like Treasured Recipes from Harris House (Westerville, Ohio, 1991).

Okay, most of the titles don't explicitly mention Halloween, but a title like Ghostly Potato Doughnuts certainly sounds the part.

Besides adding to the ghostly pallor, the potato would increase the hydration and shelf life of the doughnuts, so the recipe could also be a good make-ahead treat for a Halloween party. 

They might be served with Goblin's Perky Punch. (Sugar on sugar is a very important Halloween tradition!)

Besides, if you're freezing candy corn and candy pumpkins inside the ice cubes, it's GOTTA be a Halloween drink. (I can just imagine how excited some kids would be to realize that there's candy inside the ice. Hopefully their parents would have good dental insurance.)

There's also the old Halloween classic of popcorn balls, this time dressed up with orange marmalade.

And if you want black popcorn balls to go with the orange ones, substitute "1 (6 ounce) package of licorice sticks." (I assume it's substituted for the marmalade. Flo Holland does not specify.) In any case, it couldn't be much more obvious that this is a Halloween recipe, short of putting "Halloween" in the title.

And finally, for those who can ONLY be convinced it's genuinely meant as a Halloween recipe if the word is actually in the title, we have Halloween Cookies.

These can also serve as BOTH tricks and treats, as I imagine bars of chocolate candy could enhance plain old refrigerator cookies, but I am much less convinced of the power of Grape-Nuts to improve cookies. (Nobody sprinkles kitty litter or aquarium gravel on top of their cookies, after all!)

This is a fun little collection of Halloween-y recipes, and maybe a kid could even try to convince the parents that this is a wholesome and balanced menu for Halloween night. There's a vegetable in the doughnuts, fruit in the punch, and whole grain in the popcorn balls and cookies! It's practically health food to scarf all this stuff down before going out for candy.