Count Down to Spooky Season with This Ghostly Cookbook

Harper Celebrate

I love a good ghost story. Whether it’s told around the fire during a summer camping trip or delivered at midnight on Halloween, there is something that gives the perfect level of spooky chill. While most of my campfires have been rained out this summer, July 23 marks 100 days to Halloween, so there are plenty of reasons to start brushing up on your ghostly lore.

Here to help is a new cookbook: Food to Die For: Recipes and Stories from America’s Most Legendary Haunted Places.

This is, as one might guess from the subtitle, a combination of cookbook and paranormal history book. Many of the most famous haunted places are or were hotels, prisons, or asylums and had some kind of food service associated with them, so it does seem logical to package recipes and ghost stories together. The recipes aren’t exactly selected for meal-planning, as a good chunk of them are things most people probably wouldn’t really want to eat—prison food doesn’t strike me as appetizing, particularly historical prison food—but the recipes that came from haunted hotels all seem decent. I and my partner tried three of the dishes.

• Blueberry Maple Breakfast Sausage from the Mount Washington Hotel: This was super easy, just a matter of mixing a few ingredients with some ground pork and then forming them into patties you brown up on the stove. It was pretty good, though I would increase the amount of blueberries added—with just a tablespoon for a pound of meat, it was a little sparse for my taste. We cooked them all up and had them in the fridge to reheat for quick breakfasts during the week.
• Potato Dijon Soup from the Copper Queen Hotel: The package of pancetta we had was more than the recipe called for, but we added it all anyway, so our soup (pictured) was a tiny bit richer than it would have been otherwise. But even if we’d stayed on recipe, I think this soup would have been a winner. A cup with half a sandwich was a great lunch or dinner.
• Crustless Jack and Red Pepper Quiche from the Hotel del Coronado: I think this would be a nice dish to make if you had company over or were hosting brunch; it was pretty big and lasted for about six meals for two people. It is an absolute monster of cheese—it might be more cheese than egg, honestly. To my mind (and tastebuds), that is not a problem. I would, however, increase the amount of red pepper.

There were other recipes that sounded tasty, too. I was particularly curious about the peanut soup. And while the hardtack from the Old Jail Museum didn’t exactly stir the appetite, the brief history and associated ghost story for it were interesting and fun. I think that’s the best part of the book, honestly.

The Potato Dijon Soup was probably my favorite of the three recipes we tried.

One of the things I like best about ghost stories is the different angle on history they often come with; it’s usually the small things that wouldn’t be included in a history book but are still interesting—like the widowed owner of the Mount Washington Hotel marrying a French prince and becoming a princess. It was fun to read the little introductions before each recipe as we tried them.

While the focus wasn’t entirely on the food, the three recipes we tried were pretty good, and were easy enough that a beginner cook could manage them. I think the folks who would get the most out of Food to Die For would be, unsurprisingly, fans of both ghost stories and cooking.

Food to Die For: Recipes and Stories from America’s Most Legendary Haunted Places is available July 30, 2024, from Harper Celebrate.