Southern Living's Catherine Jessee on How Food Magazines Celebrate Halloween

When I hopped on the phone with my friend Catherine Jessee, she had good news: “I got the job!” The new gig will take her from Southern Living, where she’s been working as assistant digital food editor, to Allrecipes, America’s most unruly cooking site.

In many ways, this strikes me as an inevitable development. I first met Catherine when we were students at University of Virginia, both double majoring in English and American Studies. Our paths crossed in and out of the classroom, tangling into a friendship that continues to shape who I am today. Catherine’s work has appeared in Food & Wine, Serious Eats, Southern Foodways Alliance’s GRAVY podcast, and on tables at Oxford’s Tarasque Cucina. She is the author of “The Wild Asleep,” a cultural history of ramps.

We recently caught up to chat about a question that’s been on my mind: How does food media handle Halloween? 

MD: You work for Dotdash Meredith, which publishes a number of different food and home magazines. Compared to the big food holidays like Thanksgiving, how does Halloween factor into seasonal coverage?

CJ: Part of the nuance of working in the test kitchen as a recipe developer is that you have to be a chameleon. The Food & Wine cook is interested in all the gadgets. Recipes for People tended to be a little easier to tackle, and often they were a little bit more fun and kitschy—which gets into the Halloween of it all.

There were certain publications that embraced Halloween, and People was definitely one of those. It becomes harder and harder every day to justify putting something in print, and a lot of these publications are making really hard decisions about what stays in and what doesn’t. I’ve noticed that even over the past three years, Halloween content tends to fall to the wayside. It flashes in the pan digitally, but there are only certain publications that embrace it in print.

Do any Halloween recipes you’ve worked on stand out? Are there any behind-the-scenes stories you can share?

The Dracula cupcakes. I was cross-testing the recipe for Buddy Valastro of Carlo’s Bakery in New Jersey. Mainly, I was communicating to a reader how to make this cupcake look like Dracula in the way this guy envisioned it. He’s the Cake Boss! I don’t want to do him dirty. I was looking at the details and seeing what could be simplified. The most important part was the hairline, which you pipe in an upside-down triangle one-third of the way down the face for Dracula’s widow’s peak.

It’s basically like an animation. You have to exaggerate the main things that make it look like the thing. As someone who has more of a savory chef background, I was like, okay, I'm actually the perfect person to figure this out. And it tasted great, because it had a cream cheese icing and there's a jam thing in the middle that looks like blood.

A part of this recipe that was really great, actually, is that it calls for store bought cupcakes. If you go to your Publix or Kroger or whatever and say, “Hey, can I get cupcakes that aren’t iced yet?” they will do that for you! I love that the recipe embraced that and lowered that barrier. If the only thing I’m thinking about is how to decorate the top, maybe I can give this a try.

Interestingly, this is how food styling works. They’re not always making everything from scratch for a photograph, whether it’s for print or for digital. Very often, when there’s a cupcake or a loaf of bread, that thing is store bought because you can guarantee that it’s gonna look good and be the structure you need.

There’s something beautiful about making images with real food—especially today, when there are so many AI recipe photos junking up the internet.

I don't know how successful an AI Halloween recipe would be. Part of what's so intriguing is that you don't want it to be perfectly gross looking. You want it to still look like food.

Now I'm kind of going on a tangent, but I'm thinking about a piece that a friend of mine, Ali Domrongchai, wrote. She's a food editor at The Kitchn, and she wrote a really wonderful piece for Defector about AI food and what it's successful at evoking. There's this strange sense of uncanny perfection that all these recipes have, and I really recommend her piece.

But the Halloween recipes kind of need to look a little bit off. They need to look imperfect because it is food, but it’s not the thing it’s supposed to be representing. It's not necessarily supposed to taste like the best thing you've ever tasted—it's just supposed to be fun.

The AI food image is trying to be this, like, perfect food. And I guess what I'm saying is, I don't think that it can ever capture that aspirational, fun, campy quality completely.

I feel like it's just one too many layers of mimicry. It's like when you see those moths that are trying to look like hummingbirds, and you're like, I know you're not a hummingbird. You know what I mean? AI can't really understand that. If you told AI “make a food that looks like a degloved hand,” the results would be actually so appalling. As humans, we know that no, we're not really into cannibalism, we just like Stephen King. We just want to read Gerald's Game. You kind of know instinctively where that line is between something that's fun and campy, or just vile.

Like, I'm not making a Dracula cupcake because I want my cupcakes to look exactly like Dracula. I'm making a Dracula cupcake because Dracula is also kind of cute.

I know exactly what you mean. It's like, AI is trying to replicate human output. And when we're trying to replicate something, we usually have another goal in mind, or something that we're trying to evoke. Like you said, it's not about measuring the hairline of Dracula's widow’s peak. It's about giving someone a symbol they can recognize and respond to.

It’s a thread of a cultural story. You recognize a certain detail that recurs.

Circling back to holidays, I have a theory I want to float by you, about the beigening of media. Everything is so influencer-driven and such a blank slate—you almost have people creating sets that are really neutral to showcase different product placements. Which is weird, because it’s people’s actual homes and lives that you’re seeing, supposedly. That feels related to what’s happening politically, where we have a huge turn toward conservatism and fascism.

Halloween is such a colorful, personality-driven, funny, zany, crazy kind of a moment. And I’m wondering if it’s a victim of these larger cultural shifts. Do you feel like that shows up in media?

This is really interesting, because I think Thanksgiving is a bigger deal in the food media sphere. Thanksgiving creates this menu of expectations: The main dish is turkey, and then you have all these sides, and we do this the same way every year. That expectation is really good for the beigening of things and guaranteed selling.

Halloween feels to me like a holiday that’s a little more cheeky. It’s an opportunity to escape an identity, escape yourself, and be something else entirely. There aren’t really any rules for how to celebrate Halloween, so it’s much less predictable. By its nature, you have a new costume every year. Things change. You can’t guarantee someone will buy anything but the candy.

Whereas with Thanksgiving, people really dig their heels in on this quality of the holiday being so specific to our country and its collective identity. It’s a weird nationalism.

The older I get, the more connected I feel on Halloween. Even though it’s actually the most hectic and deranged holiday, it’s a time when people are being something outside of themselves. I feel the most connected to people choosing their own experience. There’s a lightness and silliness to even the scariest parts of Halloween—there’s a lot less pressure to perform the holiday in a certain way. You can make it your own.

Maybe I’m projecting, but I feel like there’s a real queerness to Halloween. It’s a time when you can dress up in a different gender presentation or no gender presentation, and no one will blink at that. But if you were to bring that energy to grandma’s house on Thanksgiving, perhaps there would be a conversation in the hallway.

It makes me think of all of those social media infographics—that sometimes I find very helpful, sometimes I find very overwhelming—that are like, here’s how to have a difficult conversation around Thanksgiving. It's anticipating that the conversations are going to be this heavy thing: “How will I explain myself, or my lifestyle, or my identity, or my presentation, or whatever? How can I both connect with my family, but also stay true to myself?” There’s a lot of discourse around how to do that the right way.

With a holiday like Halloween, if we're comparing these two things, the space that you're in isn't supposed to be one way or another. I would say the worst way to be on Halloween is not dressing up. Being how you typically present yourself is the last thing you should show up as at a Halloween party. I would say Halloween is not a safe space for straight people. I'm just kidding. That's not true at all.

Adults drinking wine vibes, instead of coming as the Babadook.

Exactly! I think what would be really funny would be if we queered Thanksgiving and showed up as the Babadook. [Editor’s note: Please let me know if you do this.]

What, in your experience, is the perfect Halloween dinner?

On Halloween, you’re not doing a sit-down dinner because you’re going trick-or-treating, so you’re doing a grazing moment. If that’s done nicely with something fun and weird, that is part of the delight.

I always went over to my friend Hallie's house in a neighborhood that was really good for walking around, and we always coordinated our Halloween costumes. It felt like this really special school night thing—her mom would have a party, and they would always do fondue. She also always did an amazing grazing table of, honestly, super Southern sorts of things like pimento cheese and a charcuterie board that had stuff like cheese straws. Fondue was exciting because it was cheese and savory, but it was also often chocolate dipped strawberries, which felt really decadent and special.

There always needs to be something that's a little bit off, a little bit kooky, or a little bit campy. Something that looked like an eyeball is always a thing, like olives. A lot of people have gotten, frankly, crazier and have done the prosciutto hand, which is string cheese fingers wrapped in prosciutto. Disgusting, but fascinating. I call them meat fingers! You can get them at a gas station. I love those.

For Southern Living, I did a charcuterie board that has a cheese ball—a Southern thing, often it’s cream cheese and kind of sweet, with nuts—but this one’s savory and is supposed to look like a pumpkin. Instead of shaping it into a proper sphere, you chill the ball and wrap it in plastic with rubber bands so it gets indentations that make it look like a pumpkin. There's also olives that just vaguely look like eyeballs, and I've got the meat fingers that I mentioned. Also, I kind of felt like Raisinets look a little bit like eyeballs, so I threw those on, too. I don’t know if they actually do.

For me, when game recognizes game, it’s like, someone tried to get a little freaky with it. And even if it didn’t land, or doesn’t look appetizing, that, to me, is a good Halloween recipe.

I remember roaming the halls of the test kitchen when we’d be styling and shooting the Halloween stuff. It’s common for people to be like “What is this?” as they’re passing through. But with the Halloween things, people will really stop and be like, “So what’s this supposed to be?”

That’s also how people react to costumes. People will be like, “So who are you?” And that can only be an open conversation. If someone is like “Oh my god, you’re the Log Lady from Twin Peaks” that’s a moment of connection, because you’re like, “Yes, I am, and I love you, and we’re friends now.” Or, it’s like, “Who are you? Why are you holding a log?” And you’re like, “Oh, it’s because I’m the Log Lady from Twin Peaks,” and now you’ve introduced them to David Lynch.

It’s this opening of curiosity—and I think that’s what a recipe ultimately should do. That’s what food should do. It should create a sense of “I want to try that.”

Before I let you go: What’s your favorite Halloween candy?

I like that it's the time of year that candy is like, “Okay, we'll do dark chocolate now.” For some reason, dark chocolate represents the darkness of the holiday. I remember being like, ravenous for the dark version of Milky Way. [Editor’s note: Same!]

Now that I'm thinking about it, that was maybe this weird little flourish of my culinary aspirations. I really appreciated that sensory and flavor switch-up. I'm only really processing this now, but Halloween might be when that crossed my desk for the first time. The bitterness of a darker chocolate—that was really cool.

No Tricks, Only Treats

• Catherine recommends: Reading Ali Domrongchai’s reflections on AI recipes, “Glossy, Glunky, and Ready In Minutes,” on Defector.

• I recommend: Subscribing to Catherine’s newsletter, Weekday Warriors.

Scare Me! illustrations by Sam Pugh