The turnips of bygone Halloweens have now been replaced by pumpkins

A turnip would have been carved for a lantern, you’d have dressed up in a home-made outfit and dunked for apples from a basin. Nowadays there’s Halloween merchandise in the supermarkets from July, trick or treating is now a big thing and pumpkins have usurped turnips. Carving turnips and placing a candle inside to ward off evil spirits is a tradition that started here and made its way across the Atlantic with Irish immigrants. Carving them is no easy task and I remember fervently hoking out the flesh with a chisel when I was about 8 – there was zero health and safety in the 1970s.

The pumpkins you buy in supermarkets are grown for ease of carving and scooping. They taste of nothing. Dump the innards in a compost heap and don’t even think of eating them. Culinary pumpkins have a texture similar to turnip – they have a hard, thick flesh. The best way to prepare them is to carefully cut them into wedges, drizzle with oil and roast until soft. You can then remove the seeds and skin. For something savoury the flesh can be whizzed into a soup or risotto. The wedges can be topped with crispy bacon, fried onions, fresh herbs or chilli. For the last 10 minutes or cooking you can brush the wedges with a maple or honey and vinegar mixture to glaze them. Remove the seeds and serve as a side vegetable. In the recipe here the roast pumpkin is pureed and made into a cake with dates and pecans. There’s no butter in the cake, just Broighter Gold rapeseed oil, eggs and buttermilk that are whisked together and folded into the flour, sugar and spices, along with the pumpkin puree. The cooled cake is topped with a sugary maple topping and more pecans.

When sourcing the pumpkins there are many farms growing them here. They look stunning and dramatic but it’s vital to not let that sweet vegetable go to waste. Slemish Market Garden in Ballymena have been growing pumpkins for years now – Lori McCook, originally from Virginia in the US knows how to do it and the array of squash and pumpkins is a sight to be seen. My favourite is one called Crown Prince that has a duck egg blue skin and deep orange flesh. You can store the pumpkins in a cool place for months – last year I cracked open a McCook pumpkin in February.

Back to turnips though – the original and in my opinion the best. One of my strongest memories is the smell of burning turnip flesh in a lantern. I think we should bring back carving turnips – they mightn’t be as pretty but they have character. The recipe here is for a turnip soup with cider and bacon if you decide to go down the old fashioned route. I add a potato to make the soup creamy when you blend it and add a toot of double cream for good measure. Sage leaves are fried in oil until crisp and spooned over the top.

And like all Halloween nights recently I’ll be vacating the premises to avoid all the trick or treaters – bring back dunking apples!