Pumpkins are everywhere in Paris: not only the rustic kind, but also their chic cousins in all sorts of shapes and colours. Once a symbol of harvest and hearth, they’ve become the international ambassadors of Halloween — and the faces of myth, mischief, and magic.
The pumpkin story begins, curiously enough, not with pumpkins at all, but with turnips. Long before American settlers discovered the New World squash, the Irish carved lanterns from turnips to ward off wandering spirits, especially one known as Stingy Jack who tricked the Devil and roamed the earth with only a coal in his hollowed turnip. When Irish immigrants brought this tale to America, they found pumpkins larger, easier to carve, and far more photogenic, and so the Jack-o’-Lantern was born.
In Paris, pumpkins have become sculptural, painted on macarons or transformed into confections like the ones I spotted yesterday: a skull-topped chocolate cake, a chocolate ghost, a powdered ghoul, and a pumpkin pastry so bright it could light the way through a Montmartre mist.
Halloween itself is a curious transplant here. France, with its Catholic traditions and Toussaint (All Saints’ Day), didn’t always embrace the costume-and-candy craze. Times have changed. Boulangeries (bakeries) in Paris sell wonderfully elaborate crafted edible skeletons, ghosts, and pumpkin faced pastries.
I’m celebrating Paris pumpkins for Halloween and the cross-cultural alchemy of myth, mischief, and magic, and the delightful absurdity of ghosts in Paris pastry shops.
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