Ditch the pumpkins and give yourself more of a traditional challenge this spooky season.
I’m not sure when the Great Pumpkin Replacement started, relegating the humble turnip lantern to the pages of the Scottish history books.
As a man on the wrong side of 50, I certainly can’t remember as a child simply scooping out the guts of a luminous orange squash before cutting out a scary face from its simple-to-slice thin skin.
Instead we had to attempt, by hook or by crook, to hack out the middle of a turnip - perhaps the hardest and most ill-suited of root vegetables to ‘carve’. Knife wounds to fingers were commonplace.
Blame the Halloween film franchaise or Charlie Brown, but the Americanisation of Halloween in Scotland seems near complete, with the menacing ‘trick or treating’ now favoured over the innocence of guising, and piles of huge pumpkins in every supermarket.
But we can still strike back, using a sharp knife and brute force to stab our way back to gentler times.
Here’s how to make a turnip lantern - and the mistakes I made that you don’t need to.
What you’ll need
There’s very little in the way of specialist equipment required - just a variety of knives of different sizes (which must be sharp), a pen and a spoon. You’ll also need a tealight to illuminate your masterpiece.
Of course you’ll also need a turnip, which I found was easier said than done. The ubiquitous pumpkin now reigns supreme and there seems to be little market for larger turnips. Most small supermarkets offer merely pre-mashed neeps, while the only turnips in Waitrose were the size of apples - flawless vegetables for gourmet chefs no doubt, but useless for our task.
In the end I sourced one at a local farmers’ market, but I understand that larger supermarkets do often stock them. For the purposes of this, and without wanting to take a detour down the rabbit hole of vegetable taxonomy, turnips and swedes are both equaly acceptable for lantern-making purposes.
Take the top off
The first job is to lop the top off your turnip, which will create the lid of your lantern. The easiest way to do this is with a breadknife. You’ll soon discover just how hard turnips are (some say you should microwave them first to soften the flesh, but surely that’s cheating?). The best way to attack it is by cutting a couple of inches into the flesh around a centimeter from the top and progressing around the turnip, getting deeper with every rotation. It’ll soon pop off. Don’t try to saw away at it like you’re cutting a load of bread - trust me, it doesn’t work.
Score the sides and centre
Take a sharp knife and make a cut in the flesh around one centimetre from the side, all around the turnip. This doesn’t need to be too deep at first - perhaps around five centimetres. Then make similarly deep cuts up and down the turnip, creating a grid of squares around one centimetre across.
Start scooping
The grid of cuts should loosen the turnip flesh enough to allow you to start scooping it out with a large spoon. If it’s still tough to make progress, use your knife to make diagonal cuts across the grid and try again.
Repeat
Continue to cut and scoop until your turnip is suitably hollowed out. Ideally, we’re looking for the shell to be around one centimetre deep. Save the turnip to make soup and imagine you’re dining out in Russia in 1917.
Tidy up
To tidy up the inside of your turnip, simply scrape the insides with your spoon. Make sure you have a flat area at the bottom, where the tealight will go.
Get creative
Now for the fun part. Use a pen to mark out the design you want to carve - we went for a ‘classic’ toothless look with traditional triangular eyes and nose. Carefully cut the design out with a small knife (if you’ve hollowed it out enough then it should be fairly simple) and your lantern is complete.
Light it up
You’re ready to see your creation come to life. Place a tealight inside, carefully light it, place the lid back on and place in a dark room. Enjoy its ghostly flicker, and the ‘evocative’ smell of gently burning turnip.
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