The Dresden Files: Darkhallow Beef Roast

Remember last month when I promised ya’ll more Dresden Files inspired recipes? Well never say I’m not a woman of my word. Halloween is today and you know what that means Dresden fans? It’s the birthday of our favorite modern-day wizard named Harry!

In Cold Days we saw Harry treated with all the festive and horrifying hospitality the Winter Faerie Court had to offer on his natal day. Really, though, I think he would have been much happier at home enjoying a delicious beer and steak sandwich at Mac’s. That said, being Halloween, I think Mac would be far too busy with customers to be cooking up sandwiches all night on short-order. This night is incredibly significant to Chicago’s magical community as it is the only one each year where the borders between the Never Never and the mortal world are at its weakest. Immortals and mortals both tend to use this time to feed on others and trick each other out of power to treat their own. It’s also the same time that those same immortals become mortal and can be killed to feed the Darkhallow ritual as we saw in Dead Beat.

In other words, it’s a very good time to hunker down in a safe place known to dispel and disperse any kind of deadly magical energies until the dawn comes.

With this in mind, I wanted to make up a dish Mac can have cooking low, slow, and ready to go all night for any natural and supernatural denizen wanting a little comfort and comfort food from the dangers of trolls, necromancers, or even the Erlking himself leading the Wild Hunt.

Traditionally until probably within the last two centuries, the church had ordained October 31st as a day of abstinence where no flesh was to be consumed before the feast of All Saints the following day. Though I imagine since Mac is the master of beer and red meat, he would probably huff at tradition just this once and allow a little heresy. So what could be better for a Halloween feast than an Oktoberfest beer-marinated and roasted hunk of bottom round beef roast?

Oktoberfest beer, I say? Yes. While I marinate the tasty hunk of meat overnight in Sam Addams Oktoberfest, any Oktoberfest Marzen style beer should do the trick. I know Yuengling, Sierra Nevada, Spaten, and many other breweries make similar varieties.

Since the first jack-o-lanterns were carved from turnips, I added them to the mix. Oddly enough, while jack-o-lanterns are part of the British folkloric tradition of spooky pranks, their inclusion in Halloween festivities is not really documented until the twentieth century. The story is that a miserly man named Jack successfully tricked and pranked the devil into promising not to take him to Hell. When he died, Heaven wouldn’t accept him either and his soul is now cursed to walk the earth with only a hollowed out turnip lantern to guide him. It’s when Irish immigrants came stateside that the vegetable lanterns went the route of the larger and easier-to-carve pumpkin.

Halloween itself does host some interesting food traditions: colcannon, boxty, oatcakes, and even more notably apples and nuts. October 31st, in English tradition, is also called “Snap Apple Night” and “Nut Crack Night”. Being a time when the veil between worlds is thinner than a pixie’s resistance to pizza, both apples and nuts were used in divination games. So since Mac is also a traditionalist, I added apples to the roast and baked up some pumpkin oatcakes with crushed hazelnuts. Hazelwood and hazelnuts were widely used in protection charms against witchcraft and evil faeries, which seems fitting on a night where one might need some protection from one, the other, or both.

I highly suggest dipping the oatcakes in the gravy or piling them up with vegetables and roast pieces before taking a bite.

Finally, I included pumpkin pie spice in both dishes because it’s October and pumpkin spice is in everything. I don’t feel like I need to elaborate on this any more than I have.

So here it is, a dish to settle in with a pint at your favorite pub and ring in another year of life, death, and the living dead.