♏ Ancestral Seasonal Menu

What types of foods would my ancestors have eaten during this season? ♏

When we talk about foods my ancestors (especially Appalachian, agrarian, or European folk-heritage lineages) would have eaten during Scorpio season — late autumn into early winter — we’re entering the heart of preservation, fermentation, and survival magic.

This is the season of root cellars, smokehouses, and simmering pots, when the year’s harvest begins its slow descent into the underworld — just like Pluto himself.

🪵 Seasonal Ancestral Table — Late Autumn (Scorpio Season)

🌾 Pantry Staples & Preservation Magic

By this time of year, fresh greens were scarce; food focused on what could last through winter:

• Root cellared produce: potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, parsnips, carrots, rutabagas, onions, garlic, beets

• Winter squash: pumpkin, butternut, acorn

• Apples & pears: stored in cool rooms or turned into cider, vinegar, or dried slices

• Preserves: jams, apple butter, pear preserves, pickled beets, chow chow, sauerkraut

• Smoked & cured meats: hams, bacon, salt pork, jerky — often prepared right after the first frost

• Dried beans & peas: black-eyed peas, pinto, pole beans (the famous “leather britches” dried on strings)

• Corn: ground into meal for cornbread, mush, or hominy; dried kernels used for popping or stewing

🧂 Fermentation & Transformation

My ancestors were kitchen alchemists:

• Sauerkraut & pickled vegetables — to preserve nutrients and support gut health

• Sourdough starters & fermented breads — kept alive on the hearth

• Hard cider, ale, mead — Scorpio’s intoxicating libations for warmth and celebration

• Vinegars & tonics — often infused with horseradish, garlic, or herbs for winter immunity (a folk precursor to Fire Cider)

🍲 Common Dishes

• Stews & soups: thick, long-simmered, using every scrap — bone broth, vegetable peels, marrow, and beans

• Pot pies & dumplings: to stretch ingredients and warm the body

• Cornbread & biscuits: daily staples baked in cast iron

• Gravy & drippings: nothing wasted — the essence of transformation cooking

• Apple butter on hearth bread — comfort sweetness after long days

• Cabbage, collards, or turnip greens with pork fat — ancestral soul food rich in minerals and flavor

• Pumpkin or sweet potato pie — the sweetness of endurance and faith through the dark

🐖 Appalachian & Celtic-European Crossroads

Region

Common Scorpio-Season Foods

Symbolic Themes

Appalachian Mountains

Root stews, cornbread, apple butter, beans & fatback, chow chow

Resourcefulness, preservation, hearth magic

British Isles (Celtic Samhain)

Oat cakes, turnips, cabbage, mutton stew, colcannon, soul cakes

Honoring ancestors, feeding the dead

Germanic / Eastern European

Sauerkraut, sausages, potatoes, dark bread, pickled beets

Fermentation, community feasting, survival alchemy

Mediterranean peasant roots

Olive oil, legumes, garlic, preserved lemons, dried figs, wine

Sun’s descent, sacred fire in the kitchen

🔥 Symbolic Throughline

Every one of these foods carries Plutonian resonance — they transform through time, decay, or heat:

• Smoking = fire preserving flesh

• Fermentation = life reborn through bacteria

• Root vegetables = buried treasures from the underworld

• Bone broths = resurrection from death into nourishment

• Dried beans = dormant life awaiting rebirth

In other words: my ancestors were already practicing alchemy, turning what would rot into what would sustain.

🕯️ Ancestral Meal Inspiration

To honor them during Scorpio season:

• Braised greens & beans with smoked salt pork

• Roasted root vegetables with rosemary & garlic

• Cast-iron cornbread with apple butter

• Mulled cider or spiced wine

• Pumpkin soup with black pepper & cream

• Fermented kraut or pickles on the side

Set it out by candlelight, whispering gratitude for all who preserved the line through lean, cold seasons. That act alone is an ancestral ritual — a feast of remembrance and transformation.

Feasts for the Dead 

Feasts for the dead are the ritual ancestors of today’s Halloween, All Souls’, and Samhain observances. Nearly every culture in the Northern Hemisphere marks late October → early November as a threshold time when harvest ends, daylight wanes, and the veil thins between the living and the departed. The food traditions all revolve around remembrance, reciprocity, and regeneration — feeding both body and spirit.

🍞 Soul Cakes & Spirit Bread

Origin: Medieval Britain & Ireland (All Hallows tide)

 Purpose: Given to “soulers” — poor folk and children who went door-to-door singing prayers for the dead. Each cake represented a soul released from purgatory.

 Ingredients:

• Butter, flour, egg yolks

• Sugar or honey

• Warm spices (nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon)

• Dried fruit (currants or raisins)

• Marked with a cross or wheel on top → symbol of the sun’s descent and resurrection

Magical correspondence: Bread of remembrance and exchange — you give to receive blessings from beyond.

 Modern echo: Halloween trick-or-treating, hot-cross buns, pan de muerto, and dumb-supper loaves all trace lineage here.

💀 Feasts for the Dead (Samhain → All Souls → Ancestor Night)

Across regions, the same structure repeats:

🕯️ The Setting

• A table laid for the living and the dead — sometimes with one empty chair or a plate of bread and salt left untouched.

• Candles or lanterns in windows or carved gourds to light the way home.

• Simple seasonal offerings: cider, ale, milk, or the first slice of cake.

🥘 Typical Fare

• Hearty stews (lamb, mutton, root vegetables) → sustenance for the journey.

• Colcannon or champ (mashed potatoes + greens + onion) → luck and fertility for the household.

• Oat cakes or bannocks → grain sacrifice to the earth’s rest.

• Apples and nuts → divination foods; bobbing for apples foretold love or luck.

• Honey, milk, and cream → sweetness offered to fair folk or wandering ancestors.

🧂 Ritual Acts

• “Dumb Suppers”: eaten in silence at midnight so spirits could dine unseen.

• Leaving food on the hearth overnight as an offering.

• Burning food scraps or crumbs in the fire to send sustenance to the otherworld.

🌾 Kindred Traditions

Culture / Region

Dish or Offering

Symbolic Meaning

Celtic Samhain

Colcannon, oat bannocks

Nourishing ancestors & earth spirits

Christian All Souls’ Day

Soul cakes, spiced breads

Charity → salvation for souls

Mexico (Día de Muertos)

Pan de muerto, sugar skulls

Sweet remembrance & joyful reunion

Italy (Fave dei Morti)

Almond “beans of the dead” cookies

Seeds of rebirth

Eastern Europe (Dziady, Radonitsa)

Kutia (grain + honey + poppy)

Life-death-rebirth cycle

Appalachian / Southern U.S.

Funeral foods: pies, casseroles, cornbread, sweet tea

Feeding the living in mourning; communal care

🜂 Underlying Symbolism

• Grain → sacrifice, regeneration

• Spice → warmth through darkness, protection from decay

• Sweetness → memory made palatable

• Smoke & candlelight → transformation and guidance

• Communal eating → weaving the living and the dead back together

If you wanted to honor this lineage now, you could simply:

• Bake a small batch of soul cakes or spiced shortbread.

• Light a candle for each ancestor you name while the cakes bake.

• Leave one outside or on your altar overnight.

  
  

   That single act keeps a thread of the old feast alive — an offering both sensual and sacred, right in Scorpio’s domain of death, desire, and rebirth.