Halloween dinner for two.

Everyone celebrates Halloween in their own way. Some live for the costumes, others for the horror films. And then there are those who see 31 October as an excellent excuse for dinner for two, by candlelight, with a little fright thrown in.

The menu follows the colours of the night. To start, a pumpkin soup with ginger and coconut milk, lifted with piment d'Espelette (a mild Basque chilli) and served, if you feel like it, in small hollowed-out red kuri squashes. For the main course, a roast of wild boar with paprika, marinated the day before in Cahors wine. For dessert, blood-red candy apples with cinnamon, to bite into together.

A festive menu, then, but not a heavy one: a ladle of soup each, two slices of roast, one apple for two. Wild boar is fairly lean, the soup does without cream, and the dessert is more of a game than anything. Add a glass, not the bottle, and you'll leave the table with shivers rather than the urge to sleep.

(For an ordinary evening, the aphrodisiac dinner for two plays the same tune, lighter still, around fish cooked en papillote.)

Fear and desire are far more alike than we think. The racing heart, the shorter breath, the skin prickling, the cheeks burning... the body reacts in almost the same way to both.

Psychologists noticed long ago that we easily mistake one emotion for the other. After a shared fright (a film that makes you jump, a story told in the dark), we readily find the person beside us more attractive, as if the body were blaming its flutter on the wrong cause. Or the right one, depending on how you look at it.

Halloween hands you this playground on a plate. At this time of year, night falls early and we long for rooms lit by candles. And the occasion allows for a bit of theatre: playing at scaring each other, whispering, jumping, without anyone finding it silly.

So there's no need to turn the living room into a haunted house. A hint of mystery is enough, the shivers will do the rest.

The carving pumpkin is the emblem of Halloween, and its cousin, the softer cooking pumpkin, has earned its place on the plate. This soup takes a quarter of an hour to prepare and half an hour to cook, and it warms you without filling you up: the ginger tingles gently, the coconut milk rounds things off, the piment d'Espelette leaves a heat that builds slowly.

Sweat a sliced shallot and some grated fresh ginger in a drizzle of oil, without letting them colour, add the diced pumpkin, cover with stock and cook until the flesh crushes under a fork. Blend for a good while, then reheat without boiling with the coconut milk and a little chilli. Season with salt, and keep back a pinch of the chilli for each serving.

For the staging, two small hollowed-out red kuri squashes make perfect bowls, one each. Cut off a lid, scoop out the seeds and bake them for 35 to 40 minutes at 180 °C, before you start the soup. Then scoop out a little of the flesh (it goes into the soup before blending): the baked shell will keep the soup hot.

Don't throw the seeds away: stripped of their strings, rinsed and dried well, they roast in 12 to 15 minutes in the oven at 180 °C, with a few drops of oil and a pinch of salt (stir them halfway through). They'll add a crunch on top of the soup.

The step-by-step recipe, with quantities for two: pumpkin soup with ginger, coconut milk and piment d'Espelette.

Game is the meat of the season par excellence: dark, slightly wild flesh that calls to mind the forest and a wood fire. Wild boar is also leaner than pork, which makes it a festive dish that won't leave you weighed down at the end of the meal.

All the work is done the day before. The roast spends twenty-four hours in a Cahors marinade, with carrots, onion, garlic, cloves, bay leaf, thyme and peppercorns. On the day, it comes out an hour before cooking. It gets patted dry carefully (damp meat won't brown), then massaged with a paste of oil and paprika, both sweet and smoked.

It needs a properly hot oven, at 220 °C: fifteen minutes without touching it so the crust darkens, then fifteen to twenty-five minutes, basting it with marinade. Wild boar is eaten well done, never pink, though without drying it out. It then rests under a sheet of foil while you finish the sauce.

A few small steamed potatoes are all you need to mop up the sauce. The recipe serves four: the rest of the roast is eaten cold the next day, thinly sliced, with a little mustard.

The steps and the exact timings: roast wild boar with paprika and Cahors wine.

Candy apples smell of the funfair, but their French name gives the game away: pommes d'amour, love apples. A crisp apple trapped in a shell of bright red sugar, shiny as glass: it is, without question, the most Halloween dessert there is. A touch of cinnamon and a hint of chilli add a warmth you can't quite place at first.

Choose small, firm, slightly tart apples (Granny Smith, Pink Lady, reinette, an old French variety). Dip them for a few seconds in very hot water, then rub them with a tea towel and dry them well: the waxy film on the skin stops the sugar from sticking. Pull out the stalk and push a wooden skewer in its place.

Infuse a cinnamon stick in a little simmering water, take it out, then cook the sugar in that water with a few drops of red food colouring, without stirring, to the hard crack stage (around 150 °C). Off the heat, add a pinch of chilli, then dip each apple, turning it, let the excess drip off and set it down on baking paper. The shell hardens in a quarter of an hour.

One apple between two is plenty. One of you bites, the other takes over where the sugar gave way, and everyone ends up with red lips.

The full recipe, with quantities and the pitfalls to avoid: blood-red cinnamon candy apples.

The wine chooses itself, since the boar has been marinating in it: a Cahors, a dark red from south-west France, tannic and deep, that stands up to the paprika. Serve it at around 17 °C. Failing that, a Madiran or a Marcillac will do very nicely.

Watch out for this menu's trap: the marinade already swallows a whole bottle. For the table, plan on a half-bottle: a glass each with the main course, a drop with dessert if you insist, and that's it.

A glass loosens you up, the bottle puts you to sleep. Beyond two glasses, the sensations dull, tiredness creeps in, and the evening goes out before the candles do. Put a carafe of water on the table from the start: a glass of water for every glass of wine.

For anyone not drinking, make a hot spiced apple juice: bring pure apple juice to a simmer with a cinnamon stick, two slices of ginger and a strip of orange zest, leave it to infuse for ten minutes, and serve in mugs. It warms your hands and heralds the dessert.

The plastic cobwebs, the cackling skeletons and the blinking orange garland? Leave them on the shelf: a Halloween table for two plays on half-light and textures, not on piling things up.

Start with the light. Switch off the overhead light and bet everything on candles: tall black or burgundy tapers in mismatched candlesticks, a few candles in glass holders, at different heights. Enough light to see what you're eating and each other's face, no more. For the occasion, a dripping candle is part of the decor.

As for colours, the menu does half the work (the orange of the soup, the dark red of the sauce, the bright red of the apples). For the rest, deep tones: a plum or black tablecloth, or the bare wood of the table, cloth napkins, stemmed glasses.

Bring in nature rather than plastic: fallen leaves picked up on a walk, branches, walnuts, two or three small, oddly shaped gourds. A single macabre touch is enough (an old mirror throwing back the flames, a dried flower), the rest is a matter of light.

On the safety side, keep the flames away from napkins, dry leaves... and capes, if one of you is in costume.

This menu works beautifully with four hands, and that's already the start of the evening: one of you chops the pumpkin and the ginger, the other keeps an eye on the stock and picks the music.

The jack-o'-lantern is the ideal afternoon activity. Cut the lid at an angle, blade tilted towards the centre, so that it sits on a ledge instead of falling in. Scrape out the inside until the wall is about two centimetres thick, draw the face with a felt-tip pen, carve with a small serrated knife. A tealight inside, a small hole in the lid to let the heat out, and it's ready.

Candy apples are a job for two as well, but a careful one. One of you holds the pan tilted, hand protected by a tea towel, so the sugar forms a deep pool, the other dips and turns the apples. Cooked sugar reaches 150 °C and sticks to the skin: it is never tasted with a finger, and a bowl of cold water stays within reach.

For everything else, offer each other tastes: the soup from a spoon, the Cahors sauce from a fingertip, a pumpkin seed still warm. It's often there, between two pans, that the evening really gets going.

The whole point of this menu is that it splits into three stages, so you spend the evening at the table and not in front of the oven.

The day before:

• do the shopping (a frozen roast has to be bought earlier: it needs to thaw in the fridge from two days ahead)
• make the marinade and sink the roast into it for twenty-four hours, in the fridge
• make the soup up to the blending stage if you want to save time: the coconut milk and the chilli only go in when you reheat it

In the afternoon:

• carve the pumpkin and roast the pumpkin seeds
• bake the serving squashes (35 to 40 minutes at 180 °C), and the soup if it isn't already made
• make the candy apples and leave them to harden somewhere dry, out of the kitchen and never in the fridge: moisture softens the sugar and turns it sticky
• lay the table and get the blind-tasting tray ready (we'll come to that)

In the evening:

• An hour and a half before you sit down: take the roast out of the marinade, pat it dry, strain the marinade, peel the potatoes (keep them in cold water).
• Forty-five minutes before: turn the oven on to 220 °C and brush the roast with paprika.
• Thirty-five minutes before: put it in the oven. Keep half the marinade for basting the roast, reduce the other half for 10 to 12 minutes over a medium heat for the sauce, then turn off the heat.
• When the roast comes out: cover it with foil, it will rest during the starter. Put the potatoes on, slip the squashes into the switched-off oven, reheat the soup.
• At the end of the starter: reheat the sauce with the juices from the roast, whisk in a knob of cold butter, carve, serve.

The result: two trips to the kitchen in the whole meal, and a dessert waiting patiently on its paper.

Once dinner is over, or between two courses, the evening can slip into play. Nothing that takes talent: three ideas to bring on the shivers, the good kind.

The blind tasting. In the afternoon, prepare a small tray hidden under a tea towel: a pumpkin seed, a piece of apple, a square of dark chocolate, a drop of Cahors in a spoon, a trace of piment d'Espelette (really just a trace). One of you is blindfolded with a scarf and tastes, one mouthful at a time, whatever the other holds out. Right answer, a kiss. Wrong answer, a forfeit chosen by the one who can see. Then you swap.

The whispered scary story. Put out everything except one candle. One of you starts a story with a single sentence ("That night, the house wasn't as empty as we thought..."), the other carries on with the next. Two rules: every sentence is whispered in the ear, up close, and the story has to drift little by little from fear to desire. Breath on the neck does the rest, and soon the goosebumps have nothing to do with ghosts.

Candlelit confessions. Light five small candles. Taking turns, each of you confides something (a childhood fear, a memory from your early days, a desire you've never dared voice), then blows out a flame. When the last one goes out, the room is dark and you know each other a little better. If words fail you when it comes to desires, here are some very simple phrases to dare talk about them.

One word is enough to stop any of these games, and it works for both of you.

Once the dessert has been bitten into, forget the washing-up (just put the roast in the fridge) and move to another room, taking the light with you: a candle, the lit pumpkin, and the bedroom or the living room takes on a whole new mood.

If you like your thrills on screen, it's time for the scary film, under a throw, pressed up against each other. Choose a classic rather than something too gory: you're after the jolt that makes you snuggle closer, not the nausea. And nobody said you had to watch the end.

Those who prefer silence will let their hands take over. The body feels light after this menu, the senses woken up by the spices and the games: a slow massage of the back and shoulders keeps the contact going without forcing anything. To go further, the erotic massage, from the back to the buttocks, is perfect for a night like this one.

In short: the marinade the day before, the candy apples in the afternoon, a candlelit table, one glass each and a game that only pretends to be scary. The real shivers, though, can't be prepared in advance.