Something for the Dead

In a pastry shop in Palermo, in the last week of October, the window fills up with bones.

They are sugar bones, and marzipan fruit, and little almond-paste skulls, and biscuits shaped and named, without the slightest squeamishness, ossa dei morti — the bones of the dead. Children press their faces to the glass. This is not a horror display. It is the most normal thing in the world. In a few days it will be the Day of the Dead, and in Sicily that means, above all, sweets — sweets made to be given to children in the name of dead relatives, sweets shaped like the very bones in the ground, eaten with relish and no apparent contradiction by the living and dedicated to the departed.

I remember standing in front of one of these windows, some years ago, with the particular unease of a northern European confronting a culture entirely at ease with something his own culture handles by not mentioning it. Where I come from, death and food keep a careful distance from one another. You do not, as a rule, make biscuits shaped like skeletons and hand them to your children in the name of Grandma. And yet here was a whole city doing exactly that, cheerfully, deliciously, every year, and had been for centuries. I bought a bag of the bones. They were very good. And I started to wonder why so much of the world bakes, specifically, for the dead — and why mine, on the whole, had stopped.

The dates everything clusters around are the first two days of November: All Saints’ Day on the first, All Souls’ Day on the second. The Catholic calendar put them there deliberately, laid over a much older seam — the ancient northern European sense that the turn into winter, the dying of the year, was the time when the border between the living and the dead went thin, when the departed came close. The Church, as ever, did not so much abolish the old feeling as give it a saint’s name and a liturgy. And right across the Catholic and formerly-Catholic world, in a dozen countries that otherwise agree on very little, the same instinct surfaced in the kitchen: at exactly this moment in the year, you bake something for the dead.

What fascinates me is how many different shapes that single instinct takes, and how each one quietly tells you how its culture feels about death itself.

In Spain — and I suspect this is the tradition closest to the hearts of many who will read this — the dead are honoured with some of the finest sweets of the year. There are huesos de santo, “saints’ bones”: little tubes of marzipan, rolled and shaped to look like hollow bones, traditionally filled with sweet egg-yolk custard, pale and rich and faintly macabre and completely delicious. There are buñuelos de viento — “puffs of wind,” so light they seem to be made of air, and named, lovely and strange, for the souls they are meant to release or remember. And above all, in Catalonia and beyond, there are panellets: small, dense marzipan sweets, the classic version rolled in pine nuts and glazed, made specifically for the Castanyada and for All Saints, eaten on the night when families traditionally gathered to remember their dead — in Catalonia, around roasted chestnuts and sweet wine and these little almond jewels. The Spanish approach to the dead, you might say, is to feed them beautifully: no gloom, no grimness, just the best the pastry kitchen can do, offered up in their name.

Cross to Sicily and the southern Italian mainland and the tone shifts toward something more playful, more frankly skeletal. The ossa dei morti I met in that Palermo window are hard, white, bone-pale biscuits, often so hard they really do have the density of bone, flavoured with cloves or cinnamon. But the glory of the Sicilian Day of the Dead is the frutta martorana — marzipan modelled and painted, with astonishing skill, into perfect replicas of fruit: figs, peaches, prickly pears, cherries, oranges, so lifelike you have to look twice. These were traditionally given to children on the morning of the second of November as gifts “from the dead” — the idea being that the departed relatives had left them during the night, a sort of benevolent visit from the ancestors expressed in almond sugar. Imagine it from the child’s side: you wake on the Day of the Dead and the dead have left you sweets. Death, in this telling, is not the thing that takes people away. It is the thing that, once a year, brings them quietly back, bearing marzipan.

Go north and west, to Portugal, and the dead send the children out to collect. On the first of November, Portuguese children go door to door with cloth bags for Pão-por-Deus — “bread for God” — singing or reciting at each house and receiving in return small cakes, bread, nuts, pomegranates, or sweets. It is a tradition of real antiquity, the almsgiving and soul-bread of the medieval dead reworked into a children’s rite, and it is — though most people on the other side of the Atlantic have no idea — one of the clear ancestral threads of trick-or-treat. The dead, in Portugal, are honoured by an act of charity performed through children: you give to the small and the asking, in the name of the gone.

And then, further north still, in Britain, there is a tradition that almost died, and that tells its own quiet story. The English used to make soul cakes — small, round, spiced, sweet little buns, marked with a cross, baked for All Souls and given out to “soulers,” mostly the poor and children, who went from door to door singing the souling songs and promising, in return for a cake, to pray for the household’s dead. One cake, one soul prayed out of purgatory: that was the old arithmetic. The practice faded over the centuries, souling songs survived in a few villages as folk curiosities, and the soul cake retreated into the realm of things historians mention and almost nobody bakes. Britain, in other words, is a culture that used to feed its dead and then, somewhere along the line, grew too uncomfortable to keep it up — which is more or less, I think, the whole northern European story in a single lapsed biscuit.

I have left for last the tradition that now overshadows all the others, and that comes from outside Europe entirely, because it is the one that has arguably kept the whole impulse most gloriously alive.

In Mexico, the Día de los Muertos is not a quiet corner of the calendar but one of the great festivals of the year, and its central food is pan de muerto — “bread of the dead.” It is a soft, round, enriched sweet bread, scented with orange blossom and sometimes aniseed, dusted with sugar, and decorated with strips of dough laid across the top to represent bones, and a little round knob in the centre for the skull. Families bake it, buy it, pile it high, and above all place it on the ofrenda — the home altar built for the dead, laden with marigolds and candles and photographs and the favourite foods of the departed, so that the souls, returning for their one night, will find a feast waiting. The Mexican dead are not mourned so much as hosted. They are expected. The table is laid for them. And the bread with the bones on top is set out not as a memento mori but as a welcome — pull up a chair, you’ve come a long way, we kept your place.

That, to me, is the heart of all of it. These breads and bones and marzipan fruits are, every one of them, a way of keeping a place at the table for the people who are gone. The cultures differ in tone — the Spanish feed the dead beautifully, the Sicilians let them bring gifts, the Portuguese send the children out in their name, the Mexicans lay them a whole altar, the British quietly gave up — but underneath, the instinct is identical, and it is the oldest instinct food has: that to feed someone is to love them, and that love does not simply stop because someone has died. You go on cooking for them. You bake the thing they liked. You make the little bones and eat them and think of the big bones in the ground and somehow, across that, keep the connection warm.

I think often now about that bag of sugar bones in Palermo, and about my own initial unease, and about how completely backwards that unease was.

Because the culture that bakes skulls for its children is not the morbid one. It is the healthy one. It is the culture that has found a way to keep its dead close, to speak about them, to taste them, to let the children meet them once a year over something sweet — to treat death not as the unmentionable thing at the end but as a relationship that continues, with its own season and its own foods. It is my own tradition, the one that stopped baking soul cakes and now handles death mostly by lowering its voice, that has the stranger relationship with mortality. We didn’t make death less frightening by refusing to bake for it. We just made it lonelier.

So this year, around the turn of the month, I intend to do the thing properly. I will get hold of some panellets, or make a batch of huesos de santo, or if I am feeling ambitious bake a pan de muerto with its little dough bones across the top. I will set a bit aside — not on an altar, I haven’t the nerve or the marigolds, but somewhere, in some small deliberate way — for the people I have lost. And I will eat the rest, with relish, the way every one of these traditions intends, because the whole point of a food for the dead is that it is meant to be enjoyed by the living, in their memory, at the table they have left but to which, for one or two days in the dying of the year, they are quietly invited back.

Pull up a chair. We kept your place. Have something sweet.