#cuidaddemexico

“Remember me as you pass by. As you are now, so once was I. As I am now, you soon will be. Prepare for death and follow me.”

– Traditional Calavera Verse

A fun fact about Mexico City is that oftentimes holidays or seasons are represented by a particular type of bread. For Christmas, there is Rosco de Reyes, associated with the three kings that brought gifts to Bethelehem. In mid-September, you begin to see an oddly named bread in bakeries and supermarkets: Pan de muerto, or bread of the dead. This bread appears when Mexico is preparing to celebrate Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead. For those who haven’t seen the movie Coco, the Day of the Dead is the time of year when Mexicans remember and honor their ancestors. Pan de muerto is often placed as an offering on home altars for the visiting spirits of deceased family members. 

By one estimate, between October 3rd and November 2nd (the actual Day of the Dead), over 30 million pieces of the bread are consumed in Mexico each year. 94% of Mexicans eat pan de muerto. 

What exactly is it? Pan de muerto is a rich, doughy style bread, similar in consistency to challah bread and roughly the size of a hamburger bun. It is said to be shaped like a coffin, with designs of a cross or skull and bones sometimes placed on top. Often baked with butter to give it a rich flavor, there are regional variants, but generally it is topped with sugar and an orange zest.

Like almost all local food in today’s Mexico, the bread of the dead was born of the contact between the indigenous traditions of Mesoamerica and the Spanish arrival and colonization. The main ingredients (wheat, butter, milk, sugar) came to Mexico through the Columbian Exchange, the great swapping of people, diseases, animals, and plants between the Old World and the New. Among other things, pumpkins from the Americas were brought to Ireland, where they replaced turnips as the vegetable used to make jack-o-lanterns. 

But while pan de muerto dates its creation to the time of the conquistadors in the 1500’s, the concepts behind the bread of the dead come from Mexica (or Aztec) religion and culture. One explanation is that around the start of Autumn, in order to give thanks for the harvest, the Aztecs would bake a type of bread made out of amaranth (a local grain), honey, and human blood as an offering to the gods. This was seen as a sacred offering, and was then eaten by the entire community. There is an echo of this today, in that the bread is eaten by the living relatives but is also thought of as an offering that is spiritually “nourishing” to the ancestors. 

Another origin story for bread of the dead involves the Aztecs sacrificing a young woman, placing her heart in a clay pot, and then mixing the heart with grain. The priest would then eat the heart in gratitude to the gods for a good harvest. The Spanish priests quickly banned these types of practices, but the the modern pan de muerto was born: A bread to represent the heart sprinkled with red sugar to represent the blood of the sacrificial victim. 

However it got started, pan de muerto is here to stay. A bakery near my house makes a version with a delicious mazapán cream inside.  On a cool Fall morning, sitting outside with a hot coffee and a delicious bread of the dead, there is nothing better.