Day of the Dead is truly a holiday for food lovers

For me it’s when the sun starts setting lower. Once the sun starts merging closer to the southern horizon, I finally get that cozy fall feeling. I know that my favorite harvests are underway as shadows grow longer and a tad chillier.

It also signals that Day of the Dead is near. Here at Food, Día de Muertos is one of our favorite times of the year. The observance offers a perfect moment to reset as we careen toward the holidays, when we start cooking and gathering with the people we love well into December (or into January and February for those who are hardcore about the rest of the syncretic fiestas tradicionales that round out winter in Mexico).

As Paola Briseño-González writes in her stirring essay that anchors our coverage this year, Día de Muertos is a time to reflect on the boundaries that separate and bind us, across life and death, but also man-made borders and distances from our homelands. She offers two new recipes for dishes that would sit regally on any ofrenda: A mixiote, one of my favorite delicacies from central Mexico, involving meat in an adobo that is slow-steamed in parchment paper and unwrapped like a gift upon serving; and a tropical-ish capirotada, emphasizing guavas and apricots for a coastal take on a warm bread pudding that I remember so fondly from childhood visits with my tías and abuelas in Tijuana. In Long Beach, at the epicenter of a new movement in pan dulce in California, Gusto Bread, deputy editor Betty Hallock meticulously documents owner-baker Arturo Enciso’s delicious pan de muerto, which should always be present on any Day of the Dead spread.

Intimidating to some (raises hand), making that spongey, citrusy bun with “bones” on its crown is a rite itself. I remember fondly many times a friend in Mexico City would invite over a group of us to have slices of freshly baked pan de muerto, often in variations of doughs or fruits as toppings, or in vegan form. These gatherings are usually accompanied by sips of mezcal, frothy Mexican hot chocolate spiced with cinnamon and hours of lively conversation.

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