Food scene
Incense drifts through the air, vendors call out to customers and young men offer to cleanse my soul with a chicken (or, for a reduced rate, an egg).
We’re in a section of the Mercado de Sonora, or Sonora Market, called the Witches’ Market, where the scent of copal, a treeresin-based incense, lends a ghostly ambiance to the death masks and Day of the Dead paraphernalia.
Medicinal herbs line the aisles. Sacks of bark and wood chunks are advertised as cures for inflammation, tumors and just about every conceivable bodily and spiritual ailment.
As part of Day of the Dead festivities, Mexican families visit gravesites, which Feinman explains “is a way to connect living and supernatural worlds.”
Friends and family clean the gravesite and maybe eat a little something. They then leave the deceased his or her favorite things: tequila or mezcal, cigarettes and, for children, perhaps the ever-popular candy skulls.
Leading up to the Day of the Dead, bakeries are full of pan de muerto, or
“bread of the dead,” a sugar-sprinkled egg loaf with bonelike imagery baked on top.
On Day of the Dead, large tamales made of cornmeal and chicken wrapped in banana leaves are cooked in underground ovens with hot rocks.
When the cooking is finished, the tamale is lifted out of the ground — exhumed, if you will — and eaten to remember those whose spirits have briefly returned from the other side and, just as importantly, to celebrate life in the face of death.