Pan de muerto

Where the bread came from is disputed, and the sources give three accounts.

María Angélica Galicia Gordillo of UNAM’s Institute of Anthropological Research describes colonial blending. Bread as we know it did not exist before the Spanish; what people made were ritual figures of amaranth, sweetened with honey or aguamiel and mixed with blood, called tzoalli, which stood for the gods, death among them. The Spanish brought wheat and banned the ritual use of amaranth, and “that process of food syncretism begins” that produced mole and breads such as pan de muerto. Spain had its pan de ánimas, given to children to help them in their prayers for the dead. The new bread was made of wheat but decorated with bones or tears and covered in red sugar.

INPI reaches further back. It names pre-Hispanic antecedents: the papalotlaxcalli or butterfly bread, a tortilla stamped with a butterfly while the dough was raw and painted once cooked; the amaranth “breads” in the shapes of butterflies and lightning offered to the Cihuapipiltin; and the large bones of amaranth and honey that, in Diego Durán’s chronicle, were laid at the feet of the image of Huitzilopochtli. In INPI’s reading the classic loaf, a tomb with a skull and crossed bones, took the place of the tzompantli, the rack of skulls.

The historian and anthropologist Eva Martínez Román rejects that line of descent. Bread, she told El Universal, is a European food: its wheat was not native to Mexico. The papalotlaxcalli story began to circulate on social media only a few years before, and Sahagún’s chronicle, which it cites, gives historians nothing to connect that pre-Hispanic food with pan de muerto. She points instead to the sweets and small breads shaped like bones made in Spain and other Christian countries for All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days, as the historian Elsa Malvido had noted. In her view pan de muerto most likely appeared in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century and became popular in the mid-twentieth, when city bakeries painted skeletons and skulls carrying their bread on their windows each season.