On Alfeñique and Caring for the Dead

On Alfeñique and Caring for the Dead

By Nawal Nasrallah

From time immemorial, humans have grappled with two inevitabilities: their own mortality and their pangs of anguish at the departure of loved ones. In finding meaningful ways to memorialize the dead and to go on living, food has been of central importance. There have been times when the bereaved “fed” the deceased, and others when they would symbolically involve the dead in eating rituals and ceremonies to show they still remember and care.

The earliest documented death rituals take us all the way back to the ancient land between the two rivers: Mesopotamia. People there had long ago—as early as the third millennium BC—found a way to connect with deceased family members. They did this by inviting them to special repasts, called kispu in the Akkadian.

The verb from which this ritual derived was kasāpu, which signifies breaking something into bits, especially bread. Kispu, therefore, was a periodic meal that the bereaved shared with their deceased family members who resided in the netherworld. This gesture of familial solidarity was usually performed on the last day of each lunar month, when the moonless night was at its darkest, as befit the solemnity of the occasion. It was performed at the burial place, which customarily was beneath the house where the family lived.

Now, the netherworld as ancient Mesopotamians imagined it was a gloomy place: dark, silent, and dusty. This was a place where everyone went—it was neither punishment nor reward. There, they led eternal, mournful lives, and all they ate was dry dust. To temporarily relieve the deceased, even if slightly, of the sordid state of the underworld, surviving family members would make offerings of food and drink, feeding the slight traces of their loved ones’ bodies. As described by the Assyriologist Jean Bottéro, this body was like a “wispy shadow”—a phantom, or a ghost—which was still believed to feel hunger and thirst, but in meagre measures.

It was upon such beliefs that the kispu offerings, performed at the funeral rituals and monthly afterwards, were established. As to what the deceased were actually offered, we get a glimpse from an ancient Sumerian text. They might have been offered pastries, roasted barley, clusters of dates, bittersweet beer, bunches of grapes, figs, orchard honey, wine, hot water, cold water, cream, and milk. According to Alfred Jeremias’s The Babylonian Conception of Heaven and Hell, drinking vessels and dishes filled with food were placed with the dead inside their tombs, but also upon them. The souls also had to be supplied with water. To this end, cisterns were added to burial places. Kispu was an obligation; the twelfth tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh cautions, “If the dead have none to care for him, then he is consumed by gnawing hunger, vainly he languishes for refreshment.”

Evidently, it was not only the deceased that benefited from the kispu ceremony, but also the living, as it was believed that, by keeping the dead satisfied, the living would earn their protection from the evil demons of the netherworld. Peace for the living was dependent upon peace for the dead. Therefore, any negligence in performing the kispu rituals on the part of the living would incur the anger and bitterness of the abandoned ghost of the deceased, who would avenge itself against its careless relatives. This makes it sound more like a chore with benefits than a pure act of compassion toward the deceased.

By way of comparison, the ancient Egyptians’ ceremonial offerings to the dead were much more complicated, performed in earnest and for a different purpose. The tomb murals of the Egyptians, as well as the excavated remains uncovered in archaeological sites, reveal a much more elaborate repast. These meals were not meant to be shared with the survivors, but were instead the victuals that accompanied the departed in their long and perilous journey to the afterlife, sustaining them in their new eternal abode. The bereaved would send their loved ones off with victuals such as bread, beer, and more. But sometimes, in place of physical foods, words or pictures inscribed on tombs would substitute. As can be seen on the tomb of a pharaoh’s scribe that survived from around 1380 BC, lavish paintings depicted servers carrying ducks, fish, and bunches of grapes for him in the afterlife.

We are also fortunate to have a good idea of what types of food and drink were dispatched, thanks to the remains of kings and other wealthy people. As one might expect, these offerings were not only lavishly diverse, they were also treated, so that they would keep well in the afterlife. Vegetables and fruits were thoroughly dried, and perishables like meat and poultry were salted and dried, wrapped in bundles, and mummified. As revealed in recent findings, the bundled chunks of meat were coated with a resin that turned out to be none other than the costly mastic, Pistacia lentiscus. They were, in other words, “victual mummies.” At the tomb of Tutankhamun, more than 100 baskets were found laden with the remains of wheat and barley, bread, figs, dates, melons, and grapes; this was in addition to pottery jars filled with honey, and others with wine, as well as wooden boxes loaded with victual mummies of beef cuts, ducks, geese, and small birds.

With the advent of monotheism, mourners found other ways to honor the passing of their loved ones, through ritual offerings and the distribution of foods for their souls. Here, the shared foods are more modest, reflecting the solemnity of the occasion. Take the Irish wake, with its offerings of shepherd’s pie and Irish stew, or the Middle Eastern dishes ranging from couscous and tagine in North Africa; to bulgur and rice and lentils in Turkey and the Levant; to the rice and stews of Iran, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula; to down-to-earth sweets like date or semolina halwa or rice puddings. This is no time for indulgent cookies or fancy cakes and candies. The typical funeral beverage is black and bitter coffee; serving it sweetened is a disregard for funerary codes of decorum.

Take the age-old common wheat-berry porridge of harīsa, which is offered by Shiite Muslims in Iraq, Iran, and adjoining countries on Ashura, the first 10 days of Muharram. This is an annual commemoration of the martyrdom of the prophet’s grandson Imam Hussein, which took place in 680. It is marked by dramatic and emotional mourning rituals performed by men, including chest beating and self-flagellation as an expression of grief. Harīsa is cooked in big cauldrons outside and left to simmer on a wood fire. Men of the neighborhood take turns stirring and mashing it all night long and, by the advent of dawn, it is distributed in bowls to neighbors, friends, and whoever happens to be around. A menu commemorating this same event, which is symbolic in its offerings, survives from the period when the Shiite Fatimids ruled Egypt (969– 1171). For this occasion, they offered foods and dishes to the public, called a simāt al-huzn, or a “table of sorrow,” which included simple fare, such as dark barley bread and black lentils.

Some cultures still maintain the tradition of feeding the dead as an act of care and connection, as in China, where the bereaved make offerings of foods the deceased enjoyed during their lifetime, or among Japanese Buddhists, who leave fruits and vegetables on family altars, along with flowers. The All Souls Day in the dominantly Christian Philippines is a time to pay one’s respects to the deceased in a joyful manner, as families gather at gravesites to picnic—playing, chatting, and eating—and then leaving simple foods behind for the buried.

But no other people know how to handle the inevitable better than those who celebrate the Day of the Dead, Día de los Muertos. Instead of mourning death, this annual event celebrates life. It is a tradition of joy, celebrated with good food and sweets, emphasizing remembrance of loved ones’ lives rather than their passing. This is a very different way of grieving than in much of the Middle East, where a trivial indulgence like cracking toasted melon seeds while in mourning is taboo.

The Day of the Dead is celebrated on the first and second of November, when it is believed that the spirits of the deceased temporarily return to earth. The feast has its roots in the culture of the Aztecs, for whom mourning the dead was an act of disrespect for death itself, as, to them, death was a natural phase in one’s life. On this occasion, people celebrate through ritual observances like constructing altars, or ofrendas, and filling them with offerings to the dead, as well as by decorating family gravesites and gathering together to dance, play music, feast, and drink. Many masquerade as death and eat alfeñique, a prominent part of Day of the Dead celebrations.

Alfeñique is sugar candy molded mostly as colorful and elaborately decorated skulls, symbolizing life and death. In name and substance, this candy owes its existence ultimately to the Arabs, for it was through them that the sugar plant was introduced to Spain, when they ruled the southern Iberian Peninsula, al-Andalus, for roughly eight centuries (711 to 1492). They also brought with them to Spain the skills they learned in the east, which involved cultivation of the sugarcane plant and the production and refining of sugar. They were skilled at transforming it into candy, particularly the malleable sugar paste that became the pulled sugar taffy called fānīdh, which the Spanish borrowed in name and technique, calling it alfeñique.

It was Spanish colonizers who brought sugar to Mexico and other parts of the Americas, along with the technique of working it into candy. In pre-Columbian times, the skull figurines for festivals related to remembering the dead were often made of clay. However, with the arrival of sugar, mud was replaced by sweetness, and the candy skulls made with sugar-candy paste, alfeñique, acquired the name of the paste that was used to make them. In places where there are no such festivities, alfeñique is simply sugar candy. A traveler visiting Guatemala in the 1940s, for instance, observed that the culinary specialty of the city of Sacapulas was a kind of candy called alfeñique. In his description, it was made of squash seeds and locally obtained sugarcane juice, boiled down and shaped into flat, brownish rings about three inches in diameter.

This was exactly how making fānīdh was described in Ibn Sīnā’s al-Qānūn fi-l-tibb and Ibn Jazla’s Minhāj al-Bayān, both of them eleventh-century physicians. From the fānīdh recipes that survived in medieval Arabic cookbooks, we learn that making it was more complicated than in the physicians’ versions, and that it was more like pulled sugar taffy.

Here is a recipe for fānīdh from thirteenth-century Andalusi cookbook Anwāʿ al-saydala fī alwān al-aṭʿima:

Take white sugar and dissolve it in a moderate amount of water—neither too little nor too much. Put it on a slow-burning fire and purify it by skimming the froth. Continue cooking until it is moderately thickened and then take off the fire. Once it is no longer intensely hot, hold it with your hand and pull it [from a firmly hammered nail, and then fold it and repeatedly pull it] until its whiteness is to your satisfaction. If it dries out [and hardens] while handling it by hand before it whitens to the degree you like, put it close to the fire until it softens back and resume working on it, putting it close to the fire [as needed] until you are satisfied with its whiteness, [and use it as needed].

The book also includes a recipe for making edible bracelets with fānīdh, noting that these bracelets were made for the household children, who would be kept entertained by playing with and snacking on them. Little did they know that kids in far-off lands and times would also be given fānīdh for their amusement, only by then it would be called alfeñique and shaped as skulls, which children would joyfully munch on in remembrance of the departed.

This essay is from the Spring 2025 GRIEF issue of ArabLit Quarterly, available now at Gumroad, ArabLit.org/Shop, select bookshops, and elsewhere.

Nawal Nasrallah is an independent Iraqi scholar, passionate about cooking and its history and culture, formerly a professor at the universities of Baghdad and Mosul. An award-winning researcher and food writer, she is the author of Delights from the Garden of Eden: A Cookbook and a History of the Iraqi Cuisine, the winner of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2007. She has also published Dates: A Global History. Her English translation of Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq’s 10th-century Baghdadi cookbook Kitab al-Tabikh, entitled Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens (Brill, 2007), was awarded “Best Translation” and “Best of the Best of the Past 12 Years” at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2007. Her two latest publications are translations of Andalusi cookbooks: Best of Delectable Foods and Dishes and Smorgasbords of Andalusi and Maghribi Dishes (Brill, 2021, 2025).