The first of November is Día de Todos los Santos, or All Saints’ Day, an ancient Catholic tradition to honor saints (both known and unknown). Today, Spaniards commemorate it by visiting cemeteries with chrysanthemums, scrubbing marble headstones, replanting flowers, and tidying up graves. But, like all traditions here, the day is also celebrated with specific foods.
Chestnuts are most associated with the occasion. In places like Jerte, Extremadura, and around Aracena in northern Andalucía, groups of friends go into the forest to pick and then roast chestnuts together. In towns and villages around Spain, chestnuts—the best come from Galicia—are sold from little wooden street-corner shacks, roasted over squat, charcoal-burning braziers. Scooped still warm into rolled paper cones (marked with charcoal-dusted fingerprints), they are sold by the half dozen. The blackened shells are peeled away to reveal the soft, nutty-tasting flesh.
The chestnut’s consort is the sweet potato. A distant cousin of the potato and native of South America, where it has been cultivated for thousands of years, the sweet potato arrived in Europe sometime in the sixteenth century. Boniatos, as they are called in Spain, are elongated tubers, reddish brown, with sweet, deep-orange flesh. The same corner shacks that roast chestnuts roast these, too, and they are taken home for an indulgence.
There are special dulces (sweets), too. In Castilla, they eat the wonderfully named hueso de santo (bone of a saint)—cylindrical white marzipan filled with dulce de yema (candied egg yolk). In Catalunya, the main sweetmeats for this day are panellets, marzipan cookies typically rolled in toasted pine nuts (see page 291) and eaten with a glass of moscatel (Muscatel), a sweet, golden dessert wine made from muscat grapes. And, across the country, there are buñuelos de viento (literally “fritters of the wind”), fried, sweet fritters that are also prepared during Lent. During Lent, the “wind” refers to the fritter’s airy texture, but for All Saints’ Day, tradition says that by eating one you release a soul from purgatory.
This is also the time when the quince fruit begins to ripen. My wife’s grandmother prepared quince paste (see page 323) with the season’s first pieces of fruit from their tree for All Saints’ Day, something of a tradition that we have taken over at home when local quince start arriving in our neighborhood markets.
With these treats, autumn has, at last, truly arrived.