Huesos de Santo – the bone-shaped sweets that honor the dead in Spain

Traditionally, on Día de Todos Los Santos in Spain, families across the country head to cemeteries, laying colorful flowers on the graves of their loved ones and remembering the legacies their relatives left behind (ok, I know, not only in Spain).
However there, after paying their respects, they head home for a holiday feast that culminates in an unusual dessert: bones. Delicious soft and nutty bones, filled with an intensely sweet candied paste.
In fact, If you visit Spain in late October or early November, and you’ll find bakeries and sweets shops stocked with these little marzipan-based sweets, known as “huesos de santo” or, as you can imagine, “saint’s bones”.

In their most classic form, these treats come stuffed with a candied egg yolk paste, and locals consume it in celebration of the Catholic holidays, Día de Todos Los Santos (All Saints’ Day) on November 1, and Día de Los Fieles Difuntos (All Souls’ Day) on November 2.
Rolled into tiny logs the treats resemble bones with even their marrow inside and, even if their appearance may seem a quite macabre, their role in Spain is far from disturbing.
Eating huesos de santo, in fact, is a way to remember the dead, not fear them, as a way to respect those who have died and to show that we haven’t forgotten them.
But this belief is also about the modern meaning of All Saints’ Day, which not only features the treats to commemorate canonical saints, but also to celebrate all who have passed purgatory and are in the presence of god. On All Souls’ Day, huesos de santo are consumed in honor of all who have died but are still cleansing their souls of sin in purgatory.
How, exactly, Spaniards started eating bone-shaped sweets as a way of remembering their loved ones is a bit of a mystery and, as is often the case with traditional historic recipes, theories, myths and folklore on their origins abound, but they likely have their roots in pagan holiday traditions.
Todos Los Santos traces its origins to the Celtic celebration of Samhain, that coincides with the end of the fall harvest, time in which many believed that the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead was thin, making it possible for the deceased to visit their living families.
In the pre-Christian period, it was typical for the Celts to commemorate their lost loved ones with bread or cereal-based dishes, that would relate the deceased with the agrarian cycle.
Traditionally It was custom to celebrate the dead by eating or symbolically offering them different special breads, but pagan practices transformed over centuries of Muslim and Christian rule over the Iberian peninsula.
By the time Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella rose to power in the 15th century, Christian rulers had mixed many Church traditions onto existing pagan ones, including Samhain, which became a day of reverence for martyrs.
A popular legend contends that a Benedictine monk created huesos de santos as part of this effort to blend pagan and Christian traditions and, while unproven, the legend would link huesos to other monastery-made sweets that resemble body parts and saintly relics.
Either way, huesos de santo are mostly associated with the Catholic holidays, including Holy Week in Andalucía, where they are sometimes served along huesos de San Expedito, another saintly, bone-shaped sweet, but they are also tied to some harvest traditions.
In Ceuta, for example, huesos are linked to Día de la Mochila, a celebration in which families fill backpacks with nuts from the fall harvest, and head to the woods for another feast that features huesos as a dessert.

The pastry is made from marzipan dough, which is then rolled into its signature shape. The traditional “marrow” filling is a rich cream made from sweetened egg yolks (yema), representing eternal life and resurrection, while white marzipan is often glazed with a thin layer of white sugar, which symbolizes the purity of the soul.
One of the first written recipes for huesos de santo appears in the 1611 cookbook Arte de Cozina, Pastelería, Vizcochería y Conservería by Francisco Martínez Montiño, and the book indicates that the sweet was already a well-established custom for All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day celebrations.
Moreover, the use of marzipan, a paste of almonds and sugar, has a long history in Spain and can be traced to the Moors’ influence on the Iberian Peninsula, and sweets using a marzipan base may have existed well before the 17th century.
Today in bakeries and sweets shops across Spain, huesos come in diverse flavors and varieties, including covered with chocolate, or even colored pink by a raspberry o other flavour marzipan base, fillings such as chocolate, coconut, or sweet potato, even if the most popular version is the original one.

Although it’s hard to pin down the exact origins of huesos de santo, the varied origin theories highlight just how many traditions and cultures are mingling within their story.
And, although the festival of Samhain is no longer widely celebrated even if it is still celebrated in Galicia, Spaniards still carry on the tradition of coming together every fall to connect with the dead through food.