Dulce de Calabaza en Piloncillo Yucateca

This is a Yucatecan dish. Not generic Mexican pumpkin, not autumn dessert. This is calabaza en dulce as it is made on the Peninsula, where it belongs to a specific calendar, the last days of October and the first two of November, and to a specific table, the Hanal Pixán altar set out for the dead who come back to eat with the living.

The calabaza has to be calabaza de Castilla, the ridged, hard-shelled, deep orange pumpkin you find piled outside the Lucas de Gálvez market in Mérida in late October. Not the watery decorative pumpkin from the supermarket, not butternut, not the small sugar pumpkin from a Pinterest board. Calabaza de Castilla holds its shape when you cook it for hours in piloncillo syrup. Other pumpkins collapse. The wrong ingredient will give you a sad, stringy compote. Si no conoces el mercado, no conoces la cocina.

The syrup is piloncillo, the dark unrefined cone sugar that smells like molasses and burned caramel, with sticks of Mexican canela, whole cloves, and a strip of orange peel. Some Mérida households add star anise. Some add a splash of anise liqueur. Every family has its variation and every family will tell you theirs is the right one. The constants do not move: calabaza de Castilla, piloncillo, canela verdadera, low heat, time.

My mother was from Jalisco and she did not make this. I learned it from a señora named Doña Reina in the colonia Itzimná of Mérida, who set her altar every year on October 31 with mazapanes, papel picado, candles, a glass of water, a plate of pibipollo, and a cazuela of dulce de calabaza still warm from the morning's cooking. She let me taste it before her dead did, and she told me, in the same breath she told me how to crosshatch the flesh: 'En Yucatán, los muertos comen primero, pero comen lo mismo que nosotros, así que hay que hacerlo bien.' In Yucatán, the dead eat first, but they eat the same thing we do, so you have to do it right. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, even for the ones who are not here anymore.