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Todos los Santos – All Saints’ Day
By h.b. - Oct 31, 2007 - 7:38 PM

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The feast day of Todos los Santos on 1st November, a public holiday in Spain, is celebrated as the Roman Catholic and Anglican feast to honour all Saints, known and unknown, and was moved from its original date in May more than ten centuries ago to offset the pagan autumn festivals held at that time of year.

All Saints’ Day in Spain now revolves around remembering all the dead, when relatives visit the graves of their loved ones in the cemetery and decorate the graves with flowers. Extra public transport is generally laid on in the larger towns, and florists more than double their sales compared with any other time of the year.

It is a particularly large event in Cádiz province, Andalucía, where it’s known by the shortened form of ‘Tosantos’, where most of the towns and villages of the province enjoy a week of festivities.

As with religious festivals and other festivities in Spain, there are a number of dishes which are typically seen at this time of year. The most traditional are three types of small cake, none of them too complicated to make at home, but all of which are on sale in local bakeries.
The first, ‘huesos de santo,’ literally translates as ‘Saint’s bones’, and is basically a tube of marzipan filled with a cream made from egg yolks cooked with a sugar syrup.

Then there are ‘buñuelos de viento,’ or ‘puffs of wind,’ which is rather like a small doughnut, and then sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon after frying. They are sometimes filled with a type of custard known in Spain as crema pastelera.

Panellets are typical of Cataluña and use boniato – the white-fleshed sweet potato – along with ground almonds and sugar to make a dough which is then formed into balls and rolled in beaten egg and pine nuts, chopped almonds or powdered chocolate, before being baked until golden. Other variations use normal potato in the basic mixture, and may make a sugar syrup rather than adding the sugar directly.

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