This girl has paused her work as a lawyer for a few hours to help her mother, Araceli Sánchez –who also has put aside the dental office for a few days– with the semi-fixed stall where they sell sugar skulls for the three-week Feria del Alfeñique in Toluca, around 66 kilometers away from Mexico City. While this brittle treat is elaborated with a sweet pastry made of sugar, egg white, lemon juice and a plant called chaucle –although today is substituted with unflavored gelatin–, for craftsmen, the sugar skulls fit into the category of alfeñique –even if it only includes sugar, water and lemon– since it is a fragile product, and that is precisely what the word means: delicate appearance and weak constitution.
The Sánchez family has been making sugar skulls for over 100 years. The origin of the family trade has been lost in time; they only know that their ancestors also manufactured this edible craft and that in 1630 the first sales permit of alfeñique in Toluca was granted. The calaverita, or sugar skull, is one of the most representative elements in the offerings placed in Mexico's homes and cemeteries during the festival of the dead, the 1st and 2nd of November. Due to the colorful and playful nature of this celebration, some foreigners assume that Mexicans make fun of death and joke with it. However, it has nothing to do with a macabre or morbid matter. The Day of the Dead is a holiday where you worship your ancestors. In Mexico, it is believed that the souls of our relatives or friends, who have already left this world, return to dwell with their living relatives for a day. Who does not cherish a visit from a loved one? This promise is one of the reasons why there is so much fuss during the last week of October and early November each year.
"The most important thing is to keep the tradition. Maybe I should invite you to the workshop to see how it is produced. It's really cool." I accept the invitation and the next day Arturo Sanchez, her uncle, receives me in the workshop that is inside their home. As soon as I enter, I smell sweetened milk and cinnamon. The space is divided in two: the kitchen, where there are six burners holding huge stainless steel pans in which chongos zamoranos have been cooking for seven hours. The other workspace is larger, about 10 meters long, where the sweets are handled after being cooked. There is a table with a metal platform that covers nearly three quarters of the room, some sugar sacks stacked up, and metal shelves in the walls holding spices, condensed milk, seeds, strainers and other instruments and materials which are use to create each sweet variety.
Arturo, a man in his 50s, is the guardian of the Sánchez family craft. Of the six children Don Carmelo fathered, the patriarch of the clan, only he spends time making traditional treats: turrones, lemons stuffed with shredded coconut, figs and other crystallized fruits, nougats, jamoncillos, and of course, sugar skulls.
"My dad's family had four male children and one female. The four knew how to work with sweets and the only one who went to get a degree was my dad. He was an accountant and the others were craftsmen candy makers. And now we are four men and two women, all of who are professionals and I'm the only one who does this. It's funny, but a tradition can be easily lost in a single generation," says Arturo, who has asked Antonio for help –a 25-year-old artisan, colleague and family friend, who has taken his seven-year-old son to the place, and who has been learning at that age, in a playful way, the secrets of the craft– since in June, just when sugar skull production began, he broke a tendon in his right foot playing soccer, and that prevents him from lifting heavy objects or move quickly.
Following Arturo's orders, Antonio places refined sugar and water in a copper pot –400 ml of liquid per kilo of white sweet grains– and stirs it a bit. He places the container and its contents in one of the burners covered by mosaic, and then turns the knob that seems more fit for a water faucet than for a stove. We immediately hear the unmistakable noise of gas being burned, but louder, so much so that it frightens whoever is unfamiliar with the sound. Then Antonio adds the juice of about four lemons, which will add flavor to the mix, and, above all, steadiness, and invites me to stir the broth –until the sugar dissolves– with a wooden shovel whose handle is a bit scorched for having been left in the saucepan for too long. That accident makes the instrument adjust itself perfectly into my hand. It's not hard work and it's very fast to execute. The sugar left around the pot is removed with a rice root brush. The rest is easy: we must only supervise the syrup until it is ready.
After about 25 minutes, Antonio turns the burner off. The syrup is boiling, it bubbles and forms steam. The man places a bucket of cold water alongside the pot, plunges his hand in it, takes it out, shakes the excess of water off and plunges his fingertips in the mixture, which exceeds 100 degrees Celsius. In a quick movement, he takes the hand back to the bucket and gets a transparent, soft and pliable ball that does not stick to your fingers. The mixture is ready. It's my turn to attempt the task. I plunge my hand into the water. "Until your fingers get cold," Antonio tells me. They retreat, fearful that I will make a wrong move and burn someone. I wait a few seconds more than he did; my hand seems to have a lower temperature than the rest of my body, but I'm still gathering the courage. I reach fast to the pot and back into the water again. I hear the laughter. The fear of burning my fingers was too great and I did not take a drop of the boiling syrup. I ask to make another attempt. In my head I know I'm not going to get burned because the water acts as an insulator, but instinct tells me otherwise. Again I retry and fail. I ask for a third chance, I must overcome fear. They tell me that I must hurry, otherwise the heat will pass and it will not test well. I take a deep breath, I feel the cold on my hand, I take it out of the water and, finally, my fingertips are barely touching the sweet mixture inside the copper pot. I get a small film that becomes flexible as it hits the water. My fingers have a reddish color from the cold, and not from the heat of the syrup. "Years ago, you know, the innovation of youth, I told my dad, 'with a thermometer'. He said yes. I bought it, but it dropped to the bottom of the pot, I had to empty it to get it out. He said, 'let's go back to the traditional way'," Arturo tells me amid laughter. "Yes, plunge your fingers. That does not fail."
"What sometimes fails is the water," Antonio adds, "if it is too warm, it does not give you the perfect boiling point and it passes, or if it is too cold, it gives you the boiling point very quickly and it leaves it soft." Arturo learned the trade from his father; he grew up with him, next to the sweet smell and the heat of the burners. As a child, his father would place him on the table for him to roll the candy and form the red candy canes sold at Christmas. Don Carmelo also worked for the municipal government. When he came home, he would take his jacket and tie off and go to his candy workshop. There was his son, checking for the sugar boiling point or watching the turrón cooking. One day, Don Carmelo had a facial paralysis and could not delve into the heat of the workshop; the Feria del Alfeñique was approaching, the strong selling season. Arturo, who was already nearly 16 years old, told his father that he would take care of the remaining work, that he should not worry. "Let's see how it goes," he thought. He risked it and won; the production finished. Well, nearly, because he burned the jamoncillo pip. It was hard as a rock. Afterwards, Antonio places the bucket on a plastic container, holding one of the rings with one hand while taking a wooden shovel with the other, rubbing the syrup against the walls of the copper pot to turn it white. I imitate him and do the same. I can feel the warm and sweet steam. It isn't difficult to scrape, although it is a bit tiring, the effort can be felt in the biceps, it aches a bit, but you have to whiten the liquid before it cools and thickens. Whitening syrup, kneading caramel and turrón, carrying pans and other activities in the workshop has resulted in marked brawny arms in both Arturo and Antonio.
"Aside from wood, I have whitened using thick plastic. Not with metal, since if you rub metal with metal, you get copper cyanide, and then you're scraping poison. The aluminum pan does not whiten well; that is because when you boil the aluminum in turns the sugar yellow. It is best to use a copper pot because it holds more heat," Antonio explains to me while he continues working. While we whiten the syrup, Arturo, Diego, Antonio's son and Emmanuel –an assistant in the shop– take brown objects from a bucket of water. Seen together, they look as small cups without handles, embossed on the inside. They are the clay molds and they put them to drain on a wire mesh. They must be wet to prevent the sugar syrup from sticking on their walls. In fact, they are always in water. They are made in Metepec, a nearby town, about 30 minutes from Toluca, which focuses on the elaboration of crafts in clay. The skull is designed in clay and then is taken to the craftsman for him to make the molds. That is why every family has their own designs. There begins the process of the sugar skull. The biggest mold that Arturo handles is 40 centimeters in diameter.
"This is the trompuda (Thick-lipped)." Antonio takes two halves in his hands and joins them with a rubber band. "I have a mold back in the house, a small one, that looks like the tooth of Pinky & The Brain. That's how I named it: Brain, that's its name." After joining the molds, they are placed side up in two rows. Antonio takes the copper pot and empties the contents into the containers of the first row. He does it directly since it is not a very large amount, only about seven liters of syrup. If he had more syrup, he would have had to use a pewter pitch for the pouring technique. After a couple of minutes, he pours the contents of the first molds to the ones that are empty. I help again. The mold, which is about the size of a small soup bowl, weighs just over half a kilo, even with the syrup. You have to empty the contents as if it were passed from one cup to another. Then you need to scrape off the excess with a spoon so that the inside of the skull remains even. It is simple, but they ask me to do it with caution.
"If you get burn, take the clothes with your hand. Leave the mold and then wipe yourself," says Arturo. It strikes me that in this step I get a warning when minutes earlier, while I was putting my fingers into the boiling syrup, there was plenty of laughter. "It is at "cry" temperature, as my father used to say," Antonio jokes, and the laughter lifts the tension that was forming on my back after the warning. "Once I really burned myself. I was about his age," and points to his son. "At home, there are no burners like in here; you place bricks and the burner is built upwards. The upper row is tied up with some wire. Then I started to play, the wire broke, the bucket tilted and it burned me here –he touches the outer side of his right arm– it fell on top of my shirt. Fortunately I had no scar. It peeled off, I got a scab, but nothing else happened," and the man uncovers his sleeve to confirm his statement. "They are burns similar to hot plastic," Arturo tells me as he shows me his right arm full of small scars. "Look, the burns. In fact, this one is recent," he points at the left corner of his mouth, showing a small sore. After a couple of minutes, the syrup hardens. Then Antonio and his son take a table knife and start scraping the solidified sugar that was left in the edge of the mold for the base of the sugar skull to remain even and smooth. I do the same. The caramel falls and is inevitable to take a little bit with your hands and put it in your mouth. It is not cloying sweet, it's soft because it's still wet, you can barely taste the lemon, but it neutralizes the sugar flavor. It's addictive, and in between scraping a mold and the other, I start eating all the pieces that fall on the table. And it seems that it's a normal reaction within the confectioners' world. "I love sugar," Arturo tells me, almost drooling while saying these words, his voice becomes slow, he closes his eyes and has a smirk. It is evident that he is eating pieces of candy in his mind. "Everything you do, you try it and you like it", he says with the enthusiasm of a child. "Interestingly, my dad was a diabetic, but he needed his everyday treat". "Sweets were his antidote," says Antonio, laughing. Then it's time to take the skull out of the clay. I take one of the pieces and remove the rubber band that joined the two parts of the mold. I stir one side a little and it exposes the parietal and other parts of the skull on the right side. It is still wet, but the sugar is already firm and solid. I remove the sugar skull carefully to release it from the other piece of clay. "If you hold it from the edge, it will break. Grab all of it. Like this," Antonio instructs me. It seems like I'm helping out at an animal break an egg at birth. It's exciting. Finally the clay is off and the piece is out. The sugar water makes it shine with the light. This thick-lipped sugar skull is jawless. I feel joy in my chest, satisfaction. Maybe that is how veterinarians feel when they help female
Then I put the candy in the grid where the molds were placed before, so they can finish absorbing the thin film of water that surrounds it. Gradually, we put more sugar skulls and form a type of small tzompantli (in nahuatl), the wall that, as described by the archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, the Aztec built with skulls, many of them belonging to his enemies that were captured, killed and beheaded as a warning of their mightiness. In fact, Susana Maria Victoria Uribe says sugar skulls originated in tzompantlis and were placed in the offerings that our ancestors dedicated to the dead, where they placed amaranth and honey. With the arrival of the Spaniards, sugar was introduced in the 17th Century and the Sephardic immigrants brought the alfeñique technique. After a few minutes the skulls have been aired, the shine is gone and they have a matt white color. They must be left there for 20 to 30 days for the skulls to dry since they are still moist in the inside. In fact, that is why the craftsmanship is made only during the months when there is no rain, which can be from March to July, since the humidity in the environment can destroy them. So, they prepare all the pieces needed, both to sell at the fair during October as well as to distribute orders. Climate change has led to changes in sugar skull production times, since, in the last years, artisans have been surprised by atypical rains.
"The sugar skull can last for years," says Arturo. "The older it gets, the more white and strong it gets, although it builds a crust due to dryness. The sweets are like fine wine, it can last years and remain perfect. Once we saved one for three years. It was delicious. We save the sugar skulls that are left to sweeten coffee." Arturo's task ends here. The rest of the family is responsible for the decoration. Antonio takes out a box, like a shoebox, with some dry skulls. They are impeccable white. They are a canvas in which you can capture what is in your imagination. He also takes out some bags with a paste made of sugar, egg white and natural color to decorate. They are tied and he had made a small hole in them to use as if they were pastry bags. Then he takes the skull with one hand, one that already has sequin eyes glued to it, and with the other hand he takes the pastry bag. He starts drawing figures in the parietal, temporal, frontal, occipital and other parts of the skull. He makes a series of eight figures, zigzag lines, scribbles, spirals, frets. He draws blue tears, pink eyebrows, the skull's teeth in a brighter white, playful yellow and green hair, purple ears. You have to work fast because the heat of the hand itself makes the sugar melt between your fingers.
"My brother Ricardo decorates very fast, it's scary to see him. You can only see the hand, all blurry for how fast it moves. And the next one, and the next one, and the next one. I would like to work that fast. For example, this year I was making the skulls and he was decorating. And very fast. I had to tell him, "Bro, calm down, let me breath." Antonio finished decorating his sugar skull, but a little detail is missing. Traditionally, the treat carries the name of someone in the frontal bone. In fact, they put the most common names because they knew that the skull would go to an offering to remember the deceased, or to the hands of a friend as a gift to commemorate the feast of the dead. It is uncertain from where the custom of naming the skull comes, however, in his book Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843), the English explorer John Lloyd Stephens describes that he saw exhibited, inside the church of the village Nohcacab, the skulls of people that the priest had met, and they had the written names of their owners.
"It was tradition to put your name when gifting it," Arturo tells me, who, surprisingly, is not obese despite eating candy all day. "It was not a desire for you to die, but a reminder of the date. They used to be written with a typewriter, now it is typical to get your name written in the same place with the icing sugar itself". The work of the Sanchez family is not only found in markets across the country, such as the one of Jamaica in Mexico City, but they also have received orders from Michigan, Spain, France and Germany, where one of their pieces is on display in a Frankfurt museum.
"We rarely make the one with chocolate, because the one with sugar is more traditional. The sugar skull is original, one hundred percent. We defend all this. If I'm offered a new product, I reject it. A friend from Mexico City offered me sucralose. But no. To start with, you have to meet him," Arturo says, firm and convinced. During each part of the process of the creation of sugar skulls, Arturo takes a lemon with coconut filling, then a piece of nougat, then some terrón. It is a paradise for all candy lovers. But there is more. It's not just about the sweets. I once knew someone who worked in a large multinational chocolate factory and did not look so happy. Arturo gives me the answer while I'm still eating sweets from the table. "A factory needs production. I think an artisan family workshop does not have that. They lack love, passion." Arturo stares from one end of the table around his workshop, proudly. He grabs a piece of turrón that he will soon sell in the Feria and puts it in his mouth. He does not taste the pine nut, though it is made with that seed. He gets a sweeter flavor, one only those who have cooking secrets can identify: the family tradition.