Funeral Food: Italian

Italians mark All Souls Day with special cookies. Called fave dei morti (beans of the dead) and osso dei morti (bones of the dead), these are very hard, dry cookies, often containing chunks of almonds and shaped to resemble beans or bones. The beans have various meanings. Some stories connect them to immortality and the underworld. In other explanations, fava beans were used to weight the eyes of the dead. Osso dei morti, with a dry texture resembling chunks of bone, are more common in Italian American bakeries and are sold all year despite their macabre name.