Belongs To Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Offering Food gathers four of the atlas's sacred foods, each one defined by an act of giving rather than by any shared ingredient or cuisine, and the four differ sharply in who or what receives them.

Haleem and harisa, a slow cooked porridge of wheat or barley pounded with meat, is distributed as nazr, an act of charity, during the Shia mourning assemblies of Muharram that commemorate the death of Husayn ibn Ali at Karbala, cooked in large batches and given away rather than sold. The same dish reappears at the breaking of the Ramadan fast, a second setting the atlas records alongside the first.

Pan de muerto is baked for Dia de los Muertos and set on the household ofrenda, its round loaf topped with dough shaped bones and a small ball standing for a skull, left out to receive the offering's essence for the returning dead before the family eats it, a custom blending Spanish Catholic All Souls observance with older Mesoamerican ways of remembering the dead with food.

Shinsen is the food set before the kami at a Shinto shrine, in a full order of rice, sake, rice cakes, fish, birds, vegetables, fruit, salt and water, simplified to rice, salt and water for routine use; the kami is understood to consume the food's essence, after which the remainder is shared among worshippers as naorai.

Zongzi, rice parcels steamed in bamboo leaves, are eaten at the Dragon Boat Festival on the strength of a tradition tying them to the poet Qu Yuan, thrown into the Miluo River, said to have fed his spirit and kept fish from his body, an account the atlas records as tradition's own story rather than settled history.

None of the four is complete once cooked; each waits on a receiver, a deity, an ancestor, the poor or a drowned man's spirit, before its purpose is served.