Funerary Food, Memory, and the Afterlife: A Curious Appetite with Dr Dan O’Brien
What do we eat around death? What has food meant at funerals in the past? And why does something as small and seemingly ordinary as a biscuit carry so much emotional, social, and symbolic weight?
In this episode of A Curious Appetite, I spoke with death historian Dr Dan O’Brien about funerary food, mourning rituals, and the strange but deeply human ways in which food helps us navigate loss. Dan’s research focuses on the undertaking trade and its products in eighteenth century England, and together we explored a series of objects and practices that reveal how food has long shaped the experience of death, grief, and remembrance.
One of the most fascinating objects we discussed was the funeral biscuit wrapper. It is such a fragile thing: a small piece of paper that once enclosed a biscuit distributed at a funeral in Yorkshire in 1828. The biscuit itself has long disappeared, but the wrapper remains. There is something moving about that. A perishable object survives while the food it once held is gone. In that sense, the wrapper becomes a kind of afterlife in its own right.
Funeral biscuits were more than simple refreshments. They were portable, easy to distribute, and quietly powerful. Handed to mourners during or after the funeral, they created a tangible connection between the dead and the living. Sweet, small, and easily carried away, they occupied an unusual place in a context we often imagine as stern and joyless. Their sweetness offered comfort, familiarity, and perhaps even a brief grounding in the everyday at a time of loss.
We also talked about black sealing wax, used to close wrappers and invitations. That gesture of sealing and unsealing feels important. It introduces a threshold. To break the seal is to cross into mourning, to accept the ritual, and to allow grief to enter the body in a literal and symbolic way. Food here is not casual. It is controlled, formalised, and bound up with ritual.
One of the most striking parts of our conversation was the role of women in funerary hospitality. In some traditions, women walked before the coffin, distributing biscuits and wine to mourners. These women fed the living while escorting the dead. Their labour was practical, emotional, and communal, even when it passed without much comment. It reminds us how often care work, especially around death, has been gendered and made ordinary despite its profound importance.
Wine, too, played a significant role. Dan shared examples of funerals where mourners were given mulled wine or other drinks, sometimes in considerable quantities. Alcohol could offer comfort and social bonding, helping people tell stories, remember the dead, and endure the emotional intensity of the day. But it could also tip into disorder. In this way, funerary drink sits between solemnity and release, between ritual restraint and the unpredictability of human feeling.
We also explored the printed hymn verses that sometimes appeared on funeral wrappers. These texts reminded mourners of mortality while they consumed the biscuit itself. That pairing is extraordinary. To eat while reading words about bodily decay, human frailty, and the brevity of life creates an intimate moment of reflection. It also opens up a wider religious history, including echoes of the Eucharist in the taking and eating of biscuit and wine. Even where the original meaning may have faded, the structure of the act remains hauntingly familiar.
What stayed with me throughout this conversation is the idea that food becomes a bearer of identity and memory. The name of the deceased might be printed on the wrapper or attached to the gift. The mourner takes it away, consumes it, or perhaps keeps it. In doing so, they become a carrier of memory. Food is no longer only nourishment. It becomes prompt, relic, offering, and emotional technology.
As Dan explains, funerary dining has changed dramatically over time. Large public funeral feasts gradually gave way to smaller, more domestic gatherings: funeral teas, private meals, carefully managed hospitality. This shift reflects broader changes in attitudes to death, from communal and public mourning to increasingly private and restrained forms of grief. Yet food remains present throughout. Its forms change, but its function endures.
That, perhaps, is what I found most compelling in this episode. Food allows us to touch death without touching the body. It gives us a way of processing loss through action, taste, ritual, and shared experience. It reminds us that even in grief, the body still needs to eat, and that eating itself can become an act of remembrance.
And in true A Curious Appetite fashion, the conversation also took a wonderfully unexpected turn. Dan revealed that his favourite childhood food was Brussels sprouts, making him, I think, a true sprout rebel. We also talked about salted liquorice in Sweden, overlooked foods, and the pleasures of developing a taste for things others might dismiss.
This was a rich and thought provoking episode about mourning, memory, ritual, and the strange intimacy between food and death. If you have ever wondered what funerary biscuits, wine, hymn wrappers, and funeral tea can tell us about the living as much as the dead, I think you will enjoy this one.
On my Substack, paid subscribers can access an extra post exploring Henri Misson’s account of white mulled wine at funerals, and what it reveals about ritual, memory, and mourning.
Listen now to A Curious Appetite with Dr Alessandra Pino.
