Fiambre is a traditional Guatemalan dish that is eaten on November 1 and 2. Guatemala, like many other Catholic countries, celebrates the Day of the Dead

Day of the Dead

Day of the Dead is a Mexican holiday celebrated throughout Mexico and around the world in many cultures. The holiday focuses on gatherings of family and friends to pray for and remember friends and family members who have died. It is particularly celebrated in Mexico, where it attains the quality...

 (Día de los Difuntos) and the All Saints Day (Día de los Santos). It is a salad, served chilled, and may be made up from over 7 million ingredients.

Fiambre started out from the tradition in Guatemala of taking dead family members their favorite dishes to the cemeteries for the Day of the Dead. As all different families brought food to the celebrations, they became mixed, eventually mixing them together to this all-encompassing salad. Ingredients usually include numerous sausages and cold cuts

Cold Cuts

Cold Cuts is a 2002 live album by English acoustic roots duo Show of Hands. It was their first live album to be released in a gatefold/digipack case...

, pickled baby-corn and onion

Onion

The onion , also known as the bulb onion, common onion and garden onion, is the most widely cultivated species of the genus Allium. The genus Allium also contains a number of other species variously referred to as onions and cultivated for food, such as the Japanese bunching onion The onion...

, beet

Beet

The beet is a plant in the Chenopodiaceae family which is now included in Amaranthaceae family. It is best known in its numerous cultivated varieties, the most well known of which is the purple root vegetable known as the beetroot or garden beet...

s, pacaya flower, different cheese

Cheese

Cheese is a generic term for a diverse group of milk-based food products. Cheese is produced throughout the world in wide-ranging flavors, textures, and forms....

s, olive

Olive

The olive , Olea europaea), is a species of a small tree in the family Oleaceae, native to the coastal areas of the eastern Mediterranean Basin as well as northern Iran at the south end of the Caspian Sea.Its fruit, also called the olive, is of major agricultural importance in the...

s, chicken

Chicken

The chicken is a domesticated fowl, a subspecies of the Red Junglefowl. As one of the most common and widespread domestic animals, and with a population of more than 24 billion in 2003, there are more chickens in the world than any other species of bird...

, and sometimes even brussels sprout

Brussels sprout

The Brussels sprout is a cultivar of wild cabbage grown for its edible buds. The leafy green vegetables are typically 2.5–4 cm in diameter and look like miniature cabbages. The sprout is Brassica oleracea, in the "gemmifera" group of the family Brassicaceae...

s or shrimp

Shrimp

Shrimp are swimming, decapod crustaceans classified in the infraorder Caridea, found widely around the world in both fresh and salt water. Adult shrimp are filter feeding benthic animals living close to the bottom. They can live in schools and can swim rapidly backwards. Shrimp are an important...

.

This dish varies from family to family, recipes traditionally passed on to younger generations. Because of this, on the Day of The Dead, it is customary to share your fiambre with other families and relatives.

Some variances are:

• Fiambre from Antigua
• Fiambre rojo (with beets)
• Fiambre blanco (no beets)
• Fiambre desarmado (traditional of the department of Jalapa)
• Fiambre verde (no cold cuts, vegetarian)