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- Title:
- Restocking
- Description:
- Renaissance food preservation for naval voyages was limited to mostly dried, salted and dried, or brined foods. Replenishing fresh supplies including water was mandatory for survival. Fresh foods the circumnavigation crew found in the Philippines included some familiar to them like pigs and chickens. The domesticated varieties were usually prestige foods used in pagan rituals for thanksgiving and when requesting bountiful food, safe childbirth, and healing. The crew of mixed European ethnicities also found familiar fish, crab, goat, citruses, bananas, honey, salt, ginger, garlic, rice, millet, panicum and sorghum. Magellan and his Malay slave Enrique would have known the foods of Insular Southeast Asia. Pigafetta from Vicenza seems to have tried coconut for the first time. He wrote of its uses as wine, vinegar, oil, water, milk and a substitute for bread. Although rice was cooked in a clay pot above fire as in Spain, rice was also cooked in a bamboo tube placed under fire. He found cakes wrapped in leaves, some of rice and others of millet. One rice cake was called tinapay, according to him. Other foods he and his mates may have found unusual were bat meat, turtle eggs and tabon eggs. He heard about a delicacy called Laghan Snails found attached to the hearts of dead whales. Like explorers over the millennia and even today, the Armada’s crew had to eat whatever would keep them alive.
- Subjects:
- Philippines Antonio Pigafetta Laghan Snails
- Exhibition:
- Magellan Menu
- Source:
- Commemorative Coin
- Type:
- Image;Still Image
- Format:
- image/jpeg
Source
- Preferred Citation:
- "Restocking", Philippine Food History, Felice P. Sta. Maria
- Reference Link:
- felicepstamaria.net/items/coll007.html