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- Title:
- Like the Peach
- Description:
- Pigafetta records Philippine edibles similar to those in other parts of insular Southeast Asia. He also notes some not included in his Philippine stories. One of them is Guava that he tasted in the Malucho islands. He describes it as tasting like peach. In Renaissance art, the peach symbolised purity; a rotten or half-eaten one meant a woman's reputation was compromised. Other foods specified by Pigafetta are almonds, sweet and tasty pomegranates, watermelons, wild cucumbers, gourds, and comulicai similar to a large cucumber. He made a vocabulary of "words spoken by Moro people in the area" (also called "A Malay Vocabulary") noting they had only been there for the last 50 years having pushed the indigenous peoples upland to where the clove trees grow wild. In central Philippines he listed as food "roots like turnips" but he had no word for them. In the vocabulary he calls them ubi. The word guave comes from guayaba, used in Spanish and likely from a Taino word as spoken in the Caribbean. It seems guava originated in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Carribean.
- Subjects:
- Antonio Pigafetta Malucho Islands guava
- Exhibition:
- Magellan Menu
- Source:
- BOY WITH A BASKET OF FRUIT. Attributed to Caravaggio. 1593, around 33 years after Pigafetta died. Galleria Borghese, Rome. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boy_with_a_Basket_of_Fruit-Caravaggio_(1593).jpg
- Type:
- Image;Still Image
- Format:
- image/png
Source
- Preferred Citation:
- "Like the Peach", Philippine Food History, Felice P. Sta. Maria
- Reference Link:
- felicepstamaria.net/items/coll033.html
Rights
- Rights:
- Public domain
- Standardized Rights:
- https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/