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- Title:
- Sweet Salt
- Description:
- During Bobadilla’s Philippine residence (1616-1648), he and other pioneering Spanish settlers could use honeys and native-made palm sugars. They probably rejoiced that Chinese traders annually brought what they hungered for: sugarcane sugar, once called “sweet salt” by Crusader-Knights who saw it for the first time. Sugarcane was known in ancient China but not till the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) was refining done. Around 727 Emperor Tai-Tsung sent a delegation to Magadha in India to learn how to turn sugarcane juice into much desired sugar crystals called “tang” in Chinese. From 766-779, a monk in Sichuan taught how to make rock sugar: boiling cane juice into a sticky liquid and letting it flow down a bamboo pipe into an urn where crystals formed. During the subsequent Sung Dynasty (960-1279) sugarcane became a top cash crop in Sichuan and the area from where Chinese workers in the Philippines came, Fukien. There were enough imported ingredients for Spanish to make some of their favourite homeland sweets: sugar, flour, olive oil, pork lard, almonds, raisins among others. But did they? Proof still needed. Natives outside Intramuros were still being converted to Catholicism, coaxed to live in a pueblo where a church would be built, and learn Spanish foods and customs.Two culinary systems for pleasing sweet desires were starting to meet. Priests and Chinese would bring in equipment from the New World and China to make sugarcane sugar during Bobadilla’s lifetime.
- Subjects:
- Palm sugar Sugarcane
- Exhibition:
- Diego Bob 1616
- Source:
- Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum). “Drawings of Plants from Moluccas,” c. 1805-1818. wikigallery.org
- Type:
- Image;Still Image
- Format:
- image/jpeg
Source
- Preferred Citation:
- "Sweet Salt", Philippine Food History, Felice P. Sta. Maria
- Reference Link:
- felicepstamaria.net/items/coll090.html