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- Title:
- Cooking Camote 400 Years Ago
- Description:
- Bobadilla in the early 1600s just like Pigafetta in 1521 records that rootcrops were eaten. He lists 4 cultivated ones. CAMOTE is a sweet potato, Ipomomea batatas. He writes it is the “potatoes of Spain” eaten by colonised and colonisers alike. There is APARI that a 19th-century source describes as white inside, nicely flavoured and called BARIBARAN in Borongan, Samar. UBI is an edible root characterised by a 1613 source as a hand-span or longer and white. A fourth kind was LAQUI. “Mountains furnish roots from which [natives] draw their most usual nourishment,” he added. One was PUGAIAN and the other COROT (Dioscorea triphylla or pentaphylla L.), a yam. Wild tubers were famine food, fallback when cultivated crops failed. Camote was often used as a generic term for all tubers, whatever their genus. How was camote cooked during Bobadilla’s time? He doesn’t say, however a few years before he arrived there is a document. LABON meant cooking a large quantity of tubers or meat. If it was a small amount of tubers it was as LAGA, in the juice or syrup of sugarcane (or likely plain water also). Cooking tubers in water was also called CQISA (gisa) but not referring to today’s stir-frying or complex stewing. Gisa then meant to cook rice, to make SAING that was done by cooking rice (or in this case, tuber) in water. Bobadilla has left insights into heritage cooking. Rootcrops remain healthy substitutes for emergencies and last long if stored properly.
- Subjects:
- Root crops Camote Sweet potato
- Exhibition:
- Diego Bob 1616
- Source:
- Dioscorea alata. (Ube and ubi in the Philippines.) The image is of Sri Lanka tuber. From Bihrmann’s CAUDICIFORMS.
- Type:
- Image;Still Image
- Format:
- image/jpeg
Source
- Preferred Citation:
- "Cooking Camote 400 Years Ago", Philippine Food History, Felice P. Sta. Maria
- Reference Link:
- felicepstamaria.net/items/coll091.html