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- Title:
- Culinary Adjustments
- Description:
- When Bobadilla and his 41 recruits arrived from Acapulco in 1643 they had to go overland to Manila from Lampon (Quezon Province) where the boat landed. 100 porters arrived with Fr. Ignacio Mujica to meet them. With 8 litters for the sick, they walked up and down slippery rain-washed trails through the Sierra Madre till they reached Bai Lake. At one descent, 11,000 steps were cut into the path. At Pangil village on the lakeshore, a lay brother awaited them with a “hot meal of enormous proportion,” Horacio de la Costa, SJ recounts in the history of his order published by Harvard University Press in 1961. The alcalde mayor provided boats that sailed them from the lake down Pasig River to the Walled City where bells pealed in welcome. Recruits adjusted to their new island home and its customs. They learned not to fear the foreign. There was local bread made from Japanese flour at the capital. At their assigned rural stations they ate rice like those they sought to make fine Christians: using their fingers. In the first 100 years of mission work, fervent piety ignited men like Bobadilla. This is the last of culinary vignettes based on his documents. We tend to judge historical events forgetting that attitudes change from one era to another. How well did an era display the best of humanity? Did the Jesuits and missionaries of other orders exemplify a new ideal model for natives to desire for themselves? Did the new Christian food customs make sense to Filipinos? (A new food history series will start after Easter Sunday.)
- Subjects:
- Diego Bobadilla Ignacio Mujica Horacio de la Costa Voyages and travels
- Exhibition:
- Diego Bob 1616
- Source:
- St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), co-founder of the Society of Jesus and its first Supervisor. By Peter Paul Rubens, 1620-1622. Collection: Norton Simon Art Foundation
- Type:
- Image;Still Image
- Format:
- image/jpeg
Source
- Preferred Citation:
- "Culinary Adjustments", Philippine Food History, Felice P. Sta. Maria
- Reference Link:
- felicepstamaria.net/items/coll097.html