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- Title:
- Few Fusions
- Description:
- Father Medina’s first-person narratives help make the 50th-year mark of Philippine and Spanish interaction come to life. Native food vocabularies were still barely infused with Spanish and Hispano-American terms. As earlier series show, it was areas near or servicing Intramuros that were already incorporating some Spanish terms. Back in Panay, Medina’s co-Augustinian Fr. Mentrida gave examples of Chinese words for botanicals mixing. CABUGAO, large oranges, “may have been native or from China.” LUCBAN or UCBAN were small, sweet oranges “from China.” A curious entry is ARLAI, “a seed known and eaten instead of rice.” Was it adlai, a botanical said to be native to Southeast Asia? Three centuries later another Augustinian, Manuel Blanco, wrote that in Filipinas were two species of “Coix lachrima,”Job’s Tears or adlai: ACLAI that was not as hard as TIGBI. The former was eaten as a cooked grain. ARLAI could have been ACLAI. The Chinese picked large quantities of TIGBI from Pangasinan and Calamba, turning it into a flour that they sold. It was good for convalescents and those with delicate constitutions. Blanco may have been referring to what scientists call the soft-shelled “ma-yuen”and the hard-shelled “jobi. ”Today’s Filipino uses aclai and tigbi interchangeably. Food fusions were possible once foreign ingredients became commonly available. No one bothered to remember where the ingredients originated. They became Filipino once they started growing locally. What are some considerations for food fusions? An ingredient that substitutes for the typical one because the alternative grows better, is cheaper, tastes better, looks better, smells better, is more accessible than the “original”? The two can be twinned in a dish? The foreign or new ingredient is enforced by law or religion? Food history is about the considerations, too.
- Subjects:
- Oranges Grain Flour Food fusions
- Exhibition:
- Juan Medina 50
- Source:
- Detail, Chino de la Escolta. Ilustración Filipino. 1859-1860.
- Type:
- Image;Still Image
- Format:
- image/jpeg
Source
- Preferred Citation:
- "Few Fusions", Philippine Food History, Felice P. Sta. Maria
- Reference Link:
- felicepstamaria.net/items/coll126.html