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- Title:
- By 1610
- Description:
- Flora and fauna introduced during Spanish times, in order to become popular, would need to be accessible regularly (growing locally or imported), able to combine with existing ingredients, provide a substitute when pre-colonial ingredients were unavailable, and be favored by native tastebuds. What follows is a sampling of Insular Southeast Asian ingredients up to 1610 used in Filipino native cuisine. Surely there were more than those on the list, some with and others without historical mention. First written citations are significant: coconut, 1225, Mindoro with mention of the botanical’s uses first specified in other written sources later; honey, 1515, Luzon; onion, 1225, Mindoro but the type is unidentified and it was definitely not Bombay Onion; rice wine, 1349, Mindanao; sweet potato, 1225, Mindoro but the identity of the tuber is unknown and it likely was not a sweet potato; sugarcane and sugarcane wine, 1349 (the wine was not used in Mindanao, however and there was yet no sugar refining so sugarcane was sucked for its sweet juice). While rice was growing surely in Philippine areas, none of the sources used for this group cite it. The first circumnavigation reached the Philippines in 1521. Its written narrative includes items in Part A and offers initial evidence that the following were also part of native food in central and southern islands of the archipelago. Some were cultivated while others were foraged and hunted: baghin gourd, banana of many varieties, bat, chicken, chicken egg, coconut (meat, oil, vinegar, water, wine), crab, dorado, dove, emaluan fish, garlic, ginger, goat, laghan sea snail, lemon of native variety, millet, nipa wine, orange of native variety, oyster, panapsapan multicolored fish, panicum, pilax fish, rice, salt, sorghum, swine, tabon egg, timuan red fish, tuber resembling turnip in taste, turtle dove, turtle egg, water, wild boar. Note that coconut vinegar is the first native vinegar recorded historically. There being nipa wine, there was likely nipa vinegar too but it is not specified.
- Subjects:
- Southeast Asia Ingredients
- Exhibition:
- 100 Philippine Food
- Source:
- Photo by FSM
- Type:
- Image;Still Image
- Format:
- image/jpeg
Source
- Preferred Citation:
- "By 1610", Philippine Food History, Felice P. Sta. Maria
- Reference Link:
- felicepstamaria.net/items/coll130.html