The Acapulco-Manila Culinary Connection
I’ve just been reading Memories of Philippine Kitchens by Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan. It’s a simply wonderful book, heartfelt, informative and provocative.
Since I’ve been chatting with Amy on and off for years about the Acapulco-Manila connection, one of the things I was looking out for as I worked my way through the book were signs of this connection.
Three things leapt out at me.
(1) The sheer extent of the connection. Whether breads or bread-based dishes (pan de sal, ensaimada, empanadas), pork products (butifarras, chicharron, longaniza), sweets (leche flan, tocino del cielo, buñuelos de viento), or a miscellany of prepared main dishes (pochero or puchero, escabeche) the Spanish influence on Filipino cuisine is enormous.
(2) The transformation of many dishes to Filipino tastes (or sometimes the vestiges of earlier tastes from other parts of the Spanish-speaking world). The ensaimada more like a brioche than a contemporary Minorcan ensaimada, the chicharron of whole pig’s feet, the empanadas with new fillings.
(3) The near-total absence of specifically Mexican dishes. If we take two of the key Mexican techniques to be the nixtamalization of maize and the drying and rehydrating of chiles, we don’t seem to find either in the Philippines, at least not commonly. Food for thought.
This book is so full of hitherto-unavailable information, that I will be working through it in a number of posts.
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This reply is four years late but I just want to add that nixtamalization did arrive in the Philippines but it seems to have never gotten out of Luzon.
A simple breakfast meal called Binatóg (Metro Manila) that also goes by the following names: kinutil (Bulacan, Pampanga) pabitak (Bataan), kinabog (Rizal), buálaw (Cavite, Batangas).
The root word of kinutil is kutil, which is a reference to a specific processing in tanneries which uses lye water (pottasium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide) as an alkaline solution to clean the rawhide.
After the hardships of World War II when Binatóg was used as “rice extenders” it seems to have been relegated from breakfast meal to a mere snack and is rare food fare today.
I’m still curious about the etymology of Binatóg and supposes that its root word is “atog” which is an arcaic Tagalog word for excited, and probably a description of the puffy corn kernel.
It’s also amazing to know that there’s nothing similar to it in the Visayas which has been stereotyped as “corn eaters”.
http://goo.gl/PnTfZ