Pinoy Food through the Eyes of a Brit

This is an e-mail forward somebody posted in his/her blog. Found it via Google!

Matter of Taste

By Matthew Sutherland

 

I have now been in this country for over six years, and consider

myself in most respects well assimilated. However, there is one key

step on the road to full assimilation, which I have yet to take, and

that's to eat BALUT.

 

The day any of you sees me eating balut, please call immigration and

ask them to issue me a Filipino passport. Because at that point there

will be no turning back. BALUT, for those still blissfully ignorant

non-Pinoys out there, is a fertilized duck egg. It is commonly sold

with salt in a piece of newspaper, much like English fish and chips,

by street vendors usually after dark, presumably so you can't see how

gross it is.

 

It's meant to be an aphrodisiac, although I can't imagine anything

more likely to dispel sexual desire than crunching on a partially

formed baby duck swimming in noxious fluid. The embryo in the egg

comes in varying stages of development, but basically it is not

considered macho to eat one without fully discernable feathers, beak,

and claws. Some say these crunchy bits are the best. Others prefer

just to drink the so-called 'soup', the vile, pungent liquid that

surrounds the aforementioned feathery fetus…excuse me; I have to go

and throw up now. I'll be back in a minute.

 

Food dominates the life of the Filipino. People here just love to eat.

 

They eat at least eight times a day. These eight official meals are

called, in order: breakfast, snacks, lunch, merienda, merienda cena,

dinner, bedtime snacks and no-one-saw-me- take-that- cookie-from- the-

fridge-so-it- doesn't-count.

 

The short gaps in between these mealtimes are spent eating Sky Flakes

from the open packet that sits on every desktop. You're never far from

food in the Philippines. If you doubt this, next time you're driving

home from work, try this game. See how long you can drive without

seeing food and I don't mean a distant restaurant, or a picture of

food. I mean a man on the sidewalk frying fish balls, or a man walking

through the traffic selling nuts or candy. I bet it's less than one

minute.

 

Here are some other things I've noticed about food in the Philippines:

 

Firstly, a meal is not a meal without rice - even breakfast. In the

UK, I could go a whole year without eating rice. Second, it's

impossible to drink without eating. A bottle of San Miguel just isn't

the same without gambas or beef tapa. Third, no one ventures more than

two paces from their house without baon (food in small container) and

a container of something cold to drink. You might as well ask a

Filipino to leave home without his pants on. And lastly, where I come

from, you eat with a knife and fork. Here, you eat with a spoon and

fork. You try eating rice swimming in fish sauce with a knife.

 

One really nice thing about Filipino food culture is that people

always ask you to SHARE their food. In my office, if you catch anyone

attacking their baon, they will always go, "Sir! KAIN TAYO!" ("Let's

eat!"). This confused me, until I realized that they didn't actually

expect me to sit down and start munching on their boneless bangus. In

fact, the polite response is something like, "No thanks, I just ate."

But the principle is sound - if you have food on your plate, you are

expected to share it, however hungry you are, with those who may be

even hungrier. I think that's great!

 

In fact, this is frequently even taken one step further. Many

Filipinos use "Have you eaten yet?" ("KUMAIN KA NA?") as a general

greeting, irrespective of time of day or location.

 

Some foreigners think Filipino food is fairly dull compared to other

Asian cuisines. Actually lots of it is very good: Spicy dishes like

Bicol Express (strange, a dish named after a train); anything cooked

with coconut milk; anything KINILAW; and anything ADOBO. And it's hard

to beat the sheer wanton, cholesterolic frenzy of a good old-fashioned

LECHON de leche (roast pig) feast. Dig a pit, light a fire, add 50

pounds of animal fat on a stick, and cook until crisp. Mmm, mmm…

you can actually feel your arteries constricting with each successive

mouthful.

 

I also share one key Pinoy trait —a sweet tooth. I am thus the only

foreigner I know who does not complain about sweet bread, sweet

burgers, sweet spaghetti, sweet banana ketchup, and so on. I am a man

who likes to put jam on his pizza. Try it!

 

It's the weird food you want to avoid. In addition to duck fetus in

the half-shell, items to avoid in the Philippines include pig's blood

soup (DINUGUAN); bull's testicle soup, the strangely-named "SOUP

NUMBER FIVE" (I dread to think what numbers one through four are);

and the ubiquitous, stinky shrimp paste, BAGOONG, and it's equally

stinky sister, PATIS. Filipinos are so addicted to these latter items

that they will even risk arrest or deportation trying to smuggle them

into countries like Australia and the USA, which wisely ban the

importation of items you can smell from more than 100 paces.

 

Then there's the small matter of the purple ice cream. I have never

been able to get my brain around eating purple food; the ubiquitous

UBE leaves me cold.

 

And lastly on the subject of weird food, beware: that KALDERETANG

KAMBING (goat) could well be KALDERETANG ASO (dog)…

 

The Filipino, of course, has a well-developed sense of food. Here's a

typical Pinoy food joke: "I'm on a seafood diet. "What's a seafood

diet?" "When I see food, I eat it!"

 

Filipinos also eat strange bits of animals — the feet, the head, the

guts, etc., usually barbecued on a stick. These have been given witty

names, like "ADIDAS" (chicken's feet); "KURBATA" (either just

chicken's neck, or "neck and thigh" as in "neck-tie"); "WALKMAN" (pigs

ears); "PAL" (chicken wings); "HELMET" (chicken head); "IUD" (chicken

intestines), and BETAMAX" (video-cassette- like blocks of animal

blood). Yum, yum. Bon appetit.

 

"A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches"– (Proverbs

22:1)

 

WHEN I arrived in the Philippines from the UK six years ago, one of

the first cultural differences to strike me was names. The subject has

provided a continuing source of amazement and amusement ever since.

 

The first unusual thing, from an English perspective, is that everyone

here has a nickname. In the staid and boring United Kingdom, we have

nicknames in kindergarten, but when we move into adulthood we tend, I

am glad to say, to lose them.

 

The second thing that struck me is that Philippine names for both

girls and boys tend to be what we in the UK would regard as

overbearingly cutesy for anyone over about five. Fifty-five-year- olds

colleague put it. Where I come from, a boy with a nickname like Boy

Blue or Honey Boy would be beaten to death at school by pre-adolescent

bullies, and never make it to adulthood. So, probably, would girls

with names like Babes, Lovely, Precious, Peachy or Apples. Yuk, ech

ech.

 

Here, however, no one bats an eyelid.

 

Then I noticed how many people have what I have come to call "door-bell

names".

 

These are nicknames that sound like -well, doorbells. There are

millions of them. Bing, Bong, Ding, and Dong are some of the more

common. They can be, and frequently are, used in even more

door-bell-like combinations such as Bing-Bong, Ding-Dong, Ting-Ting,

and so on. Even our newly appointed chief of police has a doorbell

name Ping. None of these doorbell names exist where I come from, and

hence sound unusually amusing to my untutored foreign ear.

 

Someone once told me that one of the Bings, when asked why he was

called Bing, replied, "because my brother is called Bong". Faultless

logic.

 

Dong, of course, is a particularly funny one for me, as where I come

from "dong" is a slang word for well; perhaps "talong" is the best

Tagalog equivalent.

 

Repeating names was another novelty to me, having never before

encountered people with names like Len-Len, Let-Let, Mai-Mai, or

Ning-Ning.

 

The secretary I inherited on my arrival had an unusual one: Leck-Leck.

 

Such names are then frequently further refined by using the "squared"

symbol, as in Len2 or Mai2. This had me very confused for a while.

 

Then there is the trend for parents to stick to a theme when naming

their children. This can be as simple as making them all begin with

the same letter, as in Jun, Jimmy, Janice, and Joy.

 

More imaginative parents shoot for more sophisticated forms of

assonance or rhyme, as in Biboy, Boboy, Buboy, Baboy (notice the names

get worse the more kids there are-best to be born early or you could

end up being a Baboy).

 

Even better, parents can create whole families of, say, desserts

(Apple Pie, Cherry Pie, Honey Pie) or flowers (Rose, Daffodil, Tulip).

The main advantage of such combinations is that they look great

painted across your trunk if you're a cab driver.

 

That's another thing I'd never seen before coming to Manila — taxis

with the driver's kids' names on the trunk.

 

Another whole eye-opening field for the foreign visitor is the

phenomenon of the "composite" name. This includes names like Jejomar

(for Jesus, Joseph and Mary), and the remarkable Luzviminda (for

Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, believe it or not).

 

That's a bit like me being called something like "Engscowani" (for

England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). Between you and me,

I'm glad I'm not.

 

And how could I forget to mention the fabulous concept of the randomly

inserted letter 'h'. Quite what this device is supposed to achieve, I

have not yet figured out, but I think it is designed to give a touch

of class to an otherwise only averagely weird name. It results in

creations like Jhun, Lhenn, Ghemma, and Jhimmy. Or how about Jhun-Jhun

(Jhun2)?

 

How boring to come from a country like the UK full of people with

names like John Smith. How wonderful to come from a country where

imagination and exoticism rule the world of names.

 

Even the towns here have weird names; my favorite is the unbelievably

named town of Sexmoan (ironically close to Olongapo and Angeles).

Where else in the world could that really be true?

 

Where else in the world could the head of the Church really be called

Cardinal Sin?

 

Where else but the Philippines!

 

Note: Philippines has a senator named Joker, and it is his legal name.