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| Classic Filipino Pork Empanada |
The Philippines is an archipelago comprising 7,107 islands with Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao as the major islands. It is rich and diverse in history and culture resulting in a wide range of food diversity. The Filipino people are a racial mix that emerged from the interracial marriages among our ancestors the Negritos, Malays, and Indonesians. Trading activities with the Chinese, Arabs, and Indians brought their influence.
Ferdinand Magellan discovered the islands on March 17, 1521, and named them after King Philip II of Spain. Thus, the name Philippines. The Spanish colonization started in 1565 and Manila was established as the capital of the Spanish East Indies. The Philippines declared independence from Spain on June 12, 1898, and, in the Treaty of Paris, the country was ceded by Spain to the United States. The Philippines’ status changed from being a colony to a commonwealth in 1935 but its independence was interrupted by World War II with the invasion of the Japanese. American and Filipino troops defeated the Japanese force in 1944 and the United States granted the Philippines its independence on July 4, 1946 (based on the Tydings-McDuffie Act).
With its rich history and culture, Philippine cuisine evolved from its Malay roots to a cuisine with a predominant Spanish base due to the influences brought by a little more than 300 years of Spanish colonization. Filipino cuisine also bears Arabic, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and American influences as well. In some parts of the islands mainly in the south or the Southern Mindanao provinces where Hispanization did not or almost did not occur, the cuisine has more of the rich and spicy influences coming from Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia. It is noticeable there that the common ingredients include coconut milk, sambal, cumin, chili, curry, and tanglad, or what is called lemon grass in English.
The traditional Filipino main meals are the following: the agahan or what you call breakfast, the tanghalian, or what you call lunch, and the hapunan, or what you call dinner. Rice is the main staple food. It is commonly served as steamed. Leftover rice is most often fried, sinangag in the Filipino language, which is usually served for breakfast complemented either with tapa (Filipino-style jerky), tocino (sweetened cured meat), longganiza (sausages), or daing (salted dried fish). Philippines also has glutinous sticky rice or what we call malagkit in Filipino. Malagkit is usually used in making sweets, cakes, and other local pastries. Aside from rice, other crops are also used to produce bread and native cakes or puddings.
Philippine cuisine can be distinguished by the bold combination of sweet, sour, salty, and spicy flavors. The Filipino palate prefers a sudden influx of flavors. Food is often brought in single preparation and mealtime can easily transform into a simultaneous visual feast, a salo-salo. An unusual mixture of flavors in the form of counterpointing is also present in Philippine cuisine. It can be in the form of pairing sweet with salty, sour with salty, salty and spicy, or savory with sweet. These unlikely combinations of flavors with the right ensemble and touch, unusually do not go against each other but end up complementing each other resulting in a surprisingly pleasant combination. Hindi naglalaban ang lasa kundi naghahabulan sila. Like that Filipino original, the banana ketchup, may tamis-anghang na sarap!
