Grain of nostalgia: Honouring kakanin across the Philippines

My architect mother’s supplier of wooden window jalousies always brought suman sa ibos from Antipolo, white malagkit (sticky rice) wrapped in coconut fronds which were coloured yellow by using turmeric. It was eaten with matamis na bao, which a reader said was the wrong term to use because the bao (coconut shell) wasn’t sweetened but contained the sweet coconut jam. I didn’t care to correct what my family and many friends called it for ages. The best way to take suman sa ibos is to fry it crisp, drown it with lots of butter and matamis na bao.

In college, my friend who hails from Quezon province thought to educate this citified girl with how they do nilupak. He brought down from his hometown a wooden lusong and bayo (large wooden mortar and pestle), then proceeded to demonstrate pounding saba banana with coconut bits, some milk and sugar. He said sometimes rice instead of banana was used. Maybe he didn’t really have the recipe because I wasn’t impressed with the taste. But a better version was encountered years later in Infanta, also in Quezon, where the town cook demonstrated the binagkat. It’s made with pounded cassava and saba bananas, and cooked with coconut milk, butter or margarine and sugar. The people of Infanta use the phrase “Ta’y magbinagkat” as an invitation to “party”, to get together.

The next encounter with a lusong and bayo was in Sta Rita, Pampanga where my friend, Claude Tayag, invited me to a Christmas event featuring duman, the prized expensive young glutinous rice that grows only in that town. The duman, after it has been through the wooden mortar and pestle, is eaten with hot tsokolate drink or, for those who can afford it, made into bibingka or rice cake. It wasn’t only a gastronomic evening featuring old recipes of Pampanga but also a cultural one with Pampango songs including their own version of the national anthem rendered near the old Church. 

In Pavia, Iloilo, baye baye is also processed with a lusong and bayo, pounding young rice, coconut meat and sugar. It used to be that a young man courting a girl had to do the baye baye in the girl’s house and the old folks said they could tell through the young man’s pounding if he would make a good husband.

My father is Ilocano and most of what I know about northern cuisine came from him. Until, that is, we had to cover Ilocos for Food Magazine. Tupig, which are wrapped in banana leaves burnt from the cooking, was his favourite. It was made with fermented sticky rice, sugar, coconut milk and bits. But that was just one kakanin in a big basket laid before us to be photographed—triangular-shaped patupat, impaltao encased in bamboo strip pouches, sweetened rice balls of incalti, dudol (ground rice flour mixed with water) and sugarcane juice.

Malabon City is known for its sapin-sapin, the layered rice cake. The commercial version has it in different colours indicating distinct cakes made of ube (purple yam), white sticky rice, yellow corn and the reddish kutsinta. The market version will have all those but separate, and it’s up to the buyer to indicate what layers will go on top of the other. But in Bulacan, the sapin-sapin layers are all white since they are made with sticky rice and coconut milk, each layer cooked separately, one on top of the other—a tedious process that takes hours to do. 

Our ASEAN neighbours have their own version of sapin-sapin. Laos has khao pad sun, Vietnam the banh da lon, Myanmar the pashu mont, the nine-layer lapis sagu in Indonesia and kuih lapis of Malaysia and Singapore.

Bibingka is a catch-all name for a rice cake akin to the Western pancake. Cooked with charcoal fire under and above the mixture, it can be as small as the Leyte bibingkinita or the Iloilo bingka which has coconut strips, or as big as the Pagsanjan version that is something like 2 feet long in diameter and 2 inches thick. The Warays, however, have a different version called salukara done with ground rice instead of wheat flour, fried flat like a taco and folded twice when cooked. The salukara is hardly cooked today and so is terribly missed in Leyte and Samar. It is akin to the Thai roti.

When I was yet a budding food writer, my sister-in-law decided to also educate me on the different rice cakes, this time the elongated suman, to be found in their home province of Leyte. The purple rice is sweetened and so is called suman nga matamis. There is a white salty version called suman inasin. But those two can be combined with a clear demarcation line to indicate the half-sweet and half-salty portion that is called suman tinipa which means “cut in half ”. She also introduced suman made with millet, which was like birdseed, at least to me. That became my favourite. My next encounter with the millet suman was in Dumaguete where it is called budbud kabog. It has its own festival in Catmon, Cebu.

My sister-in-law is a fast worker when she makes suman latik which is glutinous rice treated with lye to give it a green hue. Unlike the suman latik in other regions, the shape is triangular and instead of banana leaves as wrapper, hagikhik (Phrynium sp.) leaves are used, which is common in many Visayas provinces. Then there is moron, not a good sounding name but excellent in taste because the ground glutinous rice is mixed with chocolate. But if you go to the downtown area where “bring-home” items can be bought, it’s usually binagol that is there, grated gabi mixed with coconut milk and sugar placed in a half coconut shell and cooked in the town of Dagami. The binagol maker grows the kind of gabi (taro) used around her house but is still careful to test each harvested tuber by wiping a part of it on the hand and if it itches, to discard the particular root crop. 

Going through the regions, one notices that there are many similar rice cakes but only called by different names. For example, what most of us know as bibingkang malagkit or biko, (sticky rice cooked in coconut milk and sugar or panocha / jaggery) is called sinukmani in Laguna. And you might hear someone ask, “Sinuklay mo na ba?”, that is really asking if the sinukmani is presentable. The best one tasted had within its sticky rice, candied kundol (wintermelon), adding a sweet crunchy texture to the smooth sticky rice.

My kakanin education continued in Mindanao, the second biggest island in our archipelago and is still a mystery to many of us.

In Cagayan de Oro, the best breakfast was at the Cogon market where one can have puto maya (steamed sweetened sticky rice) and sikwate (hot chocolate), the Cebuano terms used because it is the lingua franca of the people from the north of the country who have settled there. Then there is the binaki brought to the market from Bukidnon, steamed suman of corn.

But when going deeper into this second biggest island in the country, one encounters a diverse richness of rice cakes, especially from the Muslim indigenous people. The following are only a few of them encountered when reading the book Muslim Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago: A Current of Narratives.

More from Tatler: Tatler Dining presents Flavours of Martell year 2: Experience special set menus from February 1-28

The Maranao whose name means “people of the lake” referring to Lake Lanao, have dudul/dodol, made of sticky rice flour, coconut milk and brown sugar, packaged attractively in dried anahaw wrappers with coloured ribbons. The Sama of the Sulu Archipelago have the durian-flavoured sticky rice, the wadjet makadurian. The Tausug and Yakan of Jolo have putli mandi, sticky purple rice balls sprinkled with grated coconut and which a Tausug cook translated the name as “princess shower”.

While rice cakes are present throughout the meal to be eaten at any time, the most unusual if not fantastic way to present sweets, rice cakes and delicacies was done by the Yakans of Basilan. A hapag, a contraption of wood shaped into a pyramid, is employed. This is worn by the server who slips his turbaned head into the wide part at the lower end until his head rests at the base of the wooden plate container. The server dances around guests offering the pancake called panyalam, the sweetened noodle-shaped jah, the cookie hantak among others. The jah, especially, is tied to the wooden sticks comprising the apex of the pyramid.

The lumad or ethnolinguistic groups have their own delicacies. And one way to know what they are is during the Dayaw Festival. This is a gathering of the lumad where each group demonstrates its distinct culture, practices, dances and, yes, their cooking. One of those we attended had the B’laan of Davao del Sur in Southern Mindanao make a suman studded with chilli to pair with a beef dish called sapi.

A gift of inatata from Cabagan, Isabela, smallish suman presented all in a row, stoked my curiosity. My friend who gave those said that those were made by the Irayas who were the original settlers of northern Isabela. But since I wanted more information, she asked her parish priest, Fr Evan Cauan, to answer my request. He wrote that the Spanish friars described it in an 18th-century dictionary as “awful, uneatable, terrible food” contrary to my experience of such rich-tasting wonderful suman. The good priest also included how the Irayas still do their ancient practices in cooking the inatata—“reciting incantations, putting a little cross made of sticks close to the burning firewood and offering to the spirits the first produce”.

Information through essays about kakanin also came from the Doreen Gamboa Fernandez Food Writing Award, a contest which we had shepherded through 20 years. Kakanin was the subject matter in 2006 and the winning entries included the binallay con laro, a white rice cake and reddish sweet syrup cooked during Lent by the Ibanags, the ethnolinguistic group in Isabela, to symbolise Christ’s body and blood, the vanishing kakanin of Santolan in Pasig called antala, the tibok-tibok of Pampanga made of carabao’s milk and coconut milk, the tinungbo of Ilocos that is rice cooked in bamboo tubes during harvest as thanksgiving and the practice known as panagdadaton.

If, as many say, the kinds of adobo can be as plentiful as the islands in the country, the database of kakanin can be more overwhelming with each region, province and town, each indigenous group, cooking their own native cake versions. And those should include not only the ingredients and way of cooking but the shape, wrappers, the special events when those are cooked and served, cultural and traditional references like the inatata of Isabela. One winning DGF Award essay concentrated on how suman is wrapped, shaped like a bird by the Yakans and the rituals where it is offered.

To document all the kakanin in the country is such a daunting task. But it has to be done.

Kudos to whoever compiles a comprehensive list with references that are badly needed to complete our “culinary culture”.

NOW READ

Iai by Bruce Ricketts and Jae Pickrell: A deep-dive into the value of details

Special menus and gifts from top Chinese restaurants this Lunar New Year

Metiz closes for renovation and Automat switches to an à la carte menu