Essay: Puto-Bumbong, Bibingka, Salabat, atbp: The Filipino Christmas Table

Puto-Bumbong, Bibingka, Salabat, atbp: The Filipino Christmas Table

Doreen Fernandez as published in "Sarap:Essays on Philippine Food"

Rice Delicacy for Christmas

"I'm dreaming of a green Christmas," wrote a Filipina working at the United Nations in New York. In the midst of the snow and tinsel, the bright shop windows and the glittering trees of an American Christmas, she remembered the soft lantern light from a star-shaped parol, the nip in the air as one walked to the dawn misa de gallo, and especially the food: "It was not really the choir voices nor the whispered prayers of our elders that kept us awake. It was something else... the promise of the piping hot puto bumbong being prepared by the vendors along the way home that kept our spirits up, our appetites whetted, and hence, our senses disquieted. The sweet lavender rice sprouting out of little bamboo tubes, topped by a generous sprinkling of grated coconut meal and brown sugar, was part of our Christmas delight."

She was, of course, remembering the makeshift stalls that sprout like mushrooms the week the dawn masses begin. Along the streets leading to the churches, and especially in the patios-at Las Piňas, under an ancient tree lit by a galaxy of lanterns-are built lean-tos made from bamboo poles and roofed with old blankets or coconut leaves, with a dulang in front serving as counter. From them cooking smells tantalize the churchgoers and render children impatient to get through mass.

Not only is there puto bumbong made from violet-colored pirutung rice, but also bibingka, flat and soft and fragrant in banana leaves a mite singed by the charcoal fire above and below. Sometimes these have a bit of native cheese on them or a sliver of salted egg-but always they come with freshly grated coconut meat for sprinkling on the hot, moist and golden cake. With it is served a customary free cup of hot tea or salabat, ambrosia on a cold morning.

The above simbang gabi fare in the Tagalog provinces is echoed by the other rice cakes and dishes in other regions at Christmastime. It is asif our forebears, dependent on rice as staple and base and year-round pampabigat sa tiyan, gratefully gave it primacy of place in the celebration of native Christmas. Thus, just as breads mark Christmas for the German, pudding for the Englishman, and cakes like Buche de Noel and Gateaux des Rois for the Frenchman, so rice cakes signify Christmas for the Filipino.

In Pampanga, for example, the region acknowledged to have some of the richest gastronomic traditions, the Christmas week specialties include putong sulot and especially putong lusong eaten with panara. Putong lusong is a white, anise-flavored cake cut in thick trapezoidal wedges; panara is a little pasty filled with grated upo or green papaya sauteed with garlic, chopped onion, cooked pork and shrimp, and seasoned with salt and plenty of black pepper. This is wrapped like a turnover in a dough of galapong,anisado wine and achuete, then fried in hot fat in a large kawali right in front of the buyer. It comes sizzling out of the pan and is laid on banana leaf-covered tables to cool.

"They were hot!" remembered the late Enriqueta David Perez (author of the excellent, long-running cookbook Recipes of the Philippines)." Yet one could hardly wait to pick them up. So I would take two pieces of puto and use them to pick up my panara.The puto would take two pieces of puto and use them to pick up my panara, The puto would also serve to absorb some of the oil. The combination was perfect: the hot, peppery panara, the soft white puto and a little grated coconut making juice on the tongue. And the tea with pandan and no sugar- hot and fragrant."

Cebuanos, novelist Lina Espina Moor recounted, call the predawn breakfast painit (since it literally warms one up). It traditionally features hot, sticky chocolate, potomaya (malagkit cooked with coconut milk), suman bodbod (sweetened malagkit cooked in coconut leaves), biko (sweetened malagkit molded on a plate) and bibingka.

Sanirose Singson Orbeta, born and bred in Vigan, remembers that an important part of her Christmas was the preparation of tinubong, also from rice. A half-cooked puto mixture would be poured into a long bamboo tubes and left to cook on coals while the whole town went off to midnight mass. When they returned, the coals would be dying down, the bamboo charred and the tinubong cooked. The long tubes were then cut and distributed among the family. The lazy (to cook) could buy them at stores in 10-centavo (pre-1950s prices), 20-centavo and even 50-centavo (for the greedy) lengths. For Sanirose the sound that brings back Vigan media noches is the cracking of hot, charred bamboo tubes in hands eager to get at the food of Christmas.

In Laoag, Ilocos Norte, on the other hand, the traditional delicacy is tupig. Writer Benjamin Pascual, in a piece written for the old Sunday Times Magazine, remembers that the whole town would prepare it "or risk the wrath of the children." Preparations would start before daybreak on December 24, and children would wake up to the sound of the townswomen pulverizing the malagkit : "the rhythmic thuds of thousands of wooden pestles against thousands of mortars in the town became one huge throb of gaiety... we youngsters sat on our haunches to watch the alternately bobbing women. Our purring cats made warm cushions on our laps."*

This variety of puto was flavored with molasses, which had been stored in cans long before the holiday season. 'When the can was not closed tight, lizards burglarized it and feasted and then drowned on sweetness.. The upper layer of molasses thus had to be scooped off, and this task fell to us children. For all the exertions of plunging a crowbar into the asphalt-tough molasses, we enjoyed the work because we were free to sample the sweet..."

The next step was the grating of coconut to be mixed with the dough, and here again the children involved themselves, "riding" the coconut graters carved from tree trunks and shaped like horses, dogs or even alligators. The coconut-mixed dough was next wrapped in layers of dark green, mature banana leaves, and cooked by burying them in a huge mound of burning rice chaff, a community oven for several neighbors. "The virtue of rice chaff is that it does not burst into flames, but smolders in a leisurely way," such that the tupig bakes unhurriedly and evenly as in an oven.

Besides the tupig, a Laoag media noche would include patupat or tinapet, also rice delicacies, this time wrapped in pyramidal fashion in the young, lemon-yellow shoots of the banana plant. (In other towns coconut fronds are used).

Many other varieties of puto, suman and bibingka exist around the islands, among them putong puti, which in its modern version uses baking powder; putong pula, sweet with brown sugar; kutsinta colored with lye; rich suman with a thick topping of latik; kutsinta colored with lye; rich suman with a thick topping of latik; "poverty" suman with but a hint of coconut milk and sugar; suman  to be rolled in sugar, or dipped in coconut, or fried, or rolled in leaves, or folded in leaves, or sliced. And of course there are all the other kakanin for which each region, even each town, has its own names and its own Christmas memories.

Still another rice-based Christmas delicacy is the Filipino tamales, which is quite different from the Mexican variety, being made basically of rice, coconut milk, achuete and ground toasted peanuts, with slices of pork, chicken, duck, shrimp, ham, etc.,depending on region, availability and budget of the maker. A Cebuana remembers tamales of two kinds;one sweet and one pepper hot, both wrapped in layers of banana leaf and those of Sorsogon are said to take three days to make. Those who have them as part of their Christmas memories seek them in vain in the streets and foodshops of the big city.

Although this plethora of rice cakes forms the basis of our Christmas fare, other dishes drawn from the Chinese, Spanish and American influences on our food culture have become  traditional too- to families, to regions. This is because the centrality and grandeur of the feast make it imperative to have something special, and "special" is determined both by the culture and by the individual taste. An informant from a poor Sorsogon barrio told us, for example, that her family ate fish all year round and had pork adobo once in the year, for the media noche. The next days, it was "isda na naman".

Lunch and Desserts Foods

“Special” for many are the Spanish dishes that have become traditional fiesta fare. For Enriquetta Guerrero clan, it was cocido. “Oh, I hardly wait for the Mass to be over,” she told us in that long-ago interview, “so that we could have the cocido. It was the usual old-fashioned recipe, with jamon China, chorizo de Bilbao,morcilla, beef kenchi with marrow bone, chicken, pork, cabbage, pechay, carrots, potatoes, onion, tomato sauce and a thick broth- and served with eggplant sauce.”

     Leni Guerrero of the Ermita Guerrero clan, whose French mother added richly to their Christmas traditions, remembers their customary galantine and relleno, the latter a fat capon stuffed with an assortment of riches, including, in the old days, foie gras, truffles, ground pork, olives, imported pork sausages, Spanish sausages, and such other luxuries. A Pampanga family known for its cooking liked fat nilagang manok for its media noche, the chicken especially fattened and readied for the feast. A Nueva Ecija family had pesang manok; one Negros family always had lechon stuffed with tanglad.  How central lechon can be to many a family feast is shown by the near-riot at ELAR lechon office when the machine turning over the rows of lechon spits broke down. The pigs had to be roasted in Montalban and were delayed and hundreds crowded the office on Christmas Eve clamoring for their festal lechon, or for their regales for compadres, ninongs and relatives.

           Almost everyone used to have jamon en dulce, obviously another tradition inherited from Spain. This used to be imported salted Chinese ham (also called jamon Pina, or jamon en funda, because it would come in cloth sack), cooked in sugar, white wine, beer, pineapple juice and fragrant spices-notably cloves-with a crisp, shiny sugar glaze seared in by a hot sianse. Local and homemade hams now fill in for the imported type, but most Filipinos of medium and high income levels cannot think of Christmas even now without remembering rosy red slices of ham, with their translucent strips of fat topped by a thick and delicious sugar layer.

Besides these, there were usually acharas of all kinds, sweetly pickled young papayas and other vegetables cut into flowers, stars, (and/or) butterflies. And wilderness of desserts: more suman of various persuasions; quivering leche flan fragrant with dayap, macapuno en dulce in pale, translucent strands; santol strands; santol preserves with that sweet sourness that the Filipino palate cannot resist; preserved citrus fruit peel; pastillas in wrappers with cutout designs and mottoes like "Recuerdo" and glass jars, thickly and sweetly purple; and whatever other specialties mothers, aunts and grandmothers- all of them long on time and patience-were known for.

There were, further, imported delicacies that used to appear only at Christmas time: fragrant apples and Mandarin oranges; walnuts, pecans and Brazil nuts; brown, sticky castañas; bunches of grapes fresh from their sawdust; and turrones de jijona and turrones de alicante. The turrones came from Spain in flat, round tins or in wooden boxes that were a ritual to open. They were so hard that they had to be hacked on a wooden cutting board with a very dull knife and were given out in thin slivers and slices, hard enough to break one's teeth. But they were delicious, a mixture of honey and almonds covered with a paper-thin wafer like a communion hostia, seemingly made for Christmas and for no other season. All the above are still available, but at astronomical prices, making them part of the Christmas only of the nostalgic elite, and not of the majority.

Breakfast on Christmas Day usually featured Spanish-style chocolate: hot and thick ("Chocolate E" for espeso) if one could afford it; thin and watery ("Chocolate A" for aguado) if one's budget was cramped. With this rich, savory drink were usually served slices of queso de bola- hard, cream-colored Edam cheese that came in cans-and ensaimadas, whose sweet light dough and butter-sugar-cheese topping make the expatriate Filipino wax nostalgic, since they go so perfectly with the saltiness of the cheese and the heavy sweetness of the chocolate.

Noche Buena (Christmas) and Media Noche (New Year) 

Writer and gourmet E. Aguilar Cruz believes that the media noche is the most important part of the urban Filipino's Christmas, but that for the rural Filipino it is the Christmas Day breakfast and luncheon. Christmas Day used to be the time to visit relatives and godparents, to give the ritual greetings (kiss on the hand, or hand on the forehead), and receive gifts of money, sweets, toys, or religious objects.

Writer Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil remembers going to visit, in a bygone Ermita, aunts in whose homes were laid out "an assortment of sweetmeats, some brought from Bulacan and Pampanga and even Spain and America,but mostly prepared in their own family kitchen. There were towering castillo (veritable monuments of candied pastry), pastillas wrapped in decorated tissue paper, newly wrapped tamales and all manner of candies and bonbons. These were pressed upon us with great insistence..."

This was the day the dulces de Magalang would appear, Abe Cruz remembers- those many-splendored sweets from Magalang, Pampanga. It was also the day aunts and mothers trotted out the Brazo de la Reina, a meringue roll with a syrupy egg yolk and butter filling; tocino del cielo, tiny and wickedly rich caramel custards in miniature cups; meringue sweets that were chewy inside and crisp outside and "wrapped in paper, " my father remembered,"only at Christmas time." The Ilocos homes might have instead abrillantados, crystallized colored coconut candy rolled in fine white sugar.Other regions or families had kalamay, or pinipig pudding, or yemas.

The Christmas noonday meal, which may be taken with immediate family or with one's grandparents, or with the oldest of the clan, depending on familial custom, differs widely in different regions. It might be pinapaitan in Abra (a peppery dish of goat variety meats); embutido or morcon in a Manila household; bam-i in a Cebuano home (chicken, pork, dried shrimp, mushrooms and two kinds of noodle; legend has it that only a Cebuano can cook it properly); pancit Molo in an Ilongo family; sincuchar (beef variety meats) or kilawin of goat meat in an Ilocano homes. In a poor household, it is whatever the budget could make available- the long-kept chicken, rarely seen pork, or the fish and rice of everyday. For the affluent, it is very often lechon. In urban homes,it is often American roast turkey or baked ham, German ginger-bread and almond stollen, French Buche de Noel.

Conclusion

The Filipino Christmas has adapted much from the foreign cultures that history has introduced into our lives. Just as Christmas cards and trees have joined the belen, villancicos like "Vamos Pastores" and the misa de gallo; just as blinking Christmas lights surround the star-shapped bamboo parol; so have turkey, cheese cake and rum puddings joined the native and Spanish dishes on the media noche table.

But, although our Christmases have Spanish and other foreign flavors, basic to it are the puto bumbong, bibingka and salabat in church courtyards, the suman and kutsinta at the family reunions, the taste of rice and of home, of which our Christmas memories are made.



Note
# My own headings not by Doreen Fernandez.
* I do still remember my Nanang did prepare it on our home. Every Christmas. Miss her already. Tupig laced with cheese anyone? And sesame seeds and coconut shreds. Always a favorite pasalubong for balikbayans. Nanang, hope to see you this January.