Everyone is invited!

I wrote about last year’s Duman Festival on this blog. This year, I’m making good on my promise to document the process of bringing it from the field to the table. In fact, I was out taking pictures of the lacatan malutu (red-husked glutinous rice plants) yesterday, with two of Arti Sta. Rita’s writing staff comparing common rice leaves and stalks with those of the lacatan. Most of the documentation will be on the Duman Festival website (online but still under construction).

Come join us. I hope it becomes a food bloggers’ and friends’ meet-up in a provincial setting. It only takes an hour by car from Mandaluyong or an hour and a half if commuting by bus. Sta. Rita is 15 minutes away from the San Fernando exit. Here’s a map to the festival venue.

In an attempt to efficiently enforce taxation, on 21 November 1849, the Spanish Governor General Narciso Clavería ordered a systematic distribution of surnames for the native population. Names from the Catalogo Alfabetico de Apellidos were assigned to families in all towns. The distribution was in alphabetical order and caused some small towns with only a few families to end up with all names starting with the same letter.

To the outside world, Filipinos may seem to be almost Hispanic, with surnames, food and other legacies of the 333 years of Spanish rule. But there is more than meets the eye, something more complex. A cursory glance at something as plebeian as our streetfood is already an indication. Take for example our tamales. It has a deceptively Mexican name but its essence can only be Filipino.
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by Manny Soriano

For this month’s Lasang Pinoy, I am glad to once again host an entry contributed by a Filipino-Canadian food and music enthusiast. He was born and educated in the Philippines and migrated to Canada in 1971. His mother was an excellent and practical pastry and savoury cook who operated a hotel with his father who was a coffee and cigar connoisseur. Manny started baking in highschool and worked as an accountant till 1999. He took baking courses since 1990 and opened a Filipino pastry shop in the west end of Toronto in 2000.

If the movable feast aspect of our streets spoiled you, swelled your head and made you think streetfood is uniquely ours, think again. Walk along the cobbled streets of Salvador de Bahia and you will find rows of immaculately dressed ladies selling shrimp flavoured red fritters that once tasted transports you back a world away to Aleng Asyang’s okoy from just around the bend. Don’t even get me started with Mexico. In fact you can find streetfood just about anywhere the rational, sanitizing, regulatory mindset has not yet imposed its will upon people’s native sensibilities. In neighbouring countries justly celebrated for their streetfood, totalitarian obsession for civic tidyness has now began to rear its head, this time to compel hawkers to toe the line and gather under the watched-over roof of food courts. A really foolish if not impoverished trade-off for the freedom, surprise and serendipity of traditional streetfood scenes, if you ask me. Besides, the allure of streetfood is discovering it right there and consuming it right then, with as little delay as possible and certainly without having to detour first to an officially designated concentration centre. You see, we are all impulsive four-year-olds when it comes to food. We want it when we want it. Satisfying this urgent need is streetfood’s primal appeal.
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