A little Christmas food mystery
This has always been a curious bread for me. For that matter, it’s more cake than bread and its name – sopas – can be confusing. How a bread or cake can be named for a thick, chunky soup is beyond me but it is how this delightful confection has been known for generations. It is one of the staples of Christmas in our town. How do we explain this mystery?

For the December edition of Lasang Pinoy, Mike over at lafang chose the theme Pinoy Christmas Around the World. Filipinos are known to pull all stops when celebrating and this is all the more apparent during the Christmas season. The nine-day Novena Masses formally prepare us for the day itself but the common practice is, our holiday season begins in September, when households and even radio stations start playing Christmas carols. Manger scenes or what we call Belen and Christmas trees soon come out of storage. Read Mike’s announcement, which is a fitting summary of the Filipino Advent tradition. Mike asks Filipinos all over the world how they celebrate Christmas. For those of us in the country, we can talk about how we celebrate traditions that have been passed down through the ages. What an opportunity to discuss sopas!

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Hmmm… Close but not quite. My attempt at following a recipe to recreate a Filipino biscuit fell flat. I felt proud of my work after following Manny/Apicio’s directions to the letter. My gulgoria/gorgoria tasted very good, even if I say so myself, like dense cream puffs with a caramel coating. Nobody complained but apparently, they’re not the authentic biscuit they were meant to be. This I realised when I spied jars of gorgoria at the Likha ng Central Luzon Trade Fair last week.

Compared to my experimental batch, the store-bought gorgoria are drier, crispy-crumbly, just like what the recipe’s author said. They are more tightly-rolled, looking like univalves or snails rather than my bi-valves or oysters. Apparently, if I want my next batch of gorgoria to be as tight, I’ll have to significantly subtract from the amount of butter and milk then fry them till crisp.
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by Manny Soriano

The following entry is 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.

The hurricane that recently submerged the American gulf region has a particular vivid resonance for us Filipinos because the majority of us who have not left home live through the same fear and threat year in and year out. It seems that political leaderships everywhere are all alike in being blind, deaf and dumb to this never ever unforseeable disasters. In the coastal area of Tondo, the project that was designed to lessen the problem ended up aggravating it through corruption and bungling. Now they have flood all year round. How do our resilient people cope and survive, go on with their lives and rebuild? The only patch left to them for refuge is dangerously sloped and rather slippery at that.

You hear talk of the ruinous effects of global warming getting louder each year. That there is going to be stronger hurricanes, that more frequent floods will marinate more low-lying areas. But shall we claim that we have already been living through all these grim conditions in the last two centuries for which we have written account? The Spaniards summed up our climate as “cuatro meses de polvo, cuatro meses de lodo, cuatro meses de todo.” That adds up to two-thirds of the year being wet season. So apt then of Bino Realuyo to call his coming-of-age novel “Umbrella Country” or of our great painters invariably depicting Habagat (Monsoon) as a dark and sullen giant.
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