Sticks & Stones      Resil B. Mojares
 
 

I am stranded somewhere between the ordinary and the adventurous.

Talk about food. I have friends who can speak of the rare gastronomic qualities of meals they have had - pickled iguana, fried locusts, mole crickets, sea urchins, and stuffed frog. I can only imagine what I’ve been missing.

I’m not a great eater, I can’t cook, and I can’t tell whether the fish I’m eating is mackerel or mullet. Yet, I’ve always been fascinated by food. When in a new city, I love to lunch with the locals in streetside stalls. Visiting a barrio for the first time, I gravitate towards the local market to gawk at what vegetables or meat are on sale. Food is so primary that to learn about what people eat, to eat what they eat, is to make a connection in a way most elementary (or alimentary, if you will). There is more than one kind of hunger which eating satisfies. You “eat places” when you partake of local food while traveling or on the road. It is not just calories but culture which you ingest.

When friends regale me with tales of eating a great dish of asocena in the Cordillera or black tinola in Jolo, I can’t help but think of realms of local experience I have not quite travelled (or devoured).

I pride myself in having more-or-less adventurous tastes. After all, I count papait (goat’s skin and innards, with bitter sauce from bile, laced with pepper and ginger) as a favorite dish, and, as a child, was completely enamored with the tamilok (mangrove worms) what were a delicacy in the town where I grew up. Yet, I am obviously a hundred meals away from being a connoisseur of the exotic.

The only time I had dog meat was when , in the course of a research trip, I spent a weekend in a mountain barrio in Bohol. My companion, an Ilocano, was such a dog-meat aficionado that the first thing he did when we arrived in the barrio was to send someone to scour the hills for a dog we could buy. It was such a small impoverished village that the best our man could come up with was an old, mangy creature that looked like it had been feeding on the most miserly scraps all its life. Then, I had to stand by and watched it butchered, quartered, and chopped to tiny pieces. It was an exercise of will to take a few bites of the strong, leathery kilawin. And it was not exactly a culinary high. With his hunger and my curiosity, my friend and I must have seemed a pretty desperate pair.

It was thus that, weeks ago, seized by a sudden craving not just for food but a missed education, I decided to sample something of the offbeat in the city’s street food.

Friends and I hied off to Oscar’s, a popular kandingan in Panganiban, where we ordered kaldereta (a thick stew of goat’s meat) and paklay (goat’s skin, liver, and lungs), food best taken with corn meal (which has a roughness that soaks up the juices, and sits nicely - manggunit, so it’s said - in the stomach). The piece de resistance at Oscar’s, however, is goat’s head, kaldereta-style. The place cooks 53 heads a day, a veritable herd (filling a monstrous cooking pot brimming), and the dish is so popular that all 53 heads are usually consumed in five or six hours (between one a seven p.m.). You order one whole head, a single serving (priced between P23 and P35, according to size), pick it clean of meat, and then somebody with a bolo comes along to chop your head open (the goat’s, not yours) so you can get at the juiciest portions of eyes, tongue, and brain. It’s an extremely rich meal, cooked to delicious tenderness, although my friend, a gourmet of goat, observes that Oscar’s cooks goat a bit too much on the sweet side.

Then, there is  a nameless carenderia on Pelaez street, small, cramped, and dusty but with a cook who obviously knows his or her trade (which cannot be said of most eateries catering to students in the downtown university area). The place has cheap and generous servings of standards fare like humba (pork stew), balbacoa (beeflegs), and tinola (fish soup with tomatoes and onion leaves). The tastiest dishes, however, are ubod indong (Moray eel) and pagi (sting ray) cut into bite pieces and stewed in thick coconut milk. Curious about lansiao from the signs of curbside eateries advertising that they serve it (Lansiao for Strength and Stability), I ordered the dish as well on my first visit to the carenderia. It is a dish of bull’s genitals (which is what the word , a borrowing from Chinese, means)., chopped to tiny pieces, cooked in tomato sauce spiked with Chinese herbs. Finding it sticky and pungent (and vaguely obscene), I pampered myself with the thought that, after all, I’m having an anatomical portion which is a rather rare and pricey dish in some restaurants in the United States, where it’s called “Rocky Mountain Oysters,” and France, where it goes by the name “Bull’s Pride” (though my lunch partner quickly adds: “Not anymore”).

Then there’s Pasil, a great place for lovers of street food. We went to Esmin’s near the corner of Luis Flores and Tupas. Though it was not yet high noon, the place had ran out of its main draw, pawikan (sea turtles). A missed opportunity (though I properly consoled myself that, at least this time, I would not be contributing to the extermination of an endangered species). We feasted on several steaming bowls of  tadlungan (shark) and kiampao (skate) soup, fried shrimp cakes, deep-fried pork innards (kinupusan), and plates of fine-grade corn. A sinfully delicious meal for four famished persons (three Filipinos and a Frenchman) and it all cost us only a little over a hundred pesos.

It’s not just food. Eating in places like Esmin’s one rediscovers something of  the primitive pleasures of eating, and basks, as well in a kind of male bonding (since the clientele of these places is almost exclusively male). One does not go to carenderias like these in order to linger over one’s plate, sip a drink, and engage in genteel conversation. You sit on stools and benches, warding off flies and visions of rats scurrying between your feet, assailed by street noise and the smoke from cooking  cauldrons. These are not places for ambience (at least not the kind these pretentious word conjures). You go in, dig into your food, and get out. There is a certain kind of raw energy to it all, and between you and the other customers that kind of  “Beer-na-Beer” comradeship you won’t find if your dining at Europa’s or Don Sergio’s.

Obviously, I am sentimen-talizing. Or, worse, I may be guilty of the dishonesties of slumming. You can wax lyrical over lansiao if, afterwards, you can escape to an airconditioned restaurant and wash the taste down with a postprandial cup of brewed Colombian coffee. The fact is that one person’s exotica may be another person’s common-place. Or, worse, the poor man’s daily dose of poison.

Indeed, there is another story to tell. To savor street food is also to learn something about which there is nothing, at all, exotic - poverty. Such species as shark, sting ray, goat, or dog, and such portions as genitals, head, feet, blood and intestines, have a common denominator. They are cheap meat, reject or scraps of such low market valuethey are not even sold at public markets. It’s not only aesthetics, it’s also a matter of health. The rich shall dine on the lean, prime cuts. The rest of us make do with what is left over, high-cholesterol brain, lungs, intestines, and spleen. Now, that’s difficult to romanticize.

You can’t put people down, however. At its best, street food is also a celebration of creativity. Left with scraps, one has to be quite inventive to turn them into something pleasing to the palate. (For this reason, one doesn’t find such dishes medium-rare or lightly-steamed but highly cultured, heavy with spices and sauces.) Partakers of such food have no illusions about what they eat. Food jokes as well as the names people gave to such dishes (cylinder head for goat’s head, flying kick for goat’s feet, or names like adidas, walkman, and the like) all exhibit that wry, ironic humor with which the poor lighten the monotonies of necessity. Such language is an incipient form of social criticism.

I went in search of the unfamiliar and ended with some very old truths. Yet, I am strangely filled. For the richness of its associations, for sheer gastronomic delight, I would not exchange a steaming bowl of  kiampao at Esmin’s for a Big Mac at McDonalds.*
 

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