Why Sinigang?

Doreen G. Fernandez
(1) Rather than the overworked adobo (mislabeled “Philippine stew” in foreign cookbooks), sinigang
seems to me the dish most representative of Filipino tastes. We like the lightly boiled, the slightly
soured, the dish that includes meat (or fish or shrimp), vegetables and broth. It is adaptable to all
tastes (if you don’t like shrimp, then bangus, or pork), to all classes and budget (even ayungin,
sold in humble little piles, find their way into the pot), to seasons and availability (walang talong,
mahal ang gabi? Kangkong na lang!)
(2) But why? Why does sinigang find its way to base dulang, to brightly-varnished poblacion table, to
marble-topped buffet? Why does one like anything at all? How is a people’s taste shaped?
The Island Landscape
(3) Because of the anatomy of the Philippines – islands of all sizes through teeming seas – I suspect
that the pre-Hispanic Filipino turned first to the sea (rather than to the forest) for his food. From
this, perhaps, comes our liking for fish and seafood, and our wanting it absolutely fresh: hito
trashing in a pail, shrimp still jumping in the basket, crabs so actively alive that they nip thumbs
and have to be chased all over the kitchen. Most of us live near enough to sea or river or rice
paddy to be able to demand this freshness, from which evolved our cooking methods. The best
thing to do to food so fresh is to do as little as possible, not to mar its pristine quality, not to drown
it in sauces and spices. Thus, it may be eaten uncooked, like kilawing dilis or hipon. Thus too, the
simplest of cooking methods: halabos na hipon, paksiw na banak, inihaw na tulingan, sinigang na
bangus, and pasingaw. Gat, the cartoonist, tells us of a restaurant in Tondo where only steamed
(pasingaw) fish is served, with a secret-formula dipping sauce. (The sawsawan is obviously
necessary to such simple cooking). To it, fishermen brought their catches and in it fishermen-for-
a-pastime rubbed elbows with fishermen-for-a-living, dock workers, and journalist, all to have fish
purely steamed.
Rice
(4) But still, why soured? Could it be perhaps because the dish is meant to be eaten against the mild
background of rice? Easy to plant and harvest, and allowing of more than one crop a year, rice is
ubiquitous on the landscape. One can picture our ancestors settling down beside their rivers and
finally turning to the cultivation of fields, with rice as one of their first steady crops.
(5) Rice to us is more than basic cereal, for as background, it is also shaper of other foods, and of
tastes. We not only sour, but sale (daing, tuyo, bagoong) because the blandness of rice suggests
the desirability of sharp contrasts. Rice can be ground into flour and thus the proliferation of putos:
the mildly sweet putong polo; the banana-leaf-encased Manapla variety; puto filled with meat or
flavoured with ube; puto in cakes or wedges, white or brown, eaten with dinuguan or salabat.
(6) From rice flour too, comes bibingka, and just as breads mark Christmas for the German, and
puddings for the Englishman, so puto and bibingka mean Christmas for the Filipino. After the dawn
chill of the Misa de Gallo, one looks forward to emerging into a church patio redolent with tempting
smells of food cooking. There are the makeshift bibingka stands where the flat soft cakes cook in
fragrant banana leaves, sometimes sparked with a bit of native white cheese, or a sliver of salted
egg. Or else there are the lavender-colored puto bumbong or malagkit and pirurutung rice,
sprouting out of little bamboo tubes; or in Pampanga, the anise-flavored putong lusong to be eaten
with pipinghot panara; or the potomaya and suman bodbod, the biko and putong sulot.
(7) Rice, further, lends itself to sweetening, and thus the sumans of our fiestas – sa latik, sa lihiya,
wrapped in coconut or banana leaf, in slabs, in cylinders, in pyramids – such other kakanin as
tamales, maja blanca, sapin-sapin, espasol, kutsinta.
(8) Rice is also found in such other forms as kipping, the lovely edible decorations of the Quezon San
Isidro Labrador fiesta; buro, a relish of fermented rice mixed with fish and angkak; pinipig, which
is toasted and served with chocolate or halo-halo; or made into such dishes as the Visayan baye-
baye. We might add that rich washing, in traditional homes, is not thrown away, but used as the
broth for sinigang, and lovely broth it is too, slightly thick and malinamnam.
The Coconut
(9) Filipino memories are full of coconut-dreams; waving fancily-woven coconut fronds on a Palm
Sunday morning; weaving balls and hats out of the dark-green leaves; lazily stripping the leaf
midrib just for fun, to make walis tingting; husking a nut, grating the meat, squeezing out gata;
drinking buko water on a hot day and scraping out the translucent flesh; scrubbing a wide-planked
floor to a gleam with coconut husk in a graceful, slipping-sliding motion; biting on a piece of sweet,
crunchy ubud that just an hour before had been the heart of a tree; waking on a provincial morning
 to see out of the window the leaves of a whole grove languid in the breeze; listening to the tuba-
gatherer tapping away on a swaying tree-top.
(10) The coconut we have in common with other Asian lands and areas around the Pacific, and it has
been called “the Southwest Pacific’s one dietary constant.” In the Philippines, it finds use from its
birth to its death, one might say. From the sap, one gets tuba, which is drunk young and new, or
fermented and strong. The young nut, of course, is buko – the water drunk, the flesh nibbled, or
scraped and put into halo-halo, dessert, or main dish. The Quezon pinais is a succulent combination
of leaf-wrapped river shrimp and buko strips, simmered in buko water; the Visayan binakol has
chicken, ginger and buko strips simmered inthe nut itself.
(11) The mature nut yields the fresh grated meat indispensable to bibingka, puto bumbong, kutsinta.
Squeezed, it yields gata, and here we make distinctions between the cream (the first, thick milk)
and the “second” milk, because they are used differently in ginataang gulay (langka, kalabasa),
adobo sa gata, hipon sa gata, pinangat (that spicy Bicol dish with gabi and hot peppers), suman,
etc. Macapuno, that deviant nut, is of course candied, cooked in syrup, mixed into halo-halo or
sherbet.
(12) At “death” – for taking its heart means killing the tree – the coconut yields ubud for lumpia or
salad, or what the Visayans call ensalada; a cooling drink of buko water, calamansi juice, crunchy
bits of ubud, and fruit.
The Greenery
(13) Still from the landscape, from the vines, shrubs, fields, forests, and trees, come the galaxy of
gulays with which we are blest all year round. “Back home,” an American friend commented, “all
we know are peas, carrots, potatoes, lettuce, cabbage and very few others.” The dietary
uninhibited Filipino, on the other hand, recognizes the succulence of roots (gabi, ube, camote); the
delicacy and flavour of leaves (pechay, dahong bawang, kinchay, pako, malunggay, etc.) and
tendrils (talbos ng ampalaya, kalabasa, sayote); the bounty of fruits (not only upo and calabasa
and talong and amplaya, but even dessert fruits like nangka and banana, which double as
vegetables); and the excitement of flowers like katuray. A lowly weed like kulitis or saluyot, or a
swamp growth like kangkong, comes into use, its flavour evoked by steaming, boiling, salting,
combining. Nor is any part wasted. Kangkong leaves and young stalks, for example, go into
sinigang, but the tougher stalks are made by Visayans into apan-apan (literally “mock locust”).
(14) The same imagination is applied to the souring ingredients used in sinigang. The cook who sours
with calamansi or vinegar suffers, in the folk view, from “abysmal poverty of mind,” for these are
only to be used in extreme necessity, being too obvious. Instead, one uses mashed sampalok or
kamias; guavas or green pineapple; alibangbang leaves or the tenderly green sampalok leaves and
flowers; batuan or tomatoes; or combinations of these and others.
Land and the Man
(15) The Filipino’s appreciation for the bounty of sea and land quite clearly grows out of his peasant
closeness to the land. The farmer, the fisherman, the carabao tender, is from birth attuned to the
season and to the weather, knowing when ulang abound in the rivers; when it is right to plant
camote or go out with lamp and fishnet; where wild pako (fern) are likely to be found; which
bananas are good to boil, which to eat from the tree. Perhaps it is this same folk wisdom that made
him salt fish and alamang into tuyo, daing, and bagoong, for these, besides making rice go a long
way, also help retain body fluid, an important consideration in our hot weather. Furthermore, sour
broths are actually the most refreshing kind of soup (as against the thick, the creamy, the spicy)
for this weather.
(16) The meagreness of his means makes him inventive, able to make a meal of camote tops from his
backyard; to put together a small fish, a few tendrils, and tomatoes to make sinigang. It also makes
him improvise easily. No strict formulae for him (ever hear of measuring ingredients for sinigang?)
since one cooked what to how much was available.
(17) The simplicity of these meals makes him sensitive to flavours – The bitter, the succulent, the
aromatic, the sour – unmasked by sauce or spice. The stark quality of his lifestyle makes him waste
nothing, not the gabi stalk (it is stripped into strings to tie the leaf-bundles in pinangat), or the
coconut husk, or the fish head. This too, taught him to salt or smoke fish to keep; to dry food in
the sun; to make paksiw and sinigang which keep without refrigeration.
(18) This then, I would say, is the “native” cuisine – one born out of the land and the landscape, the
weather and the seasons, as well as out of the means and lifestyles of people in an agricultural
society.
 Foreign Influences
(19) But of course, as in all aspects of culture, foreign influences come to bear and create changes.
Perhaps the two major influences on Filipino cuisine would be the Chinese and the Spanish. To the
Chinese we owe the “noodle explosion”: all the pancits, using miki, bihon, sotanghon, etc., and
combinations, and which were indigenized and varied by the regions in which they developed.
Thus, the fishing town of Malabon developed pancit Malabon, with its oysters and seafood; modest
Lucban developed pancit habhab, “poor town’s fare” of miki, cooked in the marketplace, and eaten
off squares of banana leaf; while others regions use chicharron, tinapa, pork, shrimp, Chinese
sausages, even chorizo de Bilbao. From here too developed the pancit na may sabaw, noodles in
broth (lomi, mami, etc.) with pork, shrimp meatballs, toasted garlic, etc. To the Chinese, too, we
owe staples of contemporary Filipino meriendas, such as lumpia, kekiam, siopao and siomai.
(20) The legacy from Spanish cuisine is quite different from the above, and from the native, since its
chief characteristic is richness. From the Spaniards we learned the guisado, with oil and tomato
sauce; our rich stews like cocido and puchero which would have been way beyond the native
lifestyle, with their reckless combination of pork, chicken, beef, vegetables, chorizos, jamon China,
morcilla. Also, Spanish are the different rice-meat dishes that are derivations of paella (arroz a la
valenciana, bringe); the galantinas and rellenos (an Ermita friend recalls that their relleno was fat
capon stuffed with foie gras, truffles, ground pork, olives, pork sausages, chorizos); and the rich
desserts that require such time and money to make – brazos, rotas imperials, castillos, borrachos,
suspiros, etc.
(21) While the Chinese food that was absorbed into our cuisine was, on the whole, relatively
inexpensive, and therefore found its way into lower and middle class cuisine, quite obviously, the
Spanish influence was on the ilustrado, the elite, and therefore evolved into fiesta fare. Both
influences were of course adopted and adapted analogously with much of our culture – clothing,
literature, drama, music, and art.
(22) Filipino cuisine is an authentic facet of Philippine culture that invites methodical inquiry. On our
tables, rich or poor, are mute – albeit aromatic – testimony to the blending of history and our
landscape. These dishes, especially the humbler ones, show the Filipino’s understanding of the
potential of his surroundings, his imaginative exploration into nature, his instinctive sensitivity to
nuances of combination, contrast and accompaniment. His lifestyle is lined by the simplicity and
flexibility of his dishes, there being no hard-and-fast, inviolable combinations or proportions as in
French saucer, but a knowledgeable making-do, an ease of improvisation also seen in his drama
and dance.
(23) Why sinigang? Why all the other things? The full answer is a rewarding and pleasureable avenue
towards the question of identity.