The Philippines would probably not come top of anybody’s gastronomic tourism list. It’s not that the food is bad, it just doesn’t stand out as particularly different or better than what you might eat elsewhere in the world. Nevertheless, there are some fun specialities that make Filipino cuisine worthy of a few paragraphs at least.
The staple food of the Philippines is rice. On our first day in Harold’s Mansion, my friends ordered pizza and celebrated their first day without eating rice in the whole time they had been there. It’s a bit like with bread in France. You can have potatoes or pasta, but whatever the meal, there will always be rice too. Even at breakfast.
Meat also plays a prominent role. One of the defining scents of the streets of Cebu was the odour of the smoke rising from the endless roadside barbecues where things were often being roasted whole. Vegetables seemed to be less important, despite the fact that the markets were overflowing with delicious-looking greenery. We did, however, get lots of vitamins from fruit. Mangoes were everywhere, as were pineapples, bananas and lots of exotic things that I didn’t even know the names of until I went around the supermarket taking pictures. It was interesting, too, to see the different varieties: there were green mangoes and yellow mangoes, both smaller than the South-American varieties that we tend to get in Europe, and the bananas were smaller and much sweeter.
In fact, everything in the Philippines was sweeter. I have quite a sweet tooth, but even I was a bit taken aback by the sugariness of the tomato sauce on my pasta. And the consequences were evident: the most prominent position in many of the pharmacies was occupied by treatments for diabetes.
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| Banana Fritters - Yum! |
But on to the strange delicacies. The most famous is probably balut, a fertilized chicken or duck egg containing the foetus, which you eat whole. I was quite relieved when this wasn’t produced at the Easter party as my friends threatened it might be. Much more common were the endless varieties of whole dried fish, which the students assured me was delicious and my friends said was revolting. Being a bit of a gastronomic coward, I didn’t buy any to check.
And so the weirdest thing that I tasted was this:
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| "Chewy Milk Candy with Purple Yam and Gelatinous Mutant Coconut" |
The purple colour comes from ubaye, or purple yam, which is used in lots of different dishes, including some lovely flat cakes that we bought on the last day and which I can’t remember the name of. In fact, the sweets taste more of powdered milk than anything as exciting as mutant coconuts, but that doesn’t seem to have encouraged many of my friends to try them, and half the packet is still on the table at home.
Just as well I didn’t make too much effort to bring home dried fish or chicken foetus for them to try!
