UBE, LANGKA AND PANDAN SUMAN with COCONUT CHIPS AND TUILES

Rice is indeed the Filipino staff of life. Fr. Juan J. Delgado, S.J., in his book Historia general sacro-profana, politica y natural de las isles el poniente llamadas Filipinas, which his Dedication dates at 1751, devotes a fairly long chapter to rice: Del arroz y otras especies de alimento.

Although Christ said that man cannot live by bread alone, Fr. Delgado points out that the Indios could live by rice alone. They felt that even if that was all they had. They had to fast as the Church commanded; but if they did not have it, then they were free of the obligation, because not eating rice was not eating at all.

• During Christmastime, the tradition is to come out of the dawn or midnight Masses and stop at stalls where rice cakes are cooking on clay stoves that are a signal part of Christmas feasting.

• These cakes have such generic names as suman (glutinous rice cooked with coconut milk, often wrapped in banana or coconut leaves);

• puto (rice flour steamed, with different fillings or flavorings);

• bibingka (also rice flour, but baked in banana leaves, with carabao-milk cheese and salted eggs);

• kutsinta (brown, with lye);

• sapin-sapin (delicately layered, as the name suggests),

• and such regional names as patupat, bodbod, inday-inday, baye-baye, palitaw, palarosdos, tupig, minoron, and many more, in all the Philippine languages (at least 80), a veritable lexicon of the roles that rice plays in Philippine life.

The wrapping of these cakes, which more than other foods are meant to be portable, illustrates the materials and range of traditional packaging.

• Many are wrapped and steamed in banana leaves, in different folding techniques. Some are tied with string from coconut or gabi leaves.

• Others are wound around with young coconut or nipa fronds.

• For travelling rice in Cebu, called pusu, the coconut leaves are woven into fist-sized, heart-shaped baskets, in which raw rice is steamed, and then transported.

• The cottage cheese called kesong puti (cottage cheese) is also wrapped in banana leaves in a particular way.
 
The leaves and their colors, the packages and their shapes, reflect an understanding of the contents, of the needs of portability and accessibility, and of the range of natural materials that protect, enhance and identify food from the landscape.

NOTES: From my term papers in graduate school on the history of Philippine cuisine..