PINO and Lútûng Kapampangan

Pino! Filipino Restaurant celebrated its 1st anniversary last week (Oct 14-16) with a grand dinner buffet featuring some of the finest dishes of Pampango Cuisine. The second in the series of food festivals, Chefs Sau del Rosario and Ms. Edith Singian presented the heritage and jazzed-up recipes for Cebu patrons to savour. And Lútûng Kapampangan has the reputation of being the best of the regional cuisines of the Philippines.

Long before the Spaniards came, Pampanga was a thriving community with residents living along the riverbanks or “pampang” and they were named Kapampangans or people by the river bank. Philippine Food and Life by Gilda Cordero Fernando described their “material culture as fairly advanced- they wove cloth and used a great variety of storing jars.” Even the art of brass-casting was thriving. Many of my beloved readers who religiously studied their Philippine History in high school know Panday Pira, a Pampango, who later made cannons for the Spaniards. 

Ms. Fernando described that the “predisposition for the better things in life could account for the Pampangos’ scandalous love affair with the colonizers.” There were even mercenaries and volunteers (from the town of Macabebe) in the Spanish colonial army. Such collaboration included Iberian cuisine and “food became a cult in Pampanga as well because of the Spanish friars who enjoyed a comfortable life from religious fees and revenues of Spanish fields.”

The province is rich in natural resources and major products include rice, sugar cane and fishing. Some of the residents became very rich and sustained the rapid indigenization of Iberian dishes. Add some Chinese blood line to the Pampango ancestry because in 1603, to escape the massacre of Chinese in Manila, some Chinese nationals hid in Guagua. And we know the Chinese propensity towards good food.

 The elite supported the Pampango cooks who demanded quality ingredients. “If the meat is one peso, the recado is three pesos.” A good example would be the morcon, which became an heirloom recipe made from “finely ground pork, duck eggs, imported quezo de bola and chorizo El Rey, cooked slowly for six hours.”

Some of the dishes enjoyed by the elite were served during the Pampango Food Festival in PINO Filipino Restaurant (Wilson Street, Apas, Lahug, phone 232-0939).

 These heritage and jazzed-up recipes include: Kanin na Buho with Aligue ng Talangka (Bamboo Rice with crab fat), Fresh Lumpia (Heart of Palm Rolls with Ube flavored crepe wrappers), Kalderetang Bibe (Whole duckling in Rich Spicy Sauce), Grand Seafood Kare Kare, Pancit Luglug (rice noodles in rich shrimp sauce), Cebu lechon with bringhe stuffing (sticky rice paella), Buro Sushi Style (Pampango Fermented rice) and 21 other dishes including desserts, like Tibok-Tibok with Mangoes (Coconut Cream Pudding with Cebu Mangoes).

 Whew! Plenty of hard work gyud for your favorite food columnist to taste each dish; one tablespoon na lang for each of the twenty eight dishes. For my favorite dishes which I listed above, my stomach demanded an extra tablespoon. 

During those times, while the rich grew richer in Pampanga, many residents remained in their prevailing social class and had to contend with the basic produce of the land like betute tugak (stuffed frogs), burung bulig (mudfish fermented in rice), adobong camaru (mole crickets sautéed in vinegar and garlic), and calderetang barag (spicy stew of monitor lizard).

The very poor had little to eat and joined the Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan or Hukbalahap.