| I was startled, during a recent trip to Manila and Cebu, to hear about a Filipino bibinca, but it is not even the poor country cousin of our own rich, layered dessert, famously made with 40 eggs. |
| Baked in a clay bucket-shaped bhatti over coals, it is a rich bread, eaten with grated coconut and brown sugar. It is the quintessential festival food, eaten at Christmas time, which is to say, between September and February! Yes, the Filipinos take their Christmas celebrations seriously. |
| The one other familiar name was paella, which was, strangely, never offered on restaurant menus. What I did have was a glorious mixture of Western methods (stuffing a deboned mudfish with breadcrumbs and its own minced flesh, then deep-frying it after wrapping it in foil), Chinese touches like soy sauce and vinegar on the table, and what I suspect is the original Filipino cooking: cinigang "" the local equivalent of Thailand's tom yum soup, complete with fish sauce. |
| What struck me was that on a modernity scale, you'd find the Philippines and India very close together. You can get stone-ground flour in our metros, side by side with Serrano ham, in the same way that you can get hand-ground spices and Limburger cheese in Manila. |
| Thus, the hotel I stayed in, Philippine Plaza Sofitel, had a breakfast buffet that ran the gamut of Korean kimchi, Japanese tamago yaki and Indian akuri, but supermarket shelves would groan with the weight of packaged adobo spice. |
| Chicken adobo is something of a national dish, and is a clue to the people themselves. Cubed chicken and/or pork are stewed with garlic, bayleaf, vinegar and soy sauce. If it sounds as if the final product should be assertively Chinese, it is not. |
| Because rice is the staple in the 7,107 islands that go to make up the country, adobo made for dinner would have as much gravy as an Indian curry. However, if it is to be taken on a picnic, it would be crisp fried. The combination of pork and chicken in the same dish is not unusual in the Philippines: it occurs elsewhere too, with beef being added to the melange as well. |
| Jollibee may be the most popular fast-food outlet, the one that gives McDonalds sleepless nights, but it is in Dad's, Maxi's and Aristocrat "" all popular chains "" where I sampled traditional Filipino food with live music. |
| The equivalent of palak pakodas "" water spinach "" batter-fried, crisp-fried chunks of pork, mixed vegetables in a sauce redolent of pork and fish sauce, all washed down with a live band that played requests at each table. |
| Neighbours of China, ruled by Spain and the United States, yet with their own identity, that's the Philippines for you. |
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