Origins of Our Daily Breads
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Pan de sal (Photo by Judge Florentino Floro/Wikimedia Commons)
TINAPAY. The national term for bread is tinapay. But tinapay in 1521 meant a kind of kakanin, “a certain kind of rice cake,” as recorded by Antonio Pigafetta, the official chronicler of the first circumnavigation when they reached Cebu. Fernando Magallanes, a Portuguese, skippered that voyage for the Spanish King, and Pigafetta, a Florentine, documented the trip’s journey.
Hispanic settlement of Filipinas started in 1565 with the arrival of Miguel Lopez de Legazpi. Missionaries with him agreed to use tinapay as the synonym for Communion host. How tinapay looked then does not seem to have been recorded. But in 1885 it was defined as two white circles about the size of a saucer for a demitasse chocolate cup with a sweet filling between them, and was then folded in half. Perhaps the semblance between tinapay and host was that they were white, circular, and about identical in size.
Eating of the host was explained as eating of Christ, the Bread of Life. When telling about the miracles of loaves and fishes, as well as other Biblical stories, the priests used tinapay to mean bread. By 1613 the Castilian-Tagalog dictionary compiled by the Franciscan priest Pedro San Buenaventura defined tinapay as pan. Today, it is generally unknown that tinapay once meant a kakanin (snack).
“Foods are subject to changes as the ways people live adapt to new settings, inventions, ingredients, weather patterns, trading partnerships, economics, and health discoveries.”
Tinapay finds root in tapay, which San Buenaventura defined as “to knead tortillas”; tortilla then meant “bread from rice” as well as “ligis” “to make into powder by grinding for use in tortilla (small cake or Mexican pancake), pastel (pastry), and empanada (meat or fish pie).” Spanish and Mexican-Spanish cooking was adapting to the Philippine setting. Tapay meaning “dough” is widely used in Bicolano, Hiligaynon, Pangasinense, Samar-Leytenyo, and Tagalog.
The word “pan” seems to have been used to mean strictly the “bread of the Spanish,” bread made from wheat flour. The annex to Housekeeping and Household Arts: A Manual for Work with the Girls in the Elementary Schools of the Philippines authored by Alice Fuller in 1911 describes two types of popular and common breads. Pan de caña was “Hot buns or hot bread cut into slices and re-baked. It differs from toast in that it is baked within an oven instead of being toasted over fire.” Its name means “bamboo bread” because each after its second baking, the bread curls like a bamboo. Her description is the earliest I have found for pan de sal: “A small oval-shaped loaf very common in the Philippines. Prepared much the same way as ordinary [American] bread, but baked much harder. The loaf, when baked, is 9 to 15 centimeters long, 7 to 9 centimeters wide, and about 4 to 6 centimeters thick. Prior to baking, the loaf is gashed longitudinally on top so that the baked loaf may be easily broken into halves.”
Over time, both tinapay and pan have come to mean wheat bread in the Philippines. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bread varieties and some of them are unique to a town or even only one bakery.
BAKING. While some kakanin, like the Ilocano sinibalu, were baked in bamboo culms or layers of banana leaves while buried in hot ash or even charcoal, baking in a kiln or oven – the horno -- was introduced from Spain. The Filipino word hurno is used in Bikolano, Hiligaynon, Ilokano, Sebuano and Tagalog. It becomes orno in Bicolano, Maranaw, and Pangasinense as well as urnu in Kapampangan.
Spaniards craved pan, their daily baked bread made from wheat flour and baked in an horno. To keep the colony going, ovens were also needed to bake sea biscuit, notoriously hard as rock. Sea biscuit known as pan nava was standard on galleon menus for crew and paying passengers. It was also the practical sustenance during naval battles and bad seas when cooking fires could not be lit.
Modern day kakanin (Photo by Judge Florentino Floro/Wikimedia Commons)
Wheat was not grown in the Philippines until Spanish times. The botanical did not adapt everywhere, and flour had to be imported from China and Japan even when wheat established itself well in some places. Chinese overseas workers residing at the Parian (the quarters to where Chinese were restricted) knew how to make wheat bread by baking and steaming. Although there were professional bakers among Hispanic settlers and temporary residents, they preferred to invest in the risky galleon trade rather than slave away in a hot bakery. When the King agreed to the establishment of a bakery inside Intramuros, it had a Spanish overseer but an all-Chinese staff.
In the late 1800s, some gentry homes built ovens in their kitchens or outdoors so they could make bread and roasts. Home baking grew in popularity when the technology for it became available. After Suez Canal opened in 1869, Europeans and European goods, including recipe books and tinned biscuits, found their way increasingly into the Philippines. Although heavy metal stoves with built-in ovens had been invented during the Industrial Revolution coinciding with Spanish colonial times, Philippine cooking was done the native way using the clay kalan or the stone trivet into the early 1900s.
When the American colonial era began, American women came with their husbands who had taken on military or civil jobs. Ermita and Malate swamps were transformed into housing for them. The new homes and apartment buildings had conveniences common to American life. Both districts were to become model American examples of modernity in the Far East. Instead of continuing the traditional use of wood for cooking fuel, the American regime introduced piped-in gas and electricity for hearths and ovens in the heart of Manila’s middle- and upper-class residences.
The public school system introduced island children and teachers to home economics and nutrition starting in 1904. It made home baking aspirational by teaching children to bake at model kitchens set up in schools. Textbooks for use archipelago-wide included recipes for biscuits, plain cake, a child’s birthday cake, jelly roll, mamon (sponge roll), coconut cookies, camote cookies, sugar cookies, doughnuts, and a host of other baked goods. Recipes for baking hojaldres, tarts filled with raisins steeped in muscatel or chocolate, vol au vents, and other favored pastries had been translated from French and Spanish into Tagalog for professional bakers and homes of the wealthy.
The use of breadcrumbs to thicken sauces is a Spanish culinary practice passed on to Philippine cuisine. Tagalogs make lechon sauce using pork liver and traditionally thicken it with breadcrumbs. Around the islands the breadcrumbs used range from those left over from baking breads to biscuit and unsweetened bizcocho crushed at home.
Americans enjoyed their versions of European cooking inherited from their ancestors. Some of them shared family recipes for cookbooks published in Manila. Bread crumbs were used as a filling for baked fish. Fish and fish balls or croquettes were rolled in fine bread crumbs before frying. Vegetables were also dusted with bread crumbs when baked.
Filipino homes would not be left behind from food fashions. Dishes that had become traditional since pre-Hispanic times like kakanin were served side by side with Spanish mamon or ensaymada (sugared brioche) and American chocolate cake. Salabat (ginger tea) remains on Filipino home menus along with chocolate, introduced from Mexico and popularized by the Spanish, as well as coffee beverage introduced from Ethiopia and Yemen by the Spanish but popularized in the Philippines during American times. It is possible that contemporary times will add ube cake and shakes made with green or ripe mango to the lengthening list of Philippine culinary traditions.
Ensaymada (Photo by Judge Florentino Floro/Wikimedia Commons)
Cuisine is one of the most dynamic elements of culture. Foods, in other words, are subject to changes as the ways people live adapt to new settings, inventions, ingredients, weather patterns, trading partnerships, economics, and health discoveries. Yet there are foods that last the centuries. They may no longer be made exactly as their original version. But they remain proud examples of family traditions, as well as ethnic and national identities. Aromas and flavors carry a heart-sense connecting generation to generation with delight and deliciousness.
This is the second of three articles from Felice P. Sta. Maria written for LUTONG PAMANA, a fund-raising effort of Grupo Kalinangan, a non-profit, non-stock organization incorporated in 2016. Cultural heritage professionals and volunteers from different disciplines work to help local government units and neighborhoods manage their cultural heritage resources. info@grupokalinangan.org
Felice Prudente Sta. Maria
Felice Prudente Sta. Maria is a cultural worker who pioneers Philippine culinary history. Her awards as an author include ASEAN’s most prestigious SEA Write Award presented in 2001.
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