Staple Foods of the Philippines, c. 1900
"Though wheat or maize has supplanted it in some places, the staff of life throughout the islands generally is rice, which is used in almost every native dish...."
From History and Description of the Picturesque Philippines, by Ebenezer Hannaford, 1900.
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
Though wheat or maize has supplanted it in some places, the staff of life throughout the islands generally is rice, which is used in almost every native dish.
Much oftener than not it comes to the housewife as paddy — that is, unhulled — and she must unjacket it herself. The huge mortar for pounding rice that stands at the door of almost every native house is what Luzon takes its name from. An adult will consume an average of two pounds of rice a day, or say two hundred and fifty pounds for a family of five every month. Pork is the principal animal food, and roast pig is rarely missing at a feast. Beef is a scarce article, except as the meat of the carabao, or water-buffalo, the Philippine beast of burden, might be so called, and strips of which, sun-dried, the natives consider particularly fine eating. Ducks, chicken and other poultry are a frequent service, and so are fish, especially on the coast and along the watercourses; and very generally after the rice-paddy fields have been flooded tiny fish are caught in them, in quantities to astonish a foreigner.
The woods and swamps furnish a variety of strange dishes. Some of them would seem repugnant to our taste, as most certainly would the curious kind of beetle caught in stagnant waters, that passes for a luxury in even the Manila market, to say nothing of the fried locusts with which a Filipino family finds partial consolation for the ruin that these scourges have wrought in its crops.
In the line of beverages other than chocolate or the like warm drinks and the insipid milk of carabao-cows, the commonest is tuba, which is the sap of the cocoanut palm collected in bamboo buckets from trees set apart for that purpose. The necessary incisions being continued clear to the top of the high trees, tuba-gathering is dangerous and fatiguing work, notwithstanding the natives can climb like monkeys, using hands and feet alike. Cocoa wine is distilled from tuba, nipa wine from the fruit-stalks of the swamp-growing nipa, and by a process most primitive, brandy of great strength and purity from sugar-cane. If white-ribboners are scarce in the Philippines, so are drinking-bouts. Malay moderation in the use of intoxicants shames the American and European, and in Manila has led to comparisons quite invidious.
Hannaford, Ebenezer. History and Description of the Picturesque Philippines. The Crowell & Kirkpatrick Co., 1900.
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