Reading between the grain
While archaeology and anthropology contribute much to our understanding of Philippine food and cuisine, fieldwork in these disciplines is not for me. As a historian, I prefer working in the quiet, air-conditioned comfort of a library or archive to an open pit under sun and rain.
Evidence of our ancient diet, according to the pioneering food historian Doreen Fernandez, can be found in the yellowed pages of friar vocabularios—the translated word lists from our many languages compiled by Spanish missionaries and printed as books from the 17th to the 19th centuries. After extracting all the food and food-related terms in the 1860 edition of the “Vocabulario de la lengua tagala” by Jesuit fathers Juan José de Noceda, SJ and Pedro de Sanlucar, SJ, she saw that the words with the highest frequency pertained to rice (our staple) and fish (alat for those sourced from the sea, and tabang from freshwater rivers and streams). Fernandez taught me that dictionaries are not just for word meanings; they could be primary sources for Philippine history.
Following her lead, I once read a paper at a conference on the galaxy of rice terms in Tagalog and what it said about the process from palay to bigas to kanin or sinaing. Some years ago, a Spanish scholar and a Taiwanese scholar discovered in the University of Santo Tomas Archives what turned out to be the world’s oldest and largest Spanish-Chinese dictionary, now known by its initials, DHS, for Dictionario Hispanico Sinicum. While it lay in plain sight for centuries, catalogued as a “Spanish-Chinese vocabulario with Chinese characters,” it was overlooked because a librarian wrote a note on it saying it was “of little value.”
Sometime between 1626 and 1642, Spanish Dominican missionaries began compiling words from Hokkien-speaking Chinese in the Parian de Manila and translating these words into Spanish. The result was a thousand-page manuscript with 27,000 words and phrases. Thanks to the collaborative effort of the Universidad de Barcelona and the National Tsinghua University Press, the DHS is now available online. Former University of Santo Tomas archivist and now National Historical Commission Chair Regalado T. Jose Jr. commented in a short note that aside from the Hokkien words, the DHS also contains some Tagalog words like argue (house post), bahaque (G-string), mabolo, papaya, and tanguingue. Following Fernandez’s lead, I looked up the words arroz (rice) and pescado (fish) and fell into a rabbit hole.
I cannot read Chinese (neither Hokkien nor Mandarin), so I focused on the Spanish terms and discerned what they said about 17th-century dietary staples and food security. There was a character for arroz limpio (clean, milled, or polished rice), contrasted with two types of arroz sucio (literally “dirty rice,” which pertained to seed rice or unhulled rice saved for sowing, arroz sucio para sembrar, or rice yet to be pounded, milled, or removed from its husk, arroz por pilar and cascara). Aside from clean and dirty rice, some rice was classified as good (bueno) and very good (muy bueno).
Interestingly, there was very fine rice for making wine (arroz muy bueno de que se hace bino) and rice boiling or fermenting for wine (arroz hirbiendo para bino). There was fine or precious aromatic rice (arroz precioso oloroso) and fine sticky or glutinous rice (arroz precioso pegajoso). Large-grain rice (arroz de grano grande) is mentioned, as well as red rice (arroz colorado).
The various rice terms suggested a society attentive to postharvest processing, determining grain quality, and even crop cycles. Newly sprouted or small rice seedlings (arroz nacido pequeño) had a different character from the green rice stalk (arroz en ierba), early harvest rice (arroz temprano), and an ear of rice before harvesting (arroz en espiga de segarse)—all distinct from hollow or empty rice husks that were considered useless grains. There was also a term for rice when harvested and bundled (arroz en manojo).
When cooked, rice can be wrapped in leaves “like zongzi” (arroz cocido metido en unas hojas), piled or arranged in a heap (arroz monton del cocido), or rendered as the toasted or burnt rice stuck at the bottom of the pot that we know as tutong (arroz tostado, o que sea en el suelo del carahay). I am curious, though, about the Hokkien term for surplus or leftover rice (arroz de sobra). Finally, one entry relevant to culture describes rice thrown into the water during one of their Chinese festivals (arroz que echan al agua en una fiesta suya).
The meticulous distinction between various states of rice, from raw to cooked, highlights not just rice as a staple, but how it serves as the foundation of the Filipino diet. Pescado, or fish, is just as fascinating. There are words for fresh, raw, boneless, dried, cooked, and even inedible or poisonous fish. Social stratification among fishermen is also evident from the DHS: an old fisherman (pescador viejo) is differentiated from a young one, or one who owns only his boat (pescador que no tiene mas que el navio), an angler (pescador de anzuelo), or a net fisher (pescador de red).
I wish more people would read old dictionaries to rediscover them as primary sources for history and culture.
—————-
Comments are welcome at [email protected]
Preparing for the unpredictable