Sandok Bao

Made of Kawayan Handle

and Bao / Coconut Shell Sandok based

The bewildered natives and Spaniards lamented as Thomasites preached “everyday right living” through sanitation, nutrition and oil cloth tablecloths. Under the new public school system, elementary school girls studied home economics two to three hours a week. They learned that rice is served as a vegetable and must be boiled with salt and some cooking oil.

Homemakers initially reacted with curiosity then exasperation. Why were bread-eating Americans meddling in Filipino kitchens! What did they know about cooking rice!

In time, however, the indulgent Filipinos began to adopt the ways of the new Motherland. Lovely mestizas enjoyed preening for balls and afternoon teas where Americans served some nouvelle cuisine blancmange, apricot ice water and frosted cake. With the return of the pensionados or government scholars from the States, younger generations became preoccupied with comparing native customs to those of modern America. Iced punch and delicate pan Americano sandwiches became standard fare at stylish native parties where guests never sat down.

The turn-of-the-century Filipino kitchen was a menagerie of rustling floor-length sayas, smoke and soot, savory laurel and peppers, crawling infants, pet dogs and barefoot house boys called muchachos. Cooks owed much of their discomfort to tropical heat and to the kalans, native red earthenware stoves which required fanning and puffing through a bamboo ihip every few minutes to keep the fire burning.

Joseph Earle Stevens, a British resident of mid-19th-century Manila, likened the kalan “to an old shoe. The vamp of the shoe represents the hearth; the opening in front, the place for putting in small sticks of wood; and the enclosing upper, the rim on which rests the single big pot or kettle.”

Native cakes of glutinous rice like puto, kutchinta, suman and sapin-sapin were boiled or steamed over the kalan while wrapped in buri or banana leaves or molded in white porcelain saucers. Bibingka made of rice flour was “baked” over the kalan with the top heat provided by glowing coals in a clay dish cover. Kiln baking of broas, dainty lady fingers which served as popular accompaniment and edible spoon to the ritual morning cup of syrupy chocolate remained a commercial enterprise.