Food for Fridays of Lent

MONGO soup with shrimp or "tinapa" [smoked fish], garnished with malunggay leaves, is a common Friday meal in most Filipino homes. When you ask Filipinos why this is so, nobody can give a decent answer aside from the fact that it is a tradition they grew up with.

In our home, mongo soup comes with chicken-pork "adobo" [stew] as Friday dinner combination and my chef of a sister has gone three steps further by serving "lechon kawali" [deep-fried pork with skin] on a small rice pool filled with mongo soup. Since we are not very devout Catholics (something my dear aunts in Pampanga province try to remedy through their prayers), Friday night dinners during Lent become a venue for discussions on the lack of meat during the Fridays of Lent. One has to explain the difference between fasting (restricting food intake to one full meal and light "merienda," or snack, for the day) and abstinence (abstaining from all flesh: pork, beef, chicken and other types of meat and fowl).

It is a delight to watch my 17-year-old niece abstaining from meat on Fridays, while clutching a fast-food delivery flyer she will call at midnight. Her father has no qualms about breaking abstinence, so we often remind him that his hearty gulp of Friday adobo would lead to his burning in hell for eternity.

When one thinks of all the serious crimes that are committed in our country every day, one wonders whether we should just junk fasting and abstinence altogether.

People fast for vanity diets these days and many people are forced to fast because there is no food on the table, so why does it seem so difficult to give up meat on the Fridays of Lent and to fast two days during this period? The world has become so secular that many of us hardly feel the 40 days of Lent (what in Latin was known as quadrigesima or in the Philippines as "cuaresma"), beginning with Ash Wednesday and ending with Easter Sunday.

In many Catholic countries, abstinence from meat is a rule on all Fridays of the year, but Spain was rewarded in the 16th century by an exemption on abstinence on all Fridays of the year except Lent. Naturally, this privilege was transferred to the Philippines when it was a Spanish colony, so while other places would just have mongo soup (or its equivalent) on Fridays, we can have adobo or some other meat dish as well. Thus during Lent, we suffer withdrawal symptoms. Nobody notices how history has actually shaped the way we eat, what we eat and what we don't eat.

For many Filipinos, abstinence doesn't mean abstaining from meat; it means eating seafood. Fish, shellfish, shrimp are allowed. Eggs as future fowl is a complicated case, although I am told that the Catholic bishops of the Philippines rendered a decision on "balut" [boiled unhatched duck embryo], saying that this aborted duckling is not considered meat and can be taken on days of abstinence.

In the carnivorous West, abstaining from meat and fowl was considered a sacrifice or a way of practicing penance and poverty, but when the dietary restrictions were translated to the Philippines, it did not take into account the fact that since they lived in an archipelagic country, Filipinos actually ate more fish than meat. These days when fish can sometimes be more expensive than pork, people start to look for the penance and poverty in a seafood diet.

Having to face another meatless Friday, I remembered a few paragraphs from Chapter 23 of Jose Rizal's novel "Noli Me Tangere," which mentions different kinds of fish. The characters are having a picnic on the lake and all the food was to be cooked fresh on the boats. Fish taken live from the fish pen (that later contained a crocodile) was immediately dropped into a boiling "sinigang" broth. Animal rights activists may complain about this, but then this was how good food was prepared in the late 19th-century Philippines.

Rizal draws short portraits of Andeng and Tia Isabel in these lines that make my mouth water (from the translation by Soledad Lacson-Locsin):

"Andeng, Maria Clara's foster sister, had the reputation of being an excellent cook despite her clean and joyous mien. She prepared the rice water for stewing the fish, adding to it tomatoes and kamias, helped-or hindered-in this by some vying for her favor. The girls cleaned the squash vine tendrils, the snow peas, and cut the paayap into short pieces the length of cigarettes...

"Tia Isabel was in command: The ayungin is good for sinigang, leave the bia for the escabeche, the dalag and the buan-buan for pesa; the dalag lives long. Put them in the net so that they remain in the water. The lobsters to the frying pan! The banak is good for broiling wrapped in banana leaves and stuffed with tomatoes. Leave the rest to serve as decoys: it is not good to empty the trap completely..."

All these types of fish are lost to me now. All I know are bangus and galunggong. My mother remembered all these fish from her childhood when the Pasig River was clean and fish actually thrived in its waters. At times she would get these fish from the market and serve them in a variety of ways. Now all I know is what is in Lacson-Locsin's notes: Ayungin is silver perch (Datnia plumbea), bia is flathead goby (Gobius juris), buan-buan is tarpon (Megalops cyprinoids), banak is mullet (Family Mugilidae) and dalag is fresh-water mudfish, murrel (Ophicephalus striatus).

Looking at food and fish shows us not only how we eat but how much we have changed since Rizal's time.

Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu