Written by: seigfredtristan on June 10, 2010

If you haven’t read the History of Filipino Food, Malay Influence, click this.

From Wikimedia Commons, this is a picture of Félix Resurrección Hidalgo y Padilla, one of the best Filipino Painters of all time. He is of Chinese descent.

Let’s have fun learning some Chinese words that are mostly used in the Filipino language:

mami – a cougar, and by that I mean Demi Moore

toyo – a crazy person

petsay – a politican who spends a lot of money on his campaign but will never win

toge – a graduation gown

miki – a famous mouse

bakya – hmmm… a jejemon?

And here are a few chinese sentences for you to practice:

John goto China – John went to China (the English can’t say it any other way)

Petsay mami – My pet says Mommy (whatever pet that is)

Pansit lomi – The pan sits under me (for very strange reasons)

Siomai lumpia toyo – I will show my private parts to you (you shouldn’t say this if you’re a woman, or else)

Sitaw – sit down (to be said with Arnold Scwarzhenegger’s accent)

Now I know the word translations that I gave before those sentences do not agree with the sentences themselves but if you are doing some Chinese, you shouldn’t ask any questions… or some Mao guy knocks on your door and shortlists you, your blood and your bones to be part of the new Great Wall of China. Alright, now on to Chinese Influence on Filipino Food.

As there are no records as to when the Chinese have landed on the Philippines, most historians believe that the Chinese have been here ever since the discovery of raft, we can safely say (as if somebody will shoot if we don’t) that the Chinese and Malays arrived in the Philippines about the same time. Come to think of it, if the Malays did not arrive with their structure of government and if Ferdinand Magellan was not slain by Lapu lapu, Philippines would not be named Philippines and everyone would be eating using chopsticks. Ni hao!

A rampaging list of new dishes stampeded on the Filipino table. I will list the 3 most famous ingredients where Filipino food was influenced greatly by Chinese cuisine. Make way:

Noodles! Everyone calls it Pansit. It is our Medusa. Imagine an Asian suddenly getting petrified and consumed by overwhelming, maddening hunger. Here are a few varieties of this monster:

• Pansit Canton – The most famous pansit of all, canton is basically stir-fried noodles. If you ask me, this is the tastiest of them all. What makes this different to other noodles is that it has coconut oil which I don’t find in the list of ingredients in other Asian noodles. And the Filipino twist to your basic stir-fry noodle is, innards are a key ingredient. Most recipes use chicken innards like liver, gizzard, heart.. everything that an inexperienced, non-adventurous, i-will-die-eating-chicken-breast unicorn wouldn’t eat is a staple of this dish.

• Pansit Lomi – Think about a very thick chicken nooodle soup. I couldn’t describe it any other way. The Pansit used in this dish is your usual egg noodles.

• Pansit Palabok – Think about your usual vermicelli but bigger, fatter and with an orange-colored sauce. I have offered this to my non-filipino friends and they thought it’s something fruity and sweet. Big nay-nay. I think the one who made this up was a crazy man who hasn’t eaten for days, blindfolded and thrown into the kitchen. It’s weird. The vermicelli is blanched to softness and topped with a sort of saffron sauce (we only and strictly use food coloring), on top of it is steamed chicken breast, shrimps – mostly dried and shelled, smoked fish, tofu, srping onions in wrong spelling but finely cut, pork cracklings and boiled eggs. It’s a beautiful mishmash of whatever you can get your hands on first.

I would love to talk about each Pansit in the Philippine vocabulary but i don’t want to tire you and myself. There is Pansit Luglog, Misua, Bihon, Sotanghon, Batchoy and everything else between and beyond.

Soy Sauce. I really don’t want to talk about this because there is nothing to talk about soy sauce and I can’t describe it any other way nor expound more on this ingredient even Martians know that when there is a Kung-fu master, there is soy sauce… well, aside from soy sauce is made of fermented human hair. Szechuan grandmothers to be specific.

Soy Bean Curd. Or Tofu as everybody knows it, although Tofu is a Japanese word by the way. In the Philippines we call it Tokwa. The most common dish for this ingredient is Tokwa’t Baboy (Pork and Tofu). I only know two ways of executing this dish. One is steaming pork ears (of course you have to shave and pluck it first, neanderthal), deep-frying squares of the magnificent Tokwa, mix them in a small bowl with onions and tomatoes and drizzle with a ginger, chilli, onions and soy sauce concoction. The other one is stir-frying all of those ingredients in a happy wok. Jeepney drivers are crazy with this stuff because it has a Szechuan nana in it. Another famous food that uses Tofu is actually a dessert/snack. It is called Taho and it uses silken tofu, caramel and pearls. I’ll zip it for the moment because I’ll feature it here when the crows and cranes exchange colors.

Aside from those 3 ingredients, the Chinese has changed the martial arts in a Filipino’s  kitchen. Among them is how to toss the wok dragon style, how to make soup that does neck twists in one sip and how to train a dumpling.

Fast forward to today, the Chinese consist a huge majority of the Filipino population… like every other nation in the world. As a people, they have been through a lot of doomsday episodes which include categorizing them as humanoids during the Spanish occupation, subjects of practice shooting during the Japanese occupation, denial of citizenship after World War 2 and from that time to now – kidnap for ransom magnets. I personally feel sorry for our Filipino-Chinese brothers who have gone through these experiences. In spite of that, Filipino-Chinese or Tsinoys, as they are commonly called, are on top of the food chain in the Philippines. Top businesses in the Philippines are either led by or from a Filipino-Chinese background… name it:  Airlines, TV Stations, Radio Stations, Real Estate, Restaurants… the incoming president of the Philippines Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino is a Filipino-Chinese. They are indeed an essential mix to the Filipino stock.

Although I still could not reconcile why most of us look like Mexicans. But that’s another story.

That’s it Pan-sit!

Click this to go to History of Filipino Food, Spanish Influence