M is for Manila Galleons
The aftermath of the Manila Galleons haunts my kitchen: I can taste it in sweet maiz kernels, flame-colored chilies, and the earthy bitter of cacao. This history is in the spice cabinet, in a glass jar of scarlet atsuete seeds, and the creamy green flesh of a perfectly ripe avocado I might mix with sweet milk, Filipino-style, or eat savory and mashed into guacamole.
Corn, tomatoes, atsuete, avocado, potatoes, chayote...These ingredients are inked onto the pages of Filipino cookbooks older than my grandmother, and are as common to my family's diet as wheat and rice.Yet these ingredients arrived on Philippine shores from the Americas, through a bitter history of trade, slavery, and with it, culinary exchange.
UNESCO chose 2010 as an international celebration of the Manila Galleons. The massive Spanish trading ships sailed from 1563-1815, at a time when indigenous peoples of the Philippines and the Americas both struggled under brutal wars for independence. Then the largest sea vessels of their time, the ship's watery paths spanned three centuries, 9,000 miles, as connective tissue linking Mexico with the Philippines, and eventually, Spain.
While transporting luxury items for the Spanish, the galleon route led to food exchanges between Mexico and the Philippines. Tamales, corn, tomatoes, potatoes, cassava, and yucca took root in Filipino soil and kitchens. Foods from Asia were also adapted into Mexican cuisine, from mango, tamarind, coconuts, to ceviche, a variation on the Filipino kinilaw, a raw fish "cooked" by acidic sour fruits.
Imagining Bicol Express without chilis, or sili, is mind-blowing.
Beyond food, there was an exchange of people, a story I one day hope to understand more deeply. It was mostly Filipinos, not the Spanish, who acted as the ship's laborers, as navigators, crew (and maybe cooks?). Facing the brutality of Spanish oppressors, an estimated 10,000 Filipinos escaped the ships in Acapulco, while more escaped to the bayous of Louisiana and along the California coast, intermarrying with indigenous communities.
This history continues in obvious and subtle ways, and in which food is only one entry point. When my musician friends travelled to Acapulco to perform traditional Filipino kulintang, they were surprised to find Filipino songs at a local karaoke bar. Tiangge, a common Filipino word for market, is derived from the Nahuatl word, tianquitzli. As I walked the streets of San Francisco's Mission District yesterday, I caught sight of a favorite treat that marries the flavors of both Mexico and the Philippines - chili pepper mangoes.
Where does your food come from?
More Info: