“Butong”

NOTHING different sets apart the husband’s “suki (preferred seller)” for coconut, the family’s shack surrounded by an oasis of dark green coconuts and browning husks beside the Sta. Rosa-Tagaytay Road.

Ever since a Laguna pioneer returned home from working as a helper in the U.S. and used the plentiful coconut as substitute in making the local version of apple pie, “buko (young coconut in Filipino)” pie is a favorite “pasalubong (present)” in these parts. 

Due to its white sugar and condensed milk, though, buko pie can only be an occasional treat, not daily fare. Paring down to the basic and essential, the husband bought buko from this couple in their 30’s and was pleased to find that a coconut sold for P20 yielded about two liters of “water” and “meat,” a leap in savings from the P100 bottle of coco juice only sold in supermarkets. 

In Cebu, coconut fetches P40 to P50 a piece, especially during holidays when buko strips are popular for fruit salads. 

Beneficial for many ailments from diabetes to kidney stones, coconut is ideal as a snack or even a meal. The Cebuano “sagbay-luwag” that slips from the still pinkish coco shell to throat and gut has a less literary, ruder translation in Filipino: “malauhog” or mucus-like. I cannot think of anything else that looks and feels slimy but tastes so good. 

According to Binisaya.com, sagbay-luwag is the stage between “dalinog” and “butong”. Dalinog refers to a white and creamy substance surrounding a coconut sprout. As a child, I was often given “buwa,” a spherical, spongelike bulb found in germinating coconuts. Despite its strange appearance and texture, buwa is juicy and delicately sweet.

Cebuano is rich in capturing the diversity of desirable young coconut meat: “balatungol (tender),” “kuyamis (soft),” and “lamog (meaty)”. Between the Bisdak husband and the Silang-born suki, there is no loss in translation because the wife (her husband is often away on buying trips, as well as takes on tree-felling and -cutting) performs the time-tested technique of “reading” coconuts: knocks the coconut and listens to the echo to determine if the meat is young or mature.

A coconut between butong and “lahing (mature)” is called “bagatungol” or “ungol,” the latter term also meaning “grumble”. Shaken, the lahing rumbles. Harder and thicker, mature coconut meat is more filling, a bit akin to the consolation of accepting our easily peeved older selves.

When the suki recently sold a load of coconuts to a buko pie maker, she gave the husband and other buyers free water since the entrepreneur only needed the meat. Sweeter than butong is the kindness of strangers, unforeseen and thus, more exquisite.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 31, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Hoho

"SAAN ka, Saang (where are you, Spider Shell)?"

When Rem found the noon heat too much, she dug for herself and her pups a trench under the bamboo and turned up a tiny brown bottle, bits of wrappers, and a single “Tahong (Mussel)” shell. 

Moving to Silang more than six years ago, the husband and I have grown used to living more than a thousand feet above sea level; our palates, not quite. 

Calling Opon our home for decades, we are skeptical about “fresh” seafood sourced from Batangas or other parts of Cavite like Bacoor or Imus, all a good drive away.

Eating is about connecting with the people who raise food for a living. Makeshift seafood stands line up beside the Cavitex, the Manila-Cavite Expressway also known as the Coastal Road. Along the coast of Bacoor are the bamboo homes on stilts of the families of sea farmers raising mussels and oysters.

Yet, we have never pulled to the side of the road to check out the trussed-up immobile crabs and seaweed-strewn piles of shellfish. Tito G., who knows his crabs, cautioned us about roadside crabs, which are “hoho” or “ampao,” meaning “no meat at all just air”.

Far from hoho are the “Kasag (Coral or Mask Crab)” crawling out of the seawater-filled basins of women, up at dawn in Cordova. The vendors scoop them into a “Caltex” can as fast as the “Kasag” can scrape away, sidewise, crabwise, in their doomed escape.

Late afternoons are for going to Saac, just as the fisherfolk unload sacks of “Saang (Spider Shell or Scorpion Conch)” and before buyers snap these up for restaurants and hotels. 

Dropped into water when it boils (not before as the animal will burrow in the shell whorls, reachable only for regret), the Saang is chewy and flavored by nothing more than its own brine and wisps of “sibuyas dahonan (spring onions)”. 

Post-prandial, the Saang shell decorates our garden with its dramatic apex and fearsomely flared outer lip. As a child, I preferred the Saang’s smaller version, the “Aninikad (Plicate or Samar Conch),” whose scimitar-shaped nail I picked out with a bent safety pin after dipping my fingers into the greenish-yellow soup, imagining I was diving.

Don’t play with your food, was a childhood reminder I rarely heard. I threw out the not quite empty shells in the garden, where our dogs sniffed, buried, and unburied them, still redolent of the unknown.

When Rem dug out the Tahong shell, she did not even spare it an exploratory sniff. Buried so long, its opalescent underside had faded to a milky opacity.  Yet, living a thousand feet above the sea, I can smell this shell and recreate, memory as puissant as fingers, much soaped and washed, will still smell of the sea the sea hours and lifetimes after.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s April 18, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Gray

THE SMELL of sulfur wafting in through the open bedroom window was odd in the usual Sunday mix of neighbors’ cooking odors. Alone at home, I was reading a novel to break days of plodding through philosophy and talking to an absentminded self.

When I went outside to feed the stray cats, Kitkat had something grey sprinkled on her coat of white-with-isles-of-egg-yolk.

I stooped to flick off the dust and saw a portion of the porch neatly coated in the same grey: ashfall from Taal Volcano’s phreatic explosion of steam and ash that took place earlier that afternoon.

In more than half a century, I have weathered calamities. But even the strongest typhoon—Ruping in 1990, which sank a record number of 88 ships in the Cebu City Harbor—spends its fury after hours. Power and water are restored; roads are cleared. And the comforts of daytime lying in bed, listening to the wind howl and the rain attack the roof, soon end with the resumption of classes.

Taal Volcano is an unexpected education. We live in Barangay Putingkahoy, about 15 kilometers away from Taal, at the margin of the 14-km radius danger zone initially redlighted by the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) for the immediate evacuation of residents.

Since Sunday, the Phivolcs has extended its hazard mapping to the 17-km radius and continues to flag the Alert Level 4 six days after, warning of a “possible hazardous explosive eruption… within hours to days.”

Since we moved to Silang more than five years ago, I have yet to glimpse the white trees after which the barangay is named. In last Sunday’s twilight, prematurely ushered in by ashfall mingling with the downpour, the eponymous white trees suddenly materialized all around.

Ash is a strange opponent. Wind, rain, and flood bring devastation in the blink of an eye; after a storm, though, we have cleared, repaired, and restored. And moved on.

As a metaphor for indeterminacy, the wind-borne ashes of Taal fit an environmental and political catastrophe that defies scientific forecasting or PR-finessing. Even the cats, feral and eternally watchful, favor napping on the pillows of ash that have accumulated under the trees. Dark congealed crusts drip from leaf blade like filigrees of oxidized silver and delicate lace.

Ashfall is experienced differently by farmers raising livestock and vegetables, “bakwits” (evacuees), rescue workers and volunteers, homeowners, scientists, town officials, journalists, and businessmen. Even the animals are stratified by ash: those with economic value like pigs and horses; and those without, like dogs and cats.

The indefinite delineates us.


Photo: Kitkat and her coat of ash, day after Taal Volcano’s phreatic eruption on January 12, 2020



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s January 19, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”