A Woman's Impression of the Philippines

by Mary H. Fee

Then follow meats innumerable, each with its own garnish, but without separate vegetables. There is goat’s flesh stewed with garbanzos, onions, potatoes, and peppers; chicken minced with garlic, and green peas; chicken boned and made to look and taste like breaded cutlet; boiled ham; a fat capon, boned, stuffed, and seasoned with garlic, his erstwhile proud head rolling in scarified humility; breaded pork chops; roast pork, with unlimited crackling; cold turkey; baked duck, and several kinds of fish.

There are no salads, but plenty of relishes, including the canned red peppers of Spain; olives, pickles, cheese, and green mango pickles. At intervals along the table are alluring glass dishes, filled with crystallized fruits.

After this come the sweets. There is no cake, as we know it, but meringues (French kisses), baked custard coated with caramel sauce, which they call flaon; a kind of cocoanut macaroon, the little gelatinous seeds of the nipa palm, boiled in sugar syrup, and half a dozen kinds of preserves and candied fruits. Tinto accompanies the supper, and possibly champagne.

As two or three hundred people are served on such an occasion, the intermission for supper is a long one, and dancing is not resumed till half-past nine or ten o’clock. It may then continue till midnight or dawn, just as the actions of a few important guests may determine. Filipinos are very quick to follow a lead; and if, owing perhaps to a concurrence of events which may be perfectly foreign to the occasion, a number of prominent people leave early, the rest soon take flight.

In one of the later years of my stay my good fortune led me to witness a wedding of another type, which differed from the class I have described as the simple rural gathering at home differs from the exotic atmosphere of a fashionable reception. It was just after my return from vacation that one morning a group of my pupils burst in, accompanying a middle-aged Filipina who hesitatingly made known her errand. Her niece, who lived some five or six miles up the river, was to be married that night, and a large number of people from town were going up. Could I accompany them, and would I act as one of the three madrinas for the occasion? As the bride was of an insurrecto family, whose name was familiar through bygone military acquaintances, I snapped at an opportunity to view the insurrecto upon his own (pacified) hearth, and after consuming a hasty lunch and packing a valise, I set out for the river bank where we were to rendezvous.

Our craft, a catamaran made by securing three barotos side by side and flooring them with bamboo, was the centre of great public excitement. It had a walk dutrigged at each side for the men who were to punt, or pole us up the river. It was roofed with a framework of bamboo, which was covered with palm, leaves and wreathed in bonoc-bonoc vines, and from this green bower were suspended the fruits of the season.—bananas, the scarlet sagin-sagin, and even succulent ears of sweet corn.

Cane stools were provided for a few, but many of the young people sat flat on the floor. When we were embarked, to the number of about forty, the barotos were so deep in the water that the swirling current was within an inch of their gunwales. A tilt to one side or a wave in the river would have sunk us.

The baggage and a few supernumerary young men and a mandolin orchestra were loaded into an enormous baroto, and ten sturdy brown backs bent forward as the boatmen pushed with all their strength against the great bamboo poles, which looked as if they would snap under the strain.

The river was swollen with three days’ tropical downpour and running out resistlessly in the teeth of a high tide. As we slipped out of the shallow water at the bank, the current caught us and hurled us fifty feet down stream. The baroto left apparently for the port, which was four miles away. Our valiant punters were useless against the river; but amid a hubbub in which every man, woman, and babe aboard, except one American man and myself, appeared to be giving orders, we got back to the bank and shipped an additional crew. This consumed time, because the spectators, who had seen what work it was going to be, were coy of enlisting. But at last we got away, eight men to a side, and the water perceptibly nearer the gunwales, and with infinite labor we succeeded in poling around a bend and leaving the town behind us.

But there we stuck again in a swift reach, and there were time and opportunity to marvel at the impenetrable green and silence of the nipa swamps. The banks—or rather limits of the current—were thickets of water grass six feet high, its roots sunk in ooze. Here and there a rise of ground betrayed itself in a few cocoanuts, the ragged fans of tall bouri palms, or a plume-like clump of bamboo and the hospitable shade of a magnificent mango tree.