WHAT DO THE MANGYANS OF MINDORO EAT?
By: Mickey Fenix
Philippine Daily Inquirier
January 12, 2006

A reddish drink was identified as gumamela juice. If that doesn’t make you curious, I don’t know what will.

Listed as one of the drink selections on the menu of the Mangyan Exhibit luncheon at the M Café of the Ayala Museum, the juice is reportedly produced by the Sisters of the Holy Spirit.

Students of the College of the Holy Spirit (once Holy Ghost College) were always made aware of the Mangyans of Mindoro. Our nuns, German and Filipino, made sure we supported their missionary work among these indigenous people. We either gave part of our small allowance or sent our old clothes.

So when the invitation was sent to view a Mangyan exhibit (ongoing until Jan. 23) and taste the food at the Ayala Museum, I remembered my alma mater. And now, I was curious because the nuns never really said much about the Mangyans or their culture. My sparse information never got beyond their unique writing system.

The Mangyan script was there, the syllabic writing system etched with a knife on bamboo. And so were the clothes, skirts made of long strips of dark nito (black fern) wound around a woman’s abdomen up to her thighs, like a series of hoops.

The Mangyan women we met that day, however, wore woven skirts and blouses with cross patterns, the costume of a particular tribe called the Hanunuo.

What struck many of us was how similar Mangyan art was to that of other indigenous peoples in the country. The beadwork, for instance, had almost the same patterns. The basket weaves looked almost the same. We learned of another similarity when someone mentioned the Mangyans’ liking for canned sardines.

The Aetas and the Bagobos of Davao also love sardines. They will gladly exchange their native chicken for them. Aetas and Mangyans advertise their having had a meal of the coveted sardines by using the remaining oily tomato sauce on their hair. Lowlanders find this difficult to understand and deride the cultural communities for the practice.

The inadequate amount or total absence of fish in their diets may explain this fondness for sardines. Canned fish is also portable, has long shelf life and tastes different from what is on their daily menu. It’s a prestigious item because sardines don’t come free.

Owning and eating canned sardines show that someone either had money or had something good enough to barter.

Sardine patties

And so, at the exhibit, it was the first item on our menu—sardine cakes with kaffir aioli. I wondered if the Mangyans with us would appreciate this kind of transformation—pressing sardines into patties, frying them and then flavoring with an unfamiliar kind of lime.

For the others attending the lunch, it was explained that it’s not Mangyan cooking we were to taste. The menu only featured specific ingredients used by Mangyans.

Lolita Delgado Fansler, Mangyan Heritage Center board of trustees’ president, also informed us that the ingredients were also not sourced from Mindoro because the Mangyans didn’t produce enough and, even if they did, the recent floods in the province would make it impossible to bring those to Manila.

The transformation at the Museum Café was done by Sau del Rosario, veteran chef of many restaurants. The sardine cake was treated like crab cake and served with arugula salad and beetroot vinaigrette.

On one side of the plate was the Mangyan letter for M. It could have stood for Mangyan, museum or, and I would have been really flattered, my first name. Our place mats had the Mangyan syllabic script and instructions on how to write our own names.

Poetry

In between courses, we had more information regarding the Mangyan culture. Perhaps the most beautiful was a recitation of an ambahan, a Mangyan poem with a meter of seven syllable lines, by Antoon Postma, the expert on the community’s culture and its indefatigable promoter, researcher and translator. We had a creamy soup of kabatse, their word for patani (lima beans). The kabatse espresso was served with roasted kamote. The main dish was a mix of so many ingredients—poached chicken, upo salad, ube ravioli, kalabasa fritters, pesto sauce. And then a bread stick, black sesame seeds embedded into it. I suppose the chef had so many ingredients to work with and had to use them all. Finding out that black sesame seeds were part of Mangyan ingredients was a surprise and I thought how those seeds were considered exotic by chefs. For dessert, it was banana and kasuy worked into a chocolate mousse in a tart shell and tasting like a banoffi pie.

It might seem odd to many people that we were not served genuine Mangyan cooking. Fansler explained that the Mangyan had basic roasted and boiled food, with salt for flavoring. So she thought that if café diners were made aware of the ingredients that Mangyans used, they might become curious enough to see the exhibit, too. Or the other way around.

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