Pinoy Kasi
Wraps and rolls
By Michael Tan
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:24:00 09/17/2008
Filed Under: Food
I’m going to be shameless and plug the September 2008 issue of Food magazine, which carries an article I did about Chinese food and a family recipe for Hokkien “lumpia.”
“Family recipe” makes it all sound rather exotic and secretive, but a “lumpia” is a “lumpia,” and good ones are made from years of making them. When I interviewed my mother and aunt for the recipe, I asked about measurements, and they said you just know how much you need.
People know what to cook, how to cook. Then crazy anthropologists and food magazines come around trying to put it down in writing and analyzing it to death. Which is what I’ll be doing today with regard to lumpia and similar foods, which are now generically called “wraps” and “rolls.”
I’ve wanted to write about these wraps and rolls for some time now, mainly because they offer a convenient alternative for our packed schedules in modern society. In other words, they’re fast foods, but of a healthy kind, and they offer many possible variations, so important when you try to get picky children to eat.
‘Pansitero’
The wraps and rolls remind us that fast foods aren’t a recent phenomenon. All cultures seem to have thought up ways of getting nutritious food prepared and served fast. As I explain in my Food magazine article, even the word “pansit” originally meant “readymade food” (from the Hokkien pian sit), sold by Chinese “pansiteros” [noodle makers/sellers]. The noodles (“mie”) were, no doubt, part of the convenience foods and somehow eventually came to be called “pancit.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if the pansiteros also sold lumpia. Preparing the fillings was laborious, but once you had it all mixed up, it was easy to dish out: putting the filling into the rice flour wrapper, popping in garnishing and a sauce and wrapping it up. Visit Salcedo’s weekend market or the Lung Center Sunday tiangge and look for Yen Ching, where they’ll wrap up a lumpia for you within a few minutes, as good as the ones I had as a child, in family reunions. Do go early though; sometimes as early as 10 a.m. they run out of lumpia.
Lumpia can be a complete meal, and you can experiment on the fillings. The original, like so much of Southern Chinese and Southeast Asian food, has pork but you can throw that out easily and add more vegetables. Lumpia, after all, has evolved in the hands of Filipinos: fried “lumpiang shanghai” (which is really shrunken lumpia with more pork), “lumpiang ubod” (heart of coconut palm) and what I call the Oblation lumpia (“lumpiang hubad”).
Ready to get more adventurous? Try Vietnamese spring roll wrappers. They’re much thinner than our lumpia wrappers, and have many more possible uses. The Internet is full of recipes for Vietnamese spring rolls but the Vietnamese themselves use the wrappers as a side dish, to wrap vegetables, fish, meat.
‘Burritos’
Halfway around the world, you find, throughout Latin America, variations on the tortilla. The name is actually Spanish and means “little torta,” torta being a cake or an omelet (a meaning we adopted in the Philippines). The tortilla wrap, however, dates back to pre-Hispanic times. The tortilla is a staple, eaten with each meal, with many variations from one region to another. The burrito (“little donkey”) is a tortilla wrapped around a filling, then lightly grilled or steamed. The filling varies: refried beans, rice, meat. There’s even a breakfast burrito with scrambled eggs, potatoes, onions, chorizo and bacon.
The burrito has taken off in the United States, especially in California, where restaurants offer a bewildering variety of choices. The tortilla itself now has varied “flavors,” for example, spinach, or salsa. The fillings vary as well: lots of different vegetables, mushrooms, cheeses. New Age health food restaurants will urge you on with sesame seeds, “tauge” (mungbean sprouts), cilantro (“wansoy”), lime juice. Anything goes here. Postmodern California style, you can add mayonnaise, sour cream, mustard or even “wasabi” (the fiery Japanese horseradish paste).
Ready to move on? Across the Atlantic, you get another kind of flat bread, called pita, used in Greece and the Middle East. Some linguists say pita and pizza came from the same root word, both meaning “pie.” Again, it’s a convenience food. You use it to scoop up dips like humus (made from garbanzos and a sesame paste), or to wrap up meats and vegetables to make kebabs, gyros or falafels. Some pitas even come with a ready-made pocket, like a kangaroo pouch.
Move on eastwards into South Asia and you have “roti,” which has spread throughout the world courtesy of the Indian diaspora, and has taken many new forms. The roti is used to dip into, or scoop up food. A variation, chapatti, is taken mainly with “dal” (lentils) or soups. Filipinos will love the “roti canai” of Malaysia and “roti prata” in Singapore, where condensed milk is drizzled over the roti to make a dessert. (Just writing that gives me a toothache.)
Food wisdom
There you have it. Wraps and rolls are convenient to prepare, and taste much better than sandwiches. They’ve evolved, culturally, as a take-away complete meal. In fact, I’m always amazed at how cultures combine these wraps to provide carbohydrates (from the flour used to make the wraps) and proteins (from the fillings).
There’s more to all this food wisdom. The corn tortillas have to be prepared by soaking corn in lime water, which allows the skin of corn kernels to peel off. But more than that, this process liberates niacin (vitamin B3) and an amino acid called tryptophan. When people mainly rely on corn as food, without the processing done for corn tortillas, they are unable to get the niacin they need, which results in a serious disease called pellagra. The corn tortilla preparation was therefore a wonderful example of nutritional adaptation.
Anyway, now that you know of the range of wraps and rolls, you might want to check your supermarkets and weekend “tiangge” (flea market) for what’s available. I’ve been able to buy roti, tortillas, Vietnamese spring roll wrappers and pita in various stores right here in the Philippines.
Junk the instant noodles and the burgers and fries, and do a wrap and roll. The more enterprising among you might even want to start restaurants offering these 21st century convenience foods to office workers.
Won’t Filipinos miss the rice? Now, who says you have to exclude the rice? Vietnamese spring rolls have noodles inside and Mexican burritos have rice and beans, so who says you have to exclude rice from a Filipino wrap?
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Email mtan@inquirer.com.ph
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