Epifanio de los Santos’ 1921 fish list

As a boy, I wondered why my mother preferred the wet market instead of the clean, air-conditioned comfort of the supermarket. She claimed that ingredients sourced from the wet market were better, fresher, than the items already priced and neatly packed in plastic at the supermarket. I believed her, at least when it came to fish, because the supermarket displayed mountains of dead fish on crushed ice, while the market, literally wet, teemed with all kinds of fish sold live from metal batya or aquariums.

Dead or dying fish were neatly laid out on ice, regularly bathed with water from a dipper, and that was how I was taught to open the side of a fish head to check the color of its gills — red as the marker of freshness. I also learned how to distinguish crabs by gender and knew males had a lot of meat, while females had less meat but gave luscious golden aligue or crab fat. One did not choose from the binary genders and only bought the bakla, a cross between the two that was meaty with aligue.

One could bring live fish home from a wet market, stored in a plastic bag with air; or have it killed, cleaned and ready for cooking. At Seaside Market in Pasay, you could choose the fish or crab from the wet part of the market and bring it to one of the stalls in the dry part of the market to be cooked and enjoyed on-site. Only at Seaside did I see live freshwater eel (palos), which I had cooked in coconut milk (gata) or stewed plain in a mix of assorted spices and soy sauce.

Once, I brought a live one home to the horror of our kitchen help, who mistook it for a snake. The eel jumped out of the sink and could not be caught because of its slimy, slippery skin. Nobody knew how to kill the poor creature, and from then on I learned that the best way with eel is to bring it home cooked and ready to eat.

Knowing how limited the fish selection is at our supermarkets and groceries, I always took pride in knowing more than the staples: milkfish (bangus), galunggong, grouper (lapu-lapu), sardines (tuyo when dried), tanigue, salmon, tuna, tilapia, pampano, danggit, espada, bisugo, dalag, hito (catfish), etc. My mother sourced freshwater fish from the market — ayungin, bia and banak — that she remembered from her childhood in prewar Taguig.

She made a killer dish of small, hard-to-eat bia in a tasty yellow soup produced from stewing the fish in coconut milk and yellow ginger. I got a sense of my mother’s childhood, a sense of her world, from the food she cooked, and the strange things she brought home from the market, like the disgusting colored yesa and mabolo, a stinky fruit that, like okra, was covered with a light fur.

Epifanio de los Santos’ 1921 fish list had many names that even wet market fishmongers today might not know, because these are not readily available or desirable. For example, I believed there was only one type of bia (Gobidae), but there were: bia bia bunog (Gnatholepis deltoides Seale), biang-itim (Glossogobius biocellatus Cuv. Et Val) and biang-puti (Glossogobius giuris Ham. Bunch.).

The list under “B” alone, when read aloud, can be a tongue twister: baga-baga, bagaong, bakoko, balang o pez volador (Excoetidae), balila, banak (Mugil cephalus Linn.), bangokngok, barangan, bikuda, bidbid, bonito, buan-buan, buguing, bungayngay, butete (Tetraodontidae) and buteteng saguing (Spheroides lunaris Bleck et schn.).

Too bad this column space cannot contain the complete De los Santos list.

The 1921 De los Santos essay on fish and the fish industry was a reminder that there is, or was, a lot of fish from the past we don’t know about today. It reminded me of how different my world is from the Philippines before Magellan. Pre-Spanish Filipinos lived near the sea and rivers; then, as the Spanish renewed the face of the earth, they moved populations inland, making the people lose a part of their world.

Nick Joaquin says that among the greatest events in Philippine history are the Spanish introduction of the wheel and the building of roads and bridges to cope with an archipelago of islands separated by water. However, before the Spanish contact, insular people understood their world as a group of islands connected by water. Pre-Spanish people traveled on water, their highways and roads being the sea, rivers and waterways that connected rather than separated the islands. A paradigm shift indeed.

Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu