Papaitan had always been the quintessential Ilocano dish, and one which best represented the qualities of its people: not immediately agreeable, but very warm and steadfast once you got to know them well; as well as ever slightly bitter.
The rain had been falling steadily on the craggy elevations that make up Luzon’s broad interior, swelling the creeks and tributaries and pouring into the rivers until they ran high and fast as they poured the muddy brown water into the sea. At La Union, where we stopped for lunch and cup of strong coffee, the waves curled and dashed themselves on the shore. Not a single surfer was in sight. We finished our cheese sandwiches and piled into the car to continue on the road northward, slowing when the visibility dropped down to the barest few meters in front of the windshield.
The road would take us north to Vigan, the capital of Ilocos Sur. The weather had been inclement since two days before, but we decided to proceed anyway—when traveling around the Philippines most of it is improvised on the spot, because there’s never a time when the weather is perfect or a local parade won’t crowd the thoroughfares or the whole city won’t get shut down because the two rival factions for the local government have decided to shoot at each other in the streets.
We were on a quest: or rather, two parallel quests. Neal Oshima was in search of, among other things, a rare fish called the bulidaw, which only appeared at this time of year and was highly prized among the wealthy Ilocanos; I was in search of the origins of papaitan, which to my mind had always been the quintessential Ilocano dish, and one which best represented the qualities of its people: not immediately agreeable, but very warm and steadfast once you got to know them well; as well as ever slightly bitter.
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To my mind, papaitan had always been the quintessential Ilocano dish, and one which best represented the qualities of its people: not immediately agreeable, but very warm and steadfast once you got to know them well; as well as ever slightly bitter.
The idea behind leaving Manila before the crack of dawn was that we would catch the sunset light as it curled itself over the old brick of Vigan’s graceful old mansions, but the only things curling were our toes as we hobbled out of the car into the lobby of the Hotel Luna. A radio somewhere was blaring, somewhat ominously, the refrain of “Hotel California” as we checked in. The hotel was a converted old house, with a courtyard that had, somewhat improbably, a swimming pool nestled in the tiny space; even more improbably, several families were serenely frolicking in it even as rainrops as large as gobs of spit continued to pour down from the heavens.
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One of the idiosyncracies of the old house being converted into a hotel was that the room had no windows—it technically had a window, but it looked out onto the same hallway from which I had entered. When you closed the blinds and turned out the lights the room was completely light tight, which I absolutely loved. All vampires should request for the windowless rooms at the Hotel Luna, which is named after the slightly insane general who fought in the Spanish-American war.
PHOTO: Neal Oshima
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An electric tram pulled up to take us to the nearby brewery, whose ownership is somehow connected to that of Hotel Luna; we trundled for what seemed like a very long time down the quickly darkening cobblestone streets. There was some roadwork going on in front of the hotel, which we discovered later was to put in new cobblestones to replace the ones that had been cemented over. We also later found out that it was about three minutes’ walk from the hotel to the brewery, but because of the roadworks and the one-way streets, the tram was forced to take a circuitous route through the warren of old houses, some of them well-preserved, most of them dilapidated and in various states of disrepair.
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After what seemed like a substantial journey through the heart of the city, we decanted ourselves at the Calle Brewery, where our hosts, Joey and Marco Viray, were waiting.
Entering the brewery from the cobblestone streets, lit so dimly they could have been gaslight, is a surreal experience: the light from the bar spills out onto the street, and you can hear conversation and laughter. We went inside and shook ourselves off like dogs. After being introduced to the Viray brothers, who had the quixotic idea of building a craft brewery in Vigan, we settled into the serious business. One’s trip to Vigan, after all, has not been consummated until you’ve eaten an empanada and hung the stained napkin outside your bedroom window.
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Joey ordered us all a “double-double,” meaning double sausage, double egg, with the normal amount of cabbage (which is substituted when green papaya is unavailable). All of this was wrapped in a pleasantly neutral colored wrapper, made out of rice flour, and fried until crisp. It was a pleasant surprise: I detest red-colored empanadas, tinted with atsuete, if you’re lucky, but most likely chemical food coloring. I’m used to tiny sponges of oil that you wring out briefly in a vat of sukang iloko, which does nothing to cut the fat—all that happens is you get all the fat plus heartburn from the acid.
The empanadas, which they had sourced from around the corner at a stall called CJ’s, were appropriately decadent without being soaked in cooking oil or stuffed with inappropriate, gimmicky things, including—wait for it—a vegan Vigan empanada. (Not that CJ’s is immune to the war of attention ongoing between the empanada makers in town; they offer the novelty of a footlong empanada.) It’s only after you’ve put an empanada inside of you, in our case accompanied by a generous serving of amber ale, that you can say you’ve arrived.
The cooking of Ilocos has always fascinated me, among other reasons because my father-in-law is from Nueva Vizcaya—although he lives in the States now, and cooks papaitan with tripe from the Vietnamese store and mail-order bile when we come to visit.
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The cooking of Ilocos has always fascinated me, among other reasons because my father-in-law is from Nueva Vizcaya—although he lives in the States now, and cooks papaitan with tripe from the Vietnamese store and mail-order bile when we come to visit. Inevitably both he and I get gout, and then he shares with me his prescription-strength pain medication, so that much of our time together is spent nursing swollen toes in a dreamlike state.
What kind of people would think of taking the partially digested stomach contents of a goat, wring it out, and make a soup from it? “That sounds like a good idea!” said no one ever, except for the Ilocanos. And this is why they lay claim to what has to be one of the most unique dishes on the planet, far more exotic than fertilized embryos, which the Romans ate; in fact they ate rabbit embryos for Lent. But I bet they took a pass on goat bile stew.
Ilocano food is known for its flavor profile of sour and fishy and bitter; the first two can be found throughout the Philippines, but liking bitter food is unique to the Ilocano palate. Our taste buds are extremely sensitive to bitter tastes, because they usually indicate that you are about to be poisoned; but we all do tolerate some degree of bitter, in coffee and tea, or a good IPA ale, for example.
The ampalaya, a staple of Ilocano cooking, is accepted throughout the Philippines, and pinakbet—where the bitter taste of the gourd and the fishy stink of bagoong dominate the other vegetables—has entered the national repertoire. Health-food gurus around the world are also endorsing the ampalaya, largely on the grounds that anything that tastes so appalling that’s edible must good for you somehow. But this is missing the point. Those who love bitter flavors don’t enjoy it for health benefits or to prove their virility.
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The ampalaya, a staple of Ilocano cooking, is accepted throughout the Philippines, and pinakbet—where the bitter taste of the gourd and the fishy stink of bagoong dominate the other vegetables—has entered the national repertoire.
There are different kinds of bitter, just as there are different kinds of sweetness: the round, satisfying sweetness of cane, the insidious mouth-coating sugar of fruit juices, the unpleasant simulacrum of high fructose corn syrup. Sinigang which is soured by something so quotidian as vinegar is deprecated, with tamarind the norm and exotic ingredients like batwan and guava. The kind of bitter that is prized by the Ilocanos is not the kind that you might get if you accidentally let a capsule of antibiotics melt on your tongue, for instance.
Probably the single dish that most exemplified the Ilocano love for bitter is the dish that literally bears the name, pinapaitan—“to have made bitter.” But while in Baguio you might order a dish called “papaitan” at one of the most famous restaurants that serves it, Balajadia Slaughterhouse, that consists of goat (sometimes beef, but preferably goat), the dish starts out being cooked in a bile broth. In Vigan, while we were in search of papaitan, everyone told us that we had to go to the post office. Even if we had no intentions of posting a letter or receiving a parcel? Go to the post office, they said.
Probably the single dish that most exemplified the Ilocano love for bitter is the dish that literally bears the name, pinapaitan—“to have made bitter.”
Every morning, in a semi-permanent structure of timber topped off with corrugated iron sheets but with the sides open to the elements, an army of women stood behind a number of pots bubbling over with a dark grayish green broth. They start cooking in the wee hours of the morning, and are ready to serve by 6 a.m., which is when you have to go to get the good parts. Which are the good parts? The eyeballs and the brain are the first to go, because they are the rarest. If you go at 8 a.m., as I did, they’ll still ask you which parts you want; I was able to get generous portions of the large intestine, with curly bits of fat between the large white blobs; small intestine, which the woman will cut for you into little tubes; and bits of kidney with the fat surrounding it—what the British know as suet and grate and mix in with steamed puddings. Everyone gets tender cubes of coagulated blood, soft like tofu and crumbling little flecks into the soup.
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The dish is made from boiled cow, rather than goat, and is known as sinanglaw (sometimes spelled sinanglao), and on the long tables where the diners huddled over the steaming bowls were tall containers of salt and bottles with a stopper filled with thick green fluid. The sinanglaw itself is quite mild, just a beefy broth soured with camias: it’s the bottles of green bile that are “papaitan” and they are made by taking the grassy contents of the freshly slaughtered cow from its stomach and wringing the digestive fluids and bile from it.
At the tables you could see the older Ilocanos liberally pouring the bile into their soup and stirring it in, while the younger couples put just a few drops or not at all. The taste for intense flavors of bile, it seems, is a generational thing. Without the papaitan, though, singanglaw is redolent of a bit of musk but otherwise just a mild beef broth cut with the acidic touch of camias and lightly salted. With a tablespoon or two, it’s ofally good.
At the tables you could see the older Ilocanos liberally pouring the bile into their soup and stirring it in, while the younger couples put just a few drops or not at all. The taste for intense flavors of bile, it seems, is a generational thing.
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I went back for more soup and tried to understand why they needed so many cauldrons. The women explained to me that some of the offal cooked more quickly than others, so they were taken off the heat quickly, while others were left to cook longer. The broth itself was kept at a constant boil. When you asked for a particular piece the women would dive into the cauldrons with a ladle and tongs to fish out a mysterious blob—or shrug apologetically if there wasn’t any left. By 10 there’s nothing to offer the diners except the unexciting “laman”—the muscle tissues—and before noon they’ve packed up and gone home. On Sundays it goes especially quickly because of the crowd that comes in after church.
To this day, I’ve never actually seen bile that’s actually yellow or black; but then I’ve never actually cut open a human.
Galen’s theory of humors, derived from Hippocrates, includes “yellow bile” and “black bile” as two of the four essential humors of human physiognomy, responsible for choleric and melancholy personalities, respectively. To this day, I’ve never actually seen bile that’s actually yellow or black; but then I’ve never actually cut open a human.
At the market the bile that they sell is always the same dark green color. In its most concentrated form, it comes as a very dark green liquid that they sell at most markets—but this is the pure bile, or abdo, that comes from the liver and is stored in the gallbladder. The wringing out of half-digested grass seems to be a more vernacular tradition; the “papaitan” liquid is not just bitter but slightly acidic, probably from the digestive juices.
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Another dish that uses the bile is ata-ata, a kind of beef salad—I use the word “salad” in its broadest sense, to mean a dish that is tossed together. Strips of raw beef are mixed with onions, garlic, and other aromatics, and then drizzled with papaitan, or a mix of papaitan and calamansi or vinegar, so that the meat turns white as the protein on the surface “cooks” in the acid and bile. There is some irony, of course, to the cow being digested by its digestive juices. We had this later in the trip, on a separate occasion, and I found the flavor of this quite enticing, especially as the bile was quite fresh (it was still warm)—but the meat was simply too tough to have with rice as a main course. I understand that it is popular as a a pulutan to have with beer, which would give one the leisure to masticate the strands of beef at length. Alternatively, if the beef were sliced very thin, like a carpaccio, it would go down quite well; in fact the flavor profile of the aromatics were quite close to that of a carpaccio, minus the bile of course.
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I was a little chagrined to find that this dish is not unique to the Philippines; in northern Thailand, it is known as “laab dib,” which also uses a mixture of the bile and the squeezed out stomach contents, called “pia”; the salad is then finished with a splash of fresh blood. But the bile stew seems to be a delicacy peculiar to the Philippines. Most of it is made from beef, which is a much friendlier version. But for real papaitan lovers it’s the version made from goat which is the pinnacle of the dish, and we were nearly about the leave when they found some for us. Less fatty, more acidic, and definitely grassier than its more urbane versions to be found in Baguio or even in the capital, where you can sometimes get lucky, it was an amazing, almost divine experience. And the best thing about it is that it contains digestive juices, so it washes down quickly, and in no time at all you’re hungry for the next meal.
The rain continued until Sunday morning, when we went chasing cockfights. There are two main cockpits outside Vigan, but we weren’t sure where the big fight was going to be; we drove through sodden fields until we saw a circular building in the distance, and as we got nearer we heard the shouting of the crowd and the stamping of feet on floorboards. It felt like we were arriving at a hanging. Which is perhaps not such a distant analogy: every community needs that ritualized dose of violence, whether it’s watching a Tarantino film or the Sunday morning cannibalism of partaking in Holy Communion, or watching a cockfight, which is basically a fight to the death, but by chickens.
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It felt like we were arriving at a hanging. Which is perhaps not such a distant analogy.
PHOTO: Neal Oshima
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The actual fight is over all-too-quickly. The birds fly at each other, wings flapping, and the razor-sharp knives tied to their legs do their trick. After a few minutes one of the birds has turned into a lifeless mop on the ground, covered with blood, and the winner is called out. A lot of money changes hands, mysteriously, and then the crowd is on to the next. The crowd was rowdy enough, but there were many empty seats and everyone kept looking at their watches. At a certain point they began to slink away to their motorcycles. “Sa kabila! Sa kabila!” The stakes were higher at the other side, apparently; we followed the crowd who bounced along the dirt roads to the other cockpit, this one a taller structure like an Elizabethan playhouse, but crammed to the rafters with men watching the fight. When the various odds of bets were called up to the crowd the roar was deafening.
I’ve never been much of a gambling man, and we weren’t here for the chickens. We had received a tip that the food at the gallera was one of the best places to try something beyond the usual staples of bagnet and longganisa that get rammed down the throats of the tourist crowds. There was a white bean soup with, not surprisingly, talbos ng ampalaya to flavor it with, but the soup base was long-boiled pig’s knuckle, which gave it a rich, sticky texture. There was the ever-present pinakbet, more sinanglaw, kilawin made from the skin of a goat, and plenty of rice and soup. Conspicuously absent were any dishes with thickened gravies.
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On the long tables there was bile, fish sauce, and a bowl of chilies. We finished our meal just as the last fight for the day ended and the swarm of winners and losers filled the tables; one of them was holding a dead cock upside down by its legs, its feathers smeared with blood, several deep stab wounds filled with dark coagulating blood. We asked what he would do with it. “Tinola,” he said. Not much else you could do with a muscular, wiry bird bred to fight.
“Tinola,” he said. Not much else you could do with a muscular, wiry bird bred to fight.
That afternoon we went on a search for bagnet. Everyone had a different idea where we should get bagnet—there was a place that specialized in bagnet just a few blocks down from our hotel, but it felt like a dive, with too many flies swarming around chunks of fried meat that seemed to have been sitting there for too long. Eventually we ended up at the market, where we assumed that they would overcharge us slightly, but we would get actual Ilocos bagnet, and not the curled-up bits of fat they foist on the tourists.
Real bagnet is a wonderful thing. A town south of Vigan called Narvacan is associated with it, and there is, inevitably, a bagnet festival in the town. In several sources that seem to be quoting from each other, the conquistador Juan de Salcedo was offered bagnet when he arrived in Narvacan in 1576. If this is true, or even half-true, what he ate would have been radically different from what is on offer today.
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The Philippines is believed to have four species of wild pig endemic to it, but mostly in Visayas and Mindanao. One night we were given some “wild boar”—in this case “boar” referring, not incorrectly, to any kind of non-domesticated pig—because we were looking for something interesting but the ant eggs were unavailable; at a stretch, this would have been the animal that ended up being served to Salcedo.
It differs from ordinary lechon kawali, which is simply fried pork belly, in two significant ways: that it is air-dried for some length of time; and second that it is slow-cooked in fat to preserve it, not just fried quickly to cook it.
PHOTO: Neal Oshima
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But the secret to bagnet is fat. It differs from ordinary lechon kawali, which is simply fried pork belly, in two significant ways: that it is air-dried for some length of time; and second that it is slow-cooked in fat to preserve it, not just fried quickly to cook it. In this way it is perhaps closer to a dish like confit de canard, in which a duck is cooked in fat over a low heat to preserve and tenderize it, rather than a lechon, where the aim is to not overcook the lean part of the meat while getting the skin to puff up and crisp.
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One bagnet maker claims to slow-fry the bagnet in the sinublan (a special cauldron for making bagnet) for three hours. The fat becomes mellow and creamy, the meat changes consistency to coarse strands of protein, and the skin becomes melting and soft. It’s at this point the bagnet is sold at the market and sits on the sideboard or, in more modern times, the refrigerator, and the frugal housewife can then cut a few slices as needed, fry it up to get it crisp, and then use it as a flavor base for a pinakbet.
Bad bagnet, on the other hand, is a terrible thing: curls of fat and rind, wound around a core of rock-hard lean meat. When you fry it to eat it it seems to seep up even more fat rather than rendering it, and no matter how long you fry it the fat never goes beyond being taut and unyielding and achieves the creamy, melting quality that the best bagnet has.
This is the restaurant of restaurants in Vigan: not only does it serve great authentic local food to tourists, it’s also the locals’ go-to restaurant for Italian and Japanese food.
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The die-hard way of eating bagnet is plain with rice, accompanied by a salad of chopped tomatoes and onions with northern-style bagoong—brown and runny, packing a strong punch. Those who attempt to put Mang Tomas sauce on bagnet should be shot. Even in Vigan it took several tries to get good bagnet—in the end we found what we wanted at that most touristy of all joints, Café Leona at the very top of Calle Crisologo. Even on a rainy night in the off-season, Leona was full; we took a number and waited. This is the restaurant of restaurants in Vigan: not only does it serve great authentic local food to tourists, it’s also the locals’ go-to restaurant for Italian and Japanese food. The menu is a few inches thick and includes a sushi boat and bagnet pizza, among other things.
We had to wait in a darkened terrace for 45 minutes until we got a table, though they let us order beers, so that by the time we staggered through into the restaurant we were already halfway buzzed. The crowd was a mix of locals and tourists, including a very jolly retired military man who told us, several times over, how he had once been an admiral in the navy and to never trust the Japanese.
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Before we left I considered going to the post office again, but even the locals warned me it was possible to have too much bile. I ordered brunch instead at Hotel Luna, pinakbet with bagnet and a side of rice. A little went a long way; the vegetables were full of crunch and flavor, and the ampalaya was unapologetic about blanketing everything with a gentle dose of bitter. Surrounded by resplendent art and crumbling architecture, this was as Vigan a moment as I was going to get.
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