#adobonation

The undying mystery of “ADOBO”, the original name lost in history…maybe not

When one mentions quintessential Filipino food, “chicken or pork adobo” is the ubiquitous choice.

As we all know by now, and as has been written multiple times, the term adobo is from the Spanish word adobar, meaning “marinate”. And when the Spaniards arrived in the late 16th century, they probably found the natives using this cooking process, noted by some authors as written in Vocabulario de Lengua Tagala by Pedro de San Buena Ventura in 1613. I have not gotten hold of the book as it is stacked in some University libraries, like the Kroch Library Asia at Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY, USA.

Some more than 200 years later, adobo was written down again and published in the Tagalog-Spanish-Tagalog Dictionary, the Vocabulario de la Lengua Tagala (Noceda and De Sanlucar, 1860).

Searching inside the book, the word adobo can be found twice:

- in the Tagalog-Spanish section, within the De la Letra P., P antes de I., as

 PINALAM. pc. = Un gẽnero de adobo de venado con vinagre, y el linabus del labot. Vide Chinalan.

The word PINALAM is defined partly as “deer meat (venison) marinated in vinegar”.

I wonder, is PINALAM the old, long-lost original Tagalog word for the cooking process as encountered then by the Spaniards? Later, as we all know, it quietly evolved into the name of the dish itself of adobo. Interesting enough, yet not confirmed.

 - searching further in the Spanish-Tagalog section (Vocabulario Hispano-Tagalog), there is no mention of PINALAM. However, the word appears as PANALAM:

Adobo de venado con vinagre, PANALAM. pc.

with exactly the same meaning, “deer meat (venison) marinated in vinegar = PANALAM.

 PINALAM and/or PANALAM … can somebody tell me, or give me adobo for breakfast.

Sad to say, there is only the mention of vinegar in the venison, no other ingredients. I assume salt was widely available at that period in time and could have been added to the meat. The description is a far cry from the modern-day recipe with soy sauce, sugar, bay (laurel) leaves, garlic, black pepper, chilies and vegetable oil, etc.

I just wished somebody could have recorded when these ingredients were added, in a letter, in a recipe, in a book, on a leaf or on the wall. We know when the Portuguese/Spaniards came (1521), the Arab traders in 1300s and Chinese merchants in 982 AD or earlier (Newman, 2018), whom we owe the ingredients. Soy sauce was made in China around 2000 years ago, sugar cane from New Guinea travelled to Indonesia and Philippines, then to India around 3000 BC where it transformed into sugar and introduced to China in 800 BC. From Central Asia, most probably Arab traders to southern Philippines came bay (laurel) leaves; garlic, written in a Babylonian tablet recipe around 1750 BC; black pepper was mentioned in the Hindu epic poem, Mahabharata, written in 4th century BC (Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2018);

Only chilies were originally from the New World (Mexico), introduced by Spaniards to Portuguese traders, and as Vasco de Gama made it to India in 1498, spreading it to Thailand, China and Korea. But it is not certain whether Filipinos had already sampled the spicy fruits during Muslim occupation in the decades prior to the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan in 1521 (Anderson, 2016).

Sources:

Anderson, H.A. 2016. Chillies: A Global History. Reaktion Book Ltd., London. 150 pp.

 DK Publishing (Contributor). 2018. The Story of Food: An Illustrated History of Everything We Eat. DK Publishing (Dorling Kindersley), New York. 360 pp.

 Newman, Y. 2018. 7000 Islands: Cherished Recipes and Stories from the Philippines. Hardie Grant Books (London). 336 pp.

Noceda, J. de and De Sanlucar, P. 1860. Vocabulario de la lengua tagala compuesto por varios religiosos doctos y graves, y coordinado por el P. Juan de Noceda y el P. Pedro de Sanlucar. Ultimamente aumentado y corregido por varios religiosos de la orden de Augustinos calzados. Publisher: Reimpreso en Manila: Impr. de Ramirez y Giraudier. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/miun.aqj5903.0001.001. 642 pp.