We visited Dingle, a town, a couple of hours travel from Iloilo City. Dingle was founded in 1907 as inscribed at their ingress’ landmark. The place also prided itself of their Century-old Roman Catholic Cathedral built in 1886. The vintage structure is walled with massive cut stones and marbles, could be an immortal testament of the town’s glorious past. I surmised that it was the common pattern for the founding of any towns during the Spanish days, the primal criterion in the birth of a town was the vigor of its religious community. The township status during those times was always derivative to the thriving and sustainable growth of the local Kapilya (chapel) of the Spanish friars. The large Archdiocese of Panay during those times has had unimaginable control over many small dioceses and parishes scattered throughout the Island.
In Dingle, we were fortunate, a local vendor passed by, she was selling an uncommon sweet delicacy, called Nilugaw and sold at ten pesos for every Styrofoam cup. Nilugaw is prepared by mixing milled rice cereals (malagkit), coconut milk, gabi, glutinous elements, cooked together and sweetened by white sugar. Many of these native sweet delicacies are becoming rare and forgotten; only a few of these have survived in modern times .And only few remnants of old folks have kept these priceless treasure of old time recipes; the young must be inquisitive to coax their grandparents to display those strange and uncommon classic gastronomic favorites, those rare panghimagas which only appear during town fiestas and our dwindling family gatherings.
In Guimaras Island, while leaving the port of Jordan, we gave a treat to our insatiable palate with their local delicacy called palitaw – a steamed cupful paste of malagkit, glued on green banana leaves and sold at ten pesos apiece, a sprinkle of grated coconut meat and aromatic sesame seeds mixed to a spoonful dark-brown Muscovado sugar, all these have garnished the raw palitaw. Spoon is unnecessary because one can just lick and devour the palitaw right from the banana leaves conveniently placed over the glutton’s palm of hand.