Festive food
Filipinos share traditional dishes
As a holiday special, Journal Pioneer reporters are featuring some Christmastime cuisine from different cultures. The first in the three-part series focuses on a Filipino dish.
Editor’s Note: As a holiday special, Journal Pioneer reporters are featuring some Christmastime cuisine from different cultures and the people who prepare the yuletide dishes. This is the first in a three-part Festive Food series.
Angel Bayarcal Aylward is placing a lot of hope in Santa Claus, or his representative, to deliver her a new deep-fryer for Christmas.
Since moving to P.E.I. from the Philippines nearly three and a half years ago, Aylward had grown accustomed to using a deep-fryer for cooking her traditional Filipino dishes. With a deep-fryer, it’s easier to regulate the temperature of the hot fat and it’s safer, too, she notes. However, as she and her friends prepared for a big preChristmas Filipino Feast at the Tignish Parish Centre recently, the lumpia-making team had to resort to cooking their popular dish in an open pot.
About 40 Filipinos, mostly fish plant workers in Tignish and area, recently prepared traditional dishes for the big feast, a meal they were sharing with invited Canadian friends and co-workers.
Lumpia is served as a finger food or as one of the ingredients in a meal which almost certainly would include rice.
Once the wrappers are loaded
and rolled, they are normally cut into two to three pieces before deep-frying. They can also be frozen raw and then dunked, still frozen, into the hot fat. Aylward recommends against freezing cooked lumpia, as they lose their desired crunchiness. She and her team, which includes Jocelyn Romero and Marjorie Benignos, were in charge of supplying the lumpia for the pre-Christmas meal. It’s a popular dish in the Philippines at Christmastime and for other special occasions, they note.
Their Canadian friends call the dish spring rolls.
“It looks like spring rolls,” said Aylward, but she insists that’s
the only similarity. She’s proud of the traditional dish, a recipe passed down from her mother. How many would one consume in one serving?
“It depends, because we have rice,” she answered.
“If there is no rice, more than five,” Benignos suggested.
Evidence of the dish’s popularity, was that it was a musthave for her wedding reception when she married Derek Aylward in Tignish in October 2016. She and her friends prepared 500 of the tubular-shaped treats, and there were no leftovers. The friends use lumpia wrappers they found at a Chinese food store and said they are
similar to the ones they use back home.
They are crepe pastry skins, thinner and larger than the eggroll skins used locally.
The key ingredient for the filling is ground pork, which is combined with chopped onion, carrots and bell pepper.