Baguio connections 13

THIS week, we start with my mother and her having to tell me how the Alabanzas all around Baguio are related. However, as fate would have it, I ended up having coffee with Marilou Guieb one day this past week, and I remembered then that her mother, who has passed, was an Alabanza. I thus posed to Marilou, instead of my mother, the question of how the Alabanzas are related, and Marlou and I talk some about her mother’s side of the family. I learned that, as far as Marilou knows, the Alabanzas roots are actually in Vigan.

Anyway, Marilou calls everyone Alabanza Uncle and Auntie. We end up focusing on longganizas, the famous ones from Vigan and the famous ones from Baguio. Marilou volunteers that the famous Alabanza longganizas, from the Alabanza’s meat store in the market – there has been an Alabanza meat store as far back a I can remember -- are derived from a recipe of her own mother, sister to George, father-in-law Nancy.

I volunteered that I was in Manila some weeks ago, and ran into some famous Dipasupil’s Baguio Longganizas at Rustan’s. The world, it can get really small. The family “sukis” for Baguio longganizas were the Dipasupils, the Alabanzas, the Arellanos.

Dipasupil’s was at the side of the old meat market, the Alabanzas had an inside store, Arellano’s was at the very corner itself of the market, if you were looking from that section where the sarisari stores were, beside the old Sunny’s, an old sidekick to the old Sunshine. If you were at that corner shoe store owned by the Parungaos I think, where they happened to sell Ang Tibay’s, I’m sure, the Arellano meat store was right in front of you.

As it also happened, I was at a lunch table this past week in Rosebowl, where we ended up talking about Baguio longganizas, and I was told that the famous Alabanza ones are what are served there. Next week, we start at that lunch table at Rosebowl.