Is there a chili native to the Philippines?
The discussion among foodie friends about chili began with the question, “Is there a sili (chili) native to the Philippines?”
Someone suggested labuyo, those small deadly-hot chili peppers famously grown in Bicol, a province with the distinction of liking some of their dishes with chili (both green and red) and hot to the taste.
Gilda Cordero-Fernando wrote about how Bicolanos regard their chili in the chapter “Albay: The Hot Province” in “Philippine Food and Life” (Anvil Publishing): “During a typhoon [Bicolanos] prop up their chili plants first before they attend to their house. You can quickly repair your house, reasons a farmer, it takes so long to resuscitate a drowned sili.”
Columbus connection
We remember hearing Eddie Ilarde, the late Bicolano radio and TV star, say that they hold on to their pot of chili plant while the storm is raging.
In the same essay on Albay, Cordero-Fernando names the sili varieties—”siling pari,
priest’s chili, which is plump and rotund; siling Tagalog, long, green, pointed; siling labuyo,
small, fat, hot; siling pasiti, tinier and hotter.”
But no, the sili was brought by the Spanish through Mexico. And the man who brought sili
to Spain was Christopher Columbus.
Columbus, coming from the so-called “known world,” is said to have discovered chili in the West Indies (Caribbean islands) in 1492.
Raymond Sokolov, in his book “Why We Eat What We Eat” (Summit Books, 1991), wrote that the written accounts of the pepper were only during Columbus’ second voyage. The author also wrote that Columbus called the chili pepper. Why? Because he had “not yet found the lucrative black pepper from the Indies, hopes to compensate with chilies, so he calls them pepper and starts a worldwide nomenclature confusion.”
So the next round of chili question in the group was about the not-hot chili in the Ilocos. We told them that its name there is siling duwag,
though I still cannot find its scientific name. Chef Nic Rodriguez of Bistro Candon in Ilocos Sur served it in the pinakbet. At Sam Blas’ Saramsam Restaurant in Laoag, Ilocos Norte, we had adobong siling duwag.
Someone mentioned that the
Padron chili of Spain isn’t hot. We encountered that in the market of Galicia, the autonomous region in northern Spain, where it is called pementos de Padron. Padron is a province in Galicia.
Not all Padron, though, are mild. In one of the markets of Galicia, there were old women sorting the Padron. How can they tell? We didn’t ask when
we were there, though some have told us that you can tell by the smell.
Bicol theories
At one tapas bar, we were served fried Padron in olive oil served with salt. It is quite an adventure knowing that you may just end up with one that has been misclassified, but we did not experience it.
The other question that we have been asked is why Bicol is known for its spicy hot dishes. Some have put forward theories. One cites the humid weather of the province that needs chili to make a person sweat, which then cools the body.
That explanation is the opposite of what Columbus wrote the Spanish royal couple, Ferdinand and Isabella, as told by Sokolov, that the “West Indian islanders endured the cold of winter in their mountains ‘with the aid of the meat that they eat with very hot spices.’”
Cordero-Fernando was practically told the same thing that Columbus cited. She wrote that not all of Bicol likes spicy food, that the towns of Albay that ring the Mayon Volcano—Oas, Polangui, Ligao and Guinobatan— are cold areas so they need hot, spicy food to keep them warm. But she was also told that the males of those places are “supermacho” who like hot food. The writer, however, said, “we are more inclined to believe that coconut milk and chili are merely extenders in a province where many live a marginal existence.”
From ‘siling labuyo’ to ‘siling duwag,’ the variety of local chilies have their own stories