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Social Icons. Ham and queso de bola Edam cheese start to fill the freezers and shelves. The hot chocolate is made from local tablea, which is a ball of ground-up cacao beans. It's usually heated and combined with water to make a traditional Filipino chocolate drink. The ham and cheese are often enjoyed with pan de sal, which is a Filipino bread roll made from flour, eggs, yeast, sugar, and salt.
These are noche buena staples. Noche buena? It's Spanish for "good night", literally, but in the Philippines, noche buena is steeped in cultural and religious significance. Three centuries of Spanish colonial rule included the imposition of Catholicism on the nation, creating a deep and lasting religious legacy.
For Filipinos, noche buena is the night, and the feast, before Christmas Day. More specifically, it is the meal eaten after hearing the midnight mass to welcome Christmas Day. It may seem odd to Westerners that Filipino families feast on ham and cheese at midnight before Christmas. It's important to understand that the Philippines is an economically developing country, and more than 90 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.
For many of these people, ham and cheese are luxuries that they cannot afford even once a year. When you hear and read about lavish noche buena spreads in the Philippines, they are found in the homes of the middle-class and upper-class families. Depending on the economic status and financial capacity, the ham-cheese-pan de sal-chocolate meal might be supplemented by other dishes, like these foods:.
Rice is, to Filipinos, what bread is to Westerners. For important occasions, rice is served in a very special way. While paella originally made its way into the Filipino diet as a byproduct of Spanish colonialism, it has since become a staple dish.
Saffron might not be a standard in Filipino cooking but we have our own ways of coloring and flavoring our paella. The practice of holding a fiesta dates all the way back to colonial times. Since our Hispanic colonizers were big on Catholicism and its rituals, the church pretty much presided over every aspect of community life. Prior to the actual feast, however, a series of nine-day prayers or novenas in honor of the patron saint were observed in church.
Fiestas might also have been as much a political exercise as they were a religious one. Preparations for the town fiesta normally took place months before, with pigs and chickens being earmarked for the occasion so that they could be fattened up. Lechon was a popular choice for the centerpiece since both the Spaniards and the Filipinos liked pork. The dinuguan was developed so that even the blood drained from the pig did not go to waste. Filipinos who lived in the Spanish colonial era were centuries ahead of the nose-to-tail movement since their colonizers kept the choice parts of the animals for themselves, compelling them to come up with ways to cook the remaining parts like the liver, intestines, etc.
Pancit, on the other hand, had been a staple since the pre-colonial days, back when Chinese settlers brought their noodle dishes over as their baon from the mainland. As evidenced by the Christmas carols that start playing in the malls in September, the Yuletide season is a big deal in the Philippines. And while the overall Christmas celebration in the country is a mish-mash of international and local influences, the prevailing one, at least when it comes to the Christmas Eve dinner, is Spanish surprise, surprise.
The Noche Buena actually came into being because the Spanish friars required Filipino churchgoers to fast until Christmas morning back in the 16th century.
Also, while the modern-day Christmas dinner is dominated by Spanish favorites like jamon and embotido, one crucial element does have purely Filipino roots: the kakanin.
Sweet, sticky, and rice-based, the bibingka and puto bumbong mainstays date all the way back to pre-colonial times, when natives would offer up glutinous rice cakes to their gods at the end of the year.
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