Filipino ingenuity

Source: Daily Inquirer
MANILA, Philippines -- Ever heard of a softdrink can that was converted into a cooking stove?

I could hardly believe my eyes when I was shown one by our host, Sonie Altavas, in Roxas City.

She was passing through the wet market when she saw vendors cooking their food by the roadside. It looked, she said, like a small gas stove with blue flames emanating from holes punched on the side.

The fuel? Denatured alcohol like what is used to warm up chaffing dishes on buffet tables.

The roadside cooks told Sonie that they used the converted stove to cook their meals. A bigger version for bigger pots that need more heat uses three softdrink cans.

In her kitchen, Sonie uses the innovative stove to boil water. That’s how long a full load of denatured alcohol lasts.

Milk-can stove

At the Dumaguete Buglasan festival, a food vendor in the exhibit area cooked on a big baby milk can that served as a stove. Its top was cut to fit a small milk can. The smaller can had a batter mix that in a few minutes became cassava bibingka.

The principle is the same as with cooking puto bumbong. There is the usual improvised tin stove and on top the small bamboo tubes where the purple puto batter will steam.

At the duman festival in Sta. Rita, Pampanga, I found out the big milk can can also be used to cook puto bumbong. So from north to south, people apparently have the same idea.

My Dumaguete hosts also told me that the vendors selected a certain brand of small milk can because it didn’t rust. I suppose it has something to do with the coating in some of them.

Butter can for ‘puto’

In Iloilo, Edilberto Acla showed me an empty plastic can of butter that had been recycled as his cooking container for puto lanson, the Ilonggo version of the cassava cake. Behind him was a halved water drum where some pieces of peeled cassava were soaking for next day’s batch.

The halved water drum is a bigger version of the kerosene can used as a stove in Talisay, Cebu. We found the contraption after following someone’s directions to where the wonderful cassava cake she was holding was being done.

Round the corner, an old woman was cooking those cakes in round tin containers on top of the converted kerosene can.

In Guimaras, the cooking stove for making the tultul, the block salt, is made up of two hardened rows of sand. But the cooking vessel is a tin sheet from a cooking-oil tin can.

Tultul-maker Serafin Ganila said the oil cans had their four sides cut and were then sold. He buys those, an added cost that keeps going up. He raises the corners so that the filtered salt water can be held while cooking.

Most famous

Perhaps the most famous cooking vessel is the llanera, also known as the flanera because it is where leche flan is cooked. The oval tin container is also used when Lukban, Quezon folks do their jardinera, their meat loaf dish.

I was told that the oval can of sardines must have been its predecessor because there were puto shaped like that in some provinces.

But during Christmas, I always wait for the llanera that holds the ube halaya of Mang Gusting, my grandmother’s driver who had retired. I’m sure the llanera wasn’t where the ube was cooked because I always helped lola do it, stirring the thickening halaya in a big kawali.

On market days and during the fiestas of Iloilo towns, there are stalls that make bibingka. These are cooked in what look like a tin cabinet with drawers where the bibingka is placed.

It is a simple, serviceable contraption that is portable. As in all bibingka cookers, there is fire above and below.

We bought those bibingka as soon as they were cooked because the pieces are never as good when allowed to cool.

In Mohon, whose bibingka is known throughout Iloilo City, the business is good that’s why the oven is bigger thus not portable. But it is the bibingka to have because of the amount of buko strips each piece contains.

All those ingenious contraptions were made out of necessity. There’s no extra money to buy equipment so you look around and just use what is available around you, tweak it a bit and you have what you need—a stove, a cooking vessel.

Sometimes, you can spare some money and buy what somebody else built, nothing fancy but again, serviceable and portable.

Whenever I see those made-up, improvised equipment, it reinforces my faith in Filipino creativity.

No need for recycling programs in this country. We’ve been doing that for ages.