This article and recipe have been corrected.
The journey was long and uncomfortable. I was hot, tired and desperately craving a strawberry Pop-Tart. A few of my classmates were off to Disney World for the week, but after a 22-hour flight, a delayed layover and a very bumpy three-hour van ride, I finally arrived for my first visit at my mother’s rural homestead in Central Luzon, Philippines.
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I’m half Filipino and half British, and my parents did their best to fold each culture into my life, so my knowledge of Philippine cuisine and customs was considerable, but this didn’t save me from the disorientation I faced. The land rippled with sugar cane and rice fields and the sun blazed brighter, more severe. I rode carabao instead of horses, played in a nipa hut instead of a jungle gym, and my canopy bed was really just a mosquito net draped over a worn-in mattress. It was all very wild and foreign for a mostly American girl.
In other words, there were no Pop-Tarts.
I woke up to the murmur of livestock and breathed in their scent with my eyes still shut. There was something else — the faintest unmistakable fragrance of sweet warm bread. I shuffled sleepily into the kitchen where I found my lola laying out steaming rolls. “Pandesal,” she whispered in her gentle cracked voice. Several of my cousins entered and I watched as they unclasped the lids of sundry spreads, all chattering away in a language I didn’t share.
Pandesal, a plush and pillowy yeast roll coated in breadcrumbs, is an everyday staple in the Philippines, humble and iconic. The word pandesal means salt bread in Spanish, but it’s really more sweet than salty. Many enjoy it for breakfast, dunking it into black coffee, warm milk or tsokolate (a thick and grainy hot chocolate). It’s complete on its own, but frequently enhanced with butter, coconut jam, chocolate spread, peanut butter or sweetened condensed milk. Every bite collapses softly in your mouth and sends crumbs sprinkling onto your lap.
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Each dawn, my lola and cousins performed the same ritual, and I soon found myself in the routine. It brought me comfort and in some remarkable way, language. Even though they couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak Tagalog, we found a way to “talk” through this morning ceremony, each answering in our own tongue.
To eat like a Filipino means eating multiple times a day, not just three square meals. Many will have a pandesal in the morning and then a sizable breakfast, called almusal, later with eggs, meats and, of course, rice. It’s not a meal without rice. For the most part, anything eaten without rice (pastries, noodles, sweets) is merely a snack, or merienda. What’s also great for merienda? You guessed it — pandesal.
Filipinos treat pandesal like the French treat baguettes. You don’t bake it, you buy it. Bakeries are common now, but back when my mom was growing up, smaller villages relied on traveling vendors. Bikes pulling insulated coolers bursting with hot and chewy pandesal would ride around the barrio, street to street, sounding their air horns like the alerting jingle of an ice cream truck.
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The cuisine is built on a surplus of cultures from Chinese to Malaysian to Japanese and beyond. If these are the walls, Spanish is the foundation. Nearly 80 percent of Filipino dishes can be traced back to Spanish origin, which is no great surprise given Spain ruled the Philippines for more than 300 years.
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The history of pandesal has a few plot holes, but it’s generally agreed that Spanish explorers introduced wheat bread to the Philippines in the 16th century. Before their arrival, the diet of the indigenous people centered on rice. Wheat wasn’t a native crop and still isn’t. With a mission to convert the natives to Catholicism, Spaniards initially sought wheat to make Communion bread. Eventually, they went on to design their adaptation of French bread, starring whole wheat flour. The outcome was a stiff and crusty bread called pan de suelo.
As people searched for a cheaper alternative, the dough became pliable, the bread became soft, and pandesal emerged. Then, in the 20th century, the cost of imported American wheat dropped lower than the price of rice. The production of wheat foods soared, and pandesal claimed its rightful place as the unofficial national bread.
Today, whenever I visit my lola, I still help her with the pandesal. We make the coffee and set out the spreads. She has learned bits of English over the years, but most of the time we don’t bother with it. Instead, we do what we know, because it’s our own made up language, and let pandesal do the talking.
Get the recipe: Pandesal
