Adobo is ‘paksiw,’ and other terms in Filipino food history

August 30, 2024

MANILA – The great historian and anthropologist of Filipino food, Doreen Fernandez, wrote many classics in her quest to promote the idea of Filipino food as a cuisine, rather than the simple food of a backwater country in Southeast Asia. In a sense, her work was in line with the work of the indigenization movements elsewhere in Philippine academia. Her influence on the transformation in Filipinos’ eyes of their own cuisine into something worthy of reverence cannot be overstated.

However, her discussion of adobo in the hugely important book “Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture,” betrays a common belief that seems to be based on language, and something that she avoided in all other cases. In fact, while the book itself is largely about native cuisine, the book takes great care in one of its chapters to show how certain foods and food terms from Mexico came to be in the Philippines. Which makes the entry on adobo rather curious to me.

Fernandez says that adobo seems to have been indigenized from Mexican adobo, but her only real rationale is the word “adobo” itself, after noting how divergent the actual foods are: one is pickled with spices, lemon juice, and condiments, while the other is pickled with vinegar and spices. There does not seem to be a clear relationship in a culinary sense. She also notes that the American food historian Raymond Sokolov thinks the term “adobo” was applied to a native Filipino cooking style by Spanish colonizers.

But we already know that preserving food in “suka” is common throughout the Philippines, for example with “kinilaw.” Kinilaw was actually indigenized by Mexicans as ceviche, when Filipinos were brought as enslaved shipbuilders to Mexico. Vinegar is a staple of