Kiping: Ornamental, Edible Rice Wafer by Reynaldo Alejandro and Vicente Santos
When I was in middle school, I occasionally tagged along on my dad’s business trips to Quezon province. I mostly remember snippets: waiting in the car while he chatted with a client, stopping by the wet market to pick up kilos of Lucban longganisa (we certainly couldn’t go home without some), and going to Buddy’s - the real reason I always came back.
Buddy’s was the first place I ate pancit straight out of a messy mound on a banana leaf. It was filled with vegetables and clumpy bits of longganisa, perfuming the air-conditioned restaurant with wafts of oregano and garlic, and the scent of crispy pata (mostly from my dad’s plate). Here, I doused everything I ate with vinegar from the squeeze bottle on the table - I had no idea why their vinegar tasted so good. I remember Buddy’s being bright, airy, and filled with colour, from the illustrated menu boards above the counter, to murals of rice fields on the walls, and fruit-shaped paper napkin holders on top of polished wooden tables etched with yellow sunflowers.
Pahiyas was everywhere at Buddy’s, and as a city kid who’d never really been to a big town fiesta before, our visits were the closest I got to what the real Pahiyas Festival was probably like. I still haven’t seen the main procession with the beautiful floats, but my dad and I did manage to time one of our last visits the weekend prior to the actual ‘pista’ held every year on May 15th.
Presuming this year is an exception, what will next year’s festival look like, I wonder?
In the meantime, now’s a good time to learn about kiping!
The foodways of Quezon
In social sciences, “foodways” is a term that describes how the history, traditions and culture of a certain place influence the food that comes from that area. Let’s break this down by looking at the history of Lucban, the tradition of paying tribute to patron saints, and how this has influenced local culture in the form of kiping and “making jewels of what you have”.
This book is a compact 28 pages, with about half devoted to full-colour photographs and artwork. According to local folktales, Lucban was founded in the late 1500s by a group of hunters who, at the end of an unsuccessful hunt, came across a pomelo tree, called “lukban” in the local dialect. Sitting on top of the pomelo tree, the hunters saw a pair of white egrets - the auspicious “salaksak” - with feathers white as clouds and graceful, long legs, distinct from other birds. Captivated by their beauty, the hunters decided to make the land of the lukban their home.
Following colonization, the Spanish clergy declared that town fiestas were to be celebrated on the feast day of the saint which the local church or cathedral was dedicated to. In Lucban, the 400-year-old church in the centre of town is named after a French priest known here as San Luis Obispo.
However, for generations, locals have chosen instead to celebrate their town fiesta in honour of someone else - San Isidro Labrador, the patron saint of farmers and good harvests. For villagers whose lives revolved fully around farming and the production of food, as Alejandro and Santos write, “it is easy to see why the story of San Isidro moves the hearts of farmers”.
According to the tale of San Isidro, he was born into a peasant family around the year 1070. Neighbouring farmers noticed that the fields tended by Isidro somehow always yielded a larger harvest, despite the fact that the young farmer spent more time in church than tilling his fields. Outraged, the farmers ratted San Isidro out to Juan de Vargas, their landlord, and Vargas in turn followed Isidro around.
He confirmed that Isidro basically spent the whole morning in church, while other farmers had already been working the fields for many, many hours. Upon following Isidro to his plot, the story goes, Vargas found heavenly angels plowing the land. The “prayerful farmer" spotted his landlord and invited him for a walk, and soon, unaccustomed to the hot sun (though perhaps also due to their encounter with angels), Vargas became incredibly thirsty. Isidro struck a heavy rock with his spade, and it’s said that water gushed forth to create a brook. “Overwhelmed,” Alejandro and Santos write, “Vargas dropped to his knees before the poor farmer.”
I find great value in learning about these stories, as they reflect the beliefs that specific communities have held deeply over time. Even today, if you search for “Pahiyas Festival” images online, you’ll eventually come across a house or float that depicts three figures huddled together. This iconography, Alejandro and Santos explain, “is that of an 11th-century farmer, holding a rod or spade, with a wealthy landlord kneeling before him and an angel holding a plow pulled by one or two bulls”, though Filipinos have modified this last part to depict a pair of carabao.
But how did this festival transform into the explosion of colour it’s known for?
In Tagalog, which the Lucbanin dialect is based on, “hiyas” refers to jewels, while the word “pahiyas” means to offer something precious - “pa” being a prefix that turns the noun “hiyas” into an adverb describing how the action of giving thanks is performed.
In Lucban and nearby towns, locals express this gratitude by offering what they consider most precious to them. Townsfolk decorate the exteriors of their homes with agricultural products from their “linang”, or patch of land, to celebrate the abundance of a good harvest blessed by San Isidro.
“The houses are adorned with…stalks of rice; fruits like bananas, coconuts and pineapples; vegetables like chayote, eggplants and string beans, carrots, radishes and various gourds and root crops…used as decor, whether bundled up to connote plenty, stringed and hung like buntings or curtains, or used to form figures or words, in the richest, most grateful display,” Alejandro and Santos write.
The significance of kiping
As a primary feature of the Pahiyas Festival, Alejandro and Santos note that kiping “is possibly the best reflection of the religio-artistic soul of the jovial Lucbanin”. And unlike other art forms developed around religious festivals (i.e. paper-mache for the Higantes Festival), “kiping seems to have originated from within, without any relation to the other popular arts in Asia and in Spain,” the authors add.
Kiping is essentially a thin wafer made of rice flour, often with liquid pigments added into the crepe-like batter to produce a dazzling display of colours. I imagine these pigments were once extracted from brightly coloured produce and native plants, but these days most use commercial food colouring.
To make the batter, polished white rice is first soaked in water, then ground (traditionally with a stone mill) to make galapong, best described as a wet, slightly coarse rice flour. After mixing the soaking water back in with the flour, colour is added into the batter.
Kiping makers then prepare a bamboo steamer lined with cloth or banana tree bark, called “saha ng saging”. Next, they prepare the broad, oblong-shaped, thickly-veined leaves of an abundant local tree called “kabal” (aka the ‘false coffee tree’) to use a mould for the kiping. Batter slowly gets poured onto the smooth, top side of each leaf, and allowed to drip until just a thin layer of the kiping batter remains. Then it goes into the steamer for no more than 3 to 5 seconds. But, as each kabal leaf is approximately the length of a forearm (it’s quite a large plant), this step of the process takes a lot of time and effort - it involves individually steaming hundreds, if not thousands, of kiping wafers to a decorate a single house or float. From interviews that I found on YouTube with local TV stations, I see some families start prepping their kiping in December - four months before the festival begins.
I honestly can’t wait to visit with a small film crew. Someday!