Culture

Buwad, Ginamos, and the Filipino

(As I write this, I’m seeing hundreds of doctors clearing their throats and shaking their heads disapprovingly.  However, I’d also like to imagine that there are a handful who would say that it’s all right to eat buwad and ginamos in moderation.)

They’re mainstays in the typical Filipino diet, along with rice, and are bound to be among the top three things most overseas Pinoys miss when they think of home.  They come in many varieties and preparations and are savored in every household of our archipelago from Batanes to Sulu, Siargao to Palawan.

Where the Roman gods and goddesses had nectar and ambrosia, Filipinos have buwad and ginamos.

With just these, there’s no limit to how much rice we can consume.  Except, perhaps, for the world food crisis.  But this is just to emphasize that a sliver of buwad or a teaspoon of ginamos can go a very long way on the Filipino dinner table.

In their basic process, pag-gamos and pagbuwad are merely ways of preserving the excess of a fisherman’s catch for the day.  Sometimes, though, they are sought and preferred even when fresh fish and other seafood are plentiful.  Both are begun with cleaning and salting but the ginamos are left to soak in a bottle or a jar for days or weeks and the buwad is left to dry under the sun until one gets the desired degree of dryness.  Not far from ginamos is tinabal.  The fish is salted heavily and left to season in its own juices.  Tinabal can be any size, from a labajan to a molmol but I don’t know if just about any fish can be tinabal.

For the farmer or any worker who needs to stock up on carbohydrates for a hard day’s work, ginamos is one of the cheapest ways to build up an appetite.  And what an appetite.  Have you ever tried to stop someone during a meal of ginamos bolinaw, inun-onang borot-borot, and mounds of rice?  Or of ginamos nga ojap sautéed with a few slices of pork and mounds of rice?  Or how about ginamos nga tagimtim, suka, lemonsito, and, again, mounds of rice?

The same is true with buwad.  The Filipino breakfast table seems incomplete without a plateful of buwad bolinaw, potpot, or mangsi fried crisp in edible oil or somewhat blackened after a few minutes on top of red-hot coals.  What is humbang nangka or nilaw-oy without flakes of buwad as subak?  And can you contemplate life without the delicacy of the buwad nokus or danggit.

And don’t get me started on tinabal.  Just imagine a heavily salted molmol about a week away from becoming ginamos.  How glorious would it be when it’s sautéed in oil, garlic, onions, and a lot of red, ripe tomatoes?

When I was still a kid, my father would sometimes joke, whenever we came upon a really good batch of ginamos, that it was tasty because it had fallen into a kanal, was retrieved from it, and then sold to us.  Even in those times that I believed the joke, I would still eat the ginamos.  In the years that have passed I’ve come to learn that the kanal joke is universal and that I was not alone in insisting to eat ginamos in spite of it.

Filipino humor has more to say on ginamos.  We know of a variety of preparations that have been shortened to suggest morbid execution.  There’s the classic gipusil, or ginamos pus-ag sili.  There’s also gipriso, ginamos pritohon nga solo, although I personally believe that it’s better when it’s gikahon, ginamos ug kamatis gisahon.  Then comes gidunggab, ginamos dungag gabi.  Lastly, there’s the dread gitook, ginamos tongtongag ok-ok.

Whether you believe in the kanal joke or not or have personally experienced gitook, if you want to be sure about how sanitary your ginamos is, you can always make your own.  You will need a glass jar, some small fish (your choice of kujog, bolinaw, or mubgas) or tagimtim or sisi, and some salt.  Rub the salt all over the fish.  How much salt you use will depend on your taste.  To this, you can add a few lemonsito leaves or a few cloves of ahos to make the ginamos fragrant.  Put the fish in the jar and let alone for days or weeks until ma-gamos na.  The procedure for making buwad is pretty much evident in its name, just keep it out of the reach of cats and other creatures.

One may be driven to eat them every day out of necessity or, if you’re better off, you can eat them as you please and by choice.  Whatever your status, buwad and ginamos have us Filipinos bound as one people.  It may be through our stomachs, but that’s not much further from our hearts.

Tags: buwad, dried fish, filipino, filipino food, fish paste, food, ginamos, salted fish