August 14, 2022
On a Sunday morning ritual, when I was sharing my lunch recipe on Facebook, my friend Richard from Manila sent me a message with a photo of a bottle labeled “Purung Talangka”.
“Sir, orig ba to,” he asked. Through a decade of friendship, Richard has gotten familiar with Kapampangan cuisine and considers Pampanga his second home. He asked me to check if his neighbor’s crab paste was genuine. “Nope,” I said. Since the demand for this delightful paste has gotten so great, I’ve witnessed it being counterfeited for years. An authentic talangka paste comes from the female Asian shore crab, which contains a larger amount of fat at its bottom compared with male ones. Because it’s difficult to obtain, it appears to be pricey.
Some vendors include extenders such as blue crab or mud crab innards, which comprise over 80% of what you can buy at the supermarket, while others blend it with corn starch and annatto to resemble the genuine thing. In fact, the price is the strongest indicator of authenticity. On the other hand, Richard said that his neighbor sells the 150-gram “Purung Talangka” for only 200 pesos. In Pampanga, the same amount of pure and authentic crab paste costs around 1000–1500 pesos.
When I was a kid, the abundance of crabs during the rainy season was comparable to the Walking Dead movie’s zombies. Because we lived along the river in a barrio called Betis in Pampanga, these little crustaceans would stagger like an army battalion in the early morning, climbing until they filled up the dry part of the river bank to avoid being carried by the stream, which becomes faster when high tide occurs. But this means death for them, as they become sacrificial prey for our evening meal.
“She would prepare a kilo of salt and generously pour it on top of them, as if a burial in a funeral service was taking place, until it was completely mixed and their power struggle came to a halt. This functions as a preservative. She then covers the lid, shakes them off like a salsa dancer, and waits a day before eating them”
In my science subject during college, I discovered that the “lilingkas la ding talangka” phenomenon occurred as a result of climate change, as Mt. Pinatubo erupted a few years later in that decade. The water was becoming too hot for the crabs to survive. I was a witness to a large-scale mass migration of a sensitive species.
I recall becoming acquainted with the appearance of a female crab as we manually picked them up with our bare hands. A female crab contains more tomalley and meat than a male crab, even when compared to a larger-sized male crab.
When the rainy season arrived, the crabs swimming down the river were caught using a community fishing net known as “bakut.” Tang Jose, a distant relative in his 60s at the time, had a house on the riverbank. He would walk down to the river, wearing only a maong shorts and a jungle bolo, and swim against the stream to mount the bakut to the base of the bridge, which would act as a seive as the crabs descended from their spawning habitat upstreams. When the bakut begins to float like a gigantic shoulder embracing the massive river current due to congestion of the crabs, residents in the neighborhood, including my cousins and uncles, all jump to the center and fold the massive to bring it to the shore hand-in-hand. Everyone has a chance to snag a chunk of the catch.
The river we formerly called “control” was once a free-flowing river inhabited by many types of fish including crabs. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo clogged it with lahar and made it inhabitable.My Inda (mother) prepares the burung talangka on those days by cleaning the mud off the decapods trapped between their legs. She would prepare a kilo of salt and generously pour it on top of them, as if a burial in a funeral service was taking place, until it was completely mixed and their power struggle came to a halt. This functions as a preservative. She then covers the lid, shakes them off like a salsa dancer, and waits a day before eating them.
“Don’t you think it’s heaven on earth when you squeeze the fat out of a female crab’s body, pour it on a smoking hot white rice, like a thick yellow paint you smudge onto your canvas?”
Children were not permitted to eat during those times because the “burung talangka” dish is only for adults and can cause stomach aches in children. Later, I discovered that the cause of this is amoebiasis, as crabs carry feces when they attempt to leave the water in search of spawning grounds.
However, we disregard this risk. Don’t you think it’s heaven on earth when you squeeze the fat out of a female crab’s body, pour it on a smoking hot white rice, like a thick yellow paint you smudge onto your canvas, it stains your dining plate, drop a teaspoon of calamansi, and pour a bit of those minced red chilies?
One might think that their abundance makes them less interesting, as you can become bored with the endless supplies when the source is right in your own backyard. But this was not the case, as they were always in high demand. Crabs, when cooked, continue to be a high-end dish even today.
“ Sige sir, isa na lang kunin ko, para sa aligue pasta. Dyan na lang ako bibili ng tunay sa susunod, ” Richard’s response after my confirmation.
With the silt and lahar that the Pinatubo brought to us that uprooted almost every living thing near to it, my family carried the same migration story of the crabs that brought us to far places . But Richard’s message brings me back to two-decades past.
It evokes memories of uncles and cousins filling up the sack with the catch full of excitement, Tatang Jose’s smacking of the water lilies and floating logs with his jungle bolo to clear up the entangled bakut and the framing of my Inda’s pampering hands as she slowly put a crumpled piece of steaming rice smeared with a yellowish paste into my mouth , while continuously blowing it to avoid burning my lips, are reminders of a passionate love that stays in my mind forever. (end}