Coconut fronds, banana leaves, papel de hapon, and achara in a jar. Before the food, there is always the wrapping — and in the Philippines, the wrapping has never been an afterthought.
This April, in celebration of Filipino Food Month, the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art (CCP EPA) drew attention to what it calls food art — a category that encompasses not just what Filipinos cook, but how they shape, wrap, present, and ornament it. The documentation spans regions, ingredients, and traditions, tracing a thread of creativity that runs through the country’s culinary culture from Bulacan to Cebu to the Ilocos.
“Filipino food goes far beyond simple nourishment. It reflects a deep sense of creativity and artistry that appears at every stage of the culinary experience.”
The CCP EPA’s coverage begins with relishes and fruits — preferred media for food art, according to the encyclopedia, because they can be prepared in advance, giving artisans time to work. Achara is one example.
Another is mayumo, a word for sweet, which refers to the preserved fruits of San Miguel de Mayumo in Bulacan: suha, dayap, and kundol carved with decorative patterns before being placed in display jars. In Laguna, limes are stuffed with coconut jelly — adding what the encyclopedia describes as both visual and textural contrast.
The bilao and the banana leaf
Kakanin — the broad family of rice-based sweets and snacks — gets its own chapter in the encyclopedia’s food art coverage, with particular attention to presentation. The bilao, a flat basket traditionally used for winnowing rice, has become the standard vessel for serving puto and kutsinta, its circular form turning the arrangement of differently colored and sized pieces into a kind of composition.
The wrapping of suman tells a more regional story. In most places, it comes folded in pale young coconut fronds. In Obando, Bulacan, darker fronds are woven into small triangular baskets. In Cebu and Cagayan de Oro, puso — hanging rice — arrives in woven coconut-leaf pouches shaped for portability, known by different names depending on where you are: balisungsong, lambay, patupat, tamu.
The woman with the cuticle scissors
Among the figures the encyclopedia documents is Luz Mendoza Ocampo, a pabalat artist from Bulacan. Pabalat refers to the thin, multicolored Japanese paper — papel de hapon — used to wrap pastillas de leche, the milk sweets that San Miguel de Mayumo is known for. Ocampo works from patterns she designed herself: the Maria Clara motif, the tinikling, rice-pounding scenes, nipa huts, birds, flowers. She traces each pattern through layers of paper with a pencil, then cuts with a cuticle scissors.
Other artists skip the pattern entirely, cutting folded paper freehand. The tradition in Bulacan is largely practiced by women. The encyclopedia names several: Amparo Pengson, Rosa David, Nene Pineda, Luz Reyes, Teresita Ramos.
Bread as medium, cookie as iconography
The food art survey extends to breads and cookies. In Pampanga, feast days for San Nicolas bring cookies shaped after the saint’s iconography, sold outside churches. In Bago City, Negros Occidental, alfajor cookies — a tradition brought by migrants from Panay in the 1920s — are pressed into wooden molds bearing symbols: USAFFE insignias, Boy Scout emblems, flowers. They are sun-dried rather than baked. In Antipolo, Rizal, one bakery makes bread in the shapes of lobsters, pigs, turtles, and crocodiles.
The CCP EPA was first published in 1994. Its current edition was researched by over 500 scholars from institutions across the country. The digital edition — the CCP EPAD — adds video excerpts from CCP’s performance archives. The food art article is one of more than 6,000 entries in a project that treats pabalat cutting and suman weaving with the same seriousness it gives to ballet and painting.
The achara is still in the jar. The pastillas are still wrapped. Most people will eat them without thinking about the hands that cut the paper or arranged the papaya. That the encyclopedia exists to record who those hands belonged to — and what they made — seems, for once, like exactly enough.
The CCP EPAD — the encyclopedia’s digital edition, with 6,000+ articles and video from the CCP archives — is available at epa.culturalcenter.gov.ph/encyclopedia starting at ₱75/month or ₱675/year. For the print edition or USB, email epa@culturalcenter.gov.ph.
About The Author
