Culinary Crossings

Between roughly 1760 and 1860, a single demand-side phenomenon — the consolidation of Cantonese elite banquet cuisine and its appetite for marine luxury foods — produced one of the most consequential structural transformations in the political economy of maritime Southeast Asia. The chain ran from Sama-Bajau divers on a Sulu reef through Tausug merchant networks to Chinese junks at Jolo and Sandakan to Cantonese hong merchants to the formal banquets of Qing officials and the Co-hong trading elite. A demand-side history of how an apex consumer market reshaped a Southeast Asian sovereignty 2,500 kilometers away.

An object biography of Kahawa Sūg — the Robusta coffee of the Sulu Archipelago — from the Arabic etymology that arrived centuries before the bean did, through the 1864 wreck of the Wilhelmine and the blood compact between Sultan Jamalul Alam and the Prussian mariner Herman Leopold Schück, through the leaf rust that killed the rest of the Philippine coffee industry in 1889 and spared Sulu, through the kahawahan ritual of pouring between two glasses, into the rejuvenation projects underway today. A reconstructive culinary history of how a beverage becomes a sovereignty.

Centuries before the Sultanate, before Sharif Abu Bakr, before any European saw the Sulu Sea, Sulu was already a recognized Chinese trade entry in the Song-dynasty South Seas circuit. The commodities it sent — pearls, beeswax, and the slow-cooked sea cucumber the Chinese called haishen and the Tausug called bat — are the longest-running material connection between the Philippine archipelago and the Asian mainland. A culinary-economic history of three goods that built a Sultanate.

When the Sulu Zone's export economy dissolved in the second half of the 19th century, the Tausug culinary tradition that had developed alongside it did not. Tiyula itum, piyanggang manok, latal, kahawa Sug, the long tradition of curry-and-coconut preparation that distinguishes Tausug cooking from any other Philippine cuisine — these are food-memory of a maritime sovereignty whose political institution was terminated in 1915 but whose taste survived. A culinary-cultural history of what stayed on the plate after the Sultanate left the table.

An eight-cycle traversal across 800 years of food in the polities of the modern-day Philippine archipelago — from the four pre-Hispanic technique lineages to the galleon-era creolization that fixed the lexicon contemporary palates still recognize.

Adobo, sinigang, kinilaw, lechon as pre-1565 technique lineages in the polities of the modern-day Philippine archipelago, with strict separation from Columbian-Exchange ingredients.

How the Spanish colonial taxation of fermented fish paste reshaped Philippine food culture, trade networks, and the legal foundations of indigenous commerce.

The legal history of rice in the Philippines — from pre-colonial communal granaries to RA 11203 and the politics of the nation's most regulated grain.

Alcohol regulation in the Philippines from pre-colonial coconut wine to the modern excise tax — a history of the state's attempt to control what people drink.