This journey started in 2014, when the two of us - one an anthropologist working in India, and the other a sociologist working in the Philippines - casually noticed and then were increasingly intrigued by the linguistic, confectionary, and symbolic similarities and salience of this one dessert - bibingka/bebinca - across India and the Philippines. With the help of a seed grant from the UIC Institute for the Humanities, we began researching this issue, attempting to trace and understand the history of this so called "queen of desserts" both historically and in present day Philippines and India. How did this one dessert travel this wide swath of territory in South and Southeast Asia-- territory that was colonized by different European powers – Spanish and Portuguese, respectively – each with their own, very different, culinary and confectionary traditions? The pages that follow chronicle stories of/about bibingka, collected from a range of different storytellers - bakers, culinary historians, shop owners, and bibingka/bebinca aficionados - in contemporary Philippines and India. Eventually, we hope to use these narratives as an intellectual prism to tell a complex story of culinary “contact zones,” using a maritime optic to produce a different rendering of global history, migration, and culinary foodways in South and Southeast Asia.
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