After a journey that required negotiating a ride on Manila's Light Rail Transit (LRT) to Santolan and then a jeepney ride to Taytay Rizal, we reach the town of Cainta - in search of Aling Kika's Bibingka House. Our jeepney driver seemed to know this place quite well and when asked, nodded with certainty and upon reaching the location, shouted out to us before dropping us off. It was a modest storefront - with a steady stream of locals - most likely Caintanos who bought not one but two or three boxes of "bibingka" or "kakanin" (sticky rice-based desserts) as
Filipinos would call it from what has been
heralded as an "institution" in bibingka-making.
Aling Kika's "Special Bibingka" is a fitting tribute to the municipality of Cainta, Rizal's claim to fame as the "Native Kakanin Capital of the Philippines." Its creator is the late Francisca Legaspi Cruz, most popularly known as Aling Kika. She passed away in 2009 at the age of 90 years, leaving her bibingka legacy to her eight children. On the day we visited, we met one of her grandchildren - Giah who has fond memories of Aling Kika. He proudly remembers how Aling Kika started this business by selling her "special bibingka" that she made painstakingly at home each day, and then sold outside the Antipolo church and in the streets of Cainta from a bilao (winnowing basket).
This special bibingka is now produced everyday in large quantities in the new Aling Kika ‘factory,’ with its well equipped industrial size stone ovens that produce hundreds of different types of kakanin, which eventually fill the tall piles of boxes in the store next door, and are packaged as pasalubong or gifts for families living outside of Cainta. The room smelled of caramelized coconut, sold as coco jam (which they bottle and sell). The floors were slightly slippery - which we gathered were a result of the residue of the vast quantities of coconut oil used in the production of their bibingka. According to Dorno, the store manager, their bibingka-making starts as early as 4 am. When we got there around 2 pm, pans of sticky rice with an equally sticky brown topping (coconut jam) were neatly lined up in the bakery section of the store. Two men in sleeveless shirts and shorts (probably to accommodate the heat in the room) were busily putting in and taking out pans from the oven. Despite its origins, today, this seems to be a male-dominated operation as we did not see any women in the bakery section or in the store front.
We were curious to know about the different appearance of their "bibingka" from the more common Filipino version whose texture is somewhere in between a pound cake and a pancake and buttery and egg-y in taste. Dorno explained that this was the real bibingka – “the "real" bibingka is from Cainta,” he reiterated. Dorno walked us through the timeline when Aling Kika started working in the 1930s and then ventured into making suman (sticky rice wrapped in a banana leaf) in the 1960s which she sold near the Antipolo church and then moved to selling it on the streets and then out of her house in the 1970s. But there was another story that we were curious about. We had read about the Indian Sepoys (soldiers) who deserted the Navy during the brief British occupation of the Philippines from 1762-64 and whose descendants settled in Cainta. One origin story claims that "bibingka" may have been introduced by these Sepoys, perhaps some of them even identifying as Topasses or “half-caste Portuguese from India.” Dorno seemed to buy this story as he tells us that Cainta is indeed known for having a large population of Filipinos whose lineage could be traced to the Indian Sepoys. He himself believes that he may be one such descendant. "We are Filipino with the bahagi ng Sepoy." (We are Filipinos with Indian/Sepoy features). And he proceeded to define those features as maitim (dark) and mataas ang ilong (prominent nose). He points us to a small community – in the neighboring Barangay Sto. Nino – where a large number of the residents are descendants of the Sepoys. He himself has been a resident of this community for 57 years he said. He then starts to wonder whether bibingka was one other culinary contribution of these soldiers because he tells us that "Kare Kare," a popular Filipino dish made of peanut butter and liverwurst also came from the Sepoys; it was a distortion of “curry curry” he noted. Perhaps, he mused, rather than “inventing” bibingka, the Sepoys might have seen these rice-based desserts - known as kalamay and galapong - and re-labeled them by the more familiar term (to them) - bibingka.
We walked around Barangay Sto. Nino and started to informally talk with some of the residents. They looked at Gayatri with a certain kind of frank curiosity, and asked many questions about her – where was she from? Was she also a descendant of Indian sepoys? Had she come to find her ancestors? We could not help but notice the distinctive physical features of the people that remain identifiably “Indian.” We stopped by this booth that sells another popular dessert called puto bumbong (steamed glutinous rice cooked in a bamboo or metal cylinder; lathered with sugar, margarine, and coconut). We talked to a woman who lived next door, who explained that she is likely a descendant of Indians but matter-of-factly adds: "They are all dead. That was a long time ago," reiterating Dorno’s statement earlier: "all are dead now and there is no history." That statement and our impressions form walking around this neighborhood were enough to spark our curiosity. So we are going back - to try to uncover the history/story behind this "special bibingka."