Bigas, Kanin, and Palay. Or Rice, Rice, and Rice.

After Adrienne Lehrer’s article on Levi Strauss’s theory of cooking words, I got a chance to reflect on cooking words used in Tagalog, to see if they held true to this idea of “a neural structure of cooking concepts […] valid for all languages”. My findings were similar to Lehrer’s; that while some words are similar or virtually identical in use to words of other languages, like magluto, or “to cook”, other words just don’t cover the exact same parameters as they do in English. 

Boiling, for instance, has multiple words in Tagalog. Boiling simply water is magpakulo, but if you add any type of food to the water, then the word used is now maglaga. In addition, the terminology also changes when one boils broth and condiments together. Here Filipinos will use the term isigang. Although online dictionaries will translate isigang into “to stew” in English, what Americans think of as stew is really quite far from what is made from this boiling of ingredients.

Baking, on the other hand, is harder to translate into Tagalog, and does not quite have an exact equivalent in the language. While some online dictionaries translate “to bake” as maghurno, this word is in reality not commonly used, and is actually borrowed from the Spanish word for oven, horno. Instead, most Filipinos today will simply borrow from English, saying mag-bake in conjunction with cakes and other baked goods.  However, there are specific words for baking when related to certain dishes, such as magtinapay for baking bread and magbibingka for preparing the traditional Filipino rice cake, bibingka.

What I found most interesting, however, was the word mag saing, to cook rice, which appears to have no direct equivalent in English. Mag saing, I realized, was just one of the many terms in Tagalog that are associated with or mean rice with no direct translation in English. Reminded of our discussion last Thursday, where we found that that people with more experience with a certain item will probably have more ways to describe it, I found that this definitely holds true for rice and Filipinos.

Rice itself, in grain form, is called bigas and unhusked it is called palay, but as a food cooked on the table it is called kanin. Then there are different parts of the rice, like darak and ipa, in addition to various types of rice such as malagkit, which is sticky rice. Filipinos also have many words for various rice cakes, including suman, puto, bibingka, cuchinta, and more. The list continues on, and if there exists any doubt of how important rice is to Filipinos, a cursory glance at this endless list will undoubtedly emphasize that for many Filipinos, rice is life.

If nothing else, Filipino’s numerous ways of describing rice illustrates the idea that while yes there may be some inherent, basic cooking ideas shared by all languages, culture and environment play a huge role in defining and cultivating the definition of such terms, and should not by any means be neglected.

Rice terraces in the Philippines

Puto: a Filipino rice cake