The fish market at Bato, Leyte has seen a lot of improvement over the years, but even when it was still a ramshackle affair it had been a favorite weekend haunt, primarily for the variety of the catch, something I can not say of our local market a mere 30 minutes away. Also, cheaper.
We went on a Sunday, market day, looking for fresh shrimp. Unimpressed with the ones we found near the entrance across the public terminal, we ventured deeper into the building. Right away my attention was drawn to something I didn’t see everyday, indeed had not encountered in the flesh before: butete!
—and for good reason: sale of this creature is prohibited by law. As cited in BFAR Administrative Order No. 249, there were 119 reported cases of pufferfish poisoning from 2007 to early 2014, with 17 deaths. Every Juan knows improperly prepared butete is deadly (which is why in Japan, a chef has to train for at least three years to be certified to serve it ), so you have to wonder why, save for a death wish, some people eat it at all. A sense of adventure, perhaps? The thrill of living on the edge? Desperation? I’m not ruling out stupidity.
At the stall opposite, some cousins, equally alien to me and also poisonous. The vendor said they were tagotongan (horned boxfish). If looks could kill, no? But apparently it’s their skin that secretes toxin when touched, though dangerous only when ingested. Apparently, too, in some parts of Cebu and elsewhere, the term tagotongan refers to pufferfish or porcupine fish, kind of like how kitong in one place is danggit in another.
Not here. They are both called rabbitfish in English, but the easiest way to tell one from the other is that kitong skin is mottled with yellow. Still, if you’ve never handled them raw, you may not be aware how nasty a prick of their spines can be, which is why a good fishmonger chops them off, and carefully removes the entrails, too, because there is no pleasure to be had in fish that reeks of excrement.
The rest of the catch that day were more of the usual: tulingan (mackerel tuna, known here as mangkô), sapsap (ponyfish), and hawol-hawol (Bali sardinella), better known these days as dayang-dayang (after the insanely popular song that never seems to end or go away) — the most affordable at ₱20 a kilo.
Speaking of mangkô, I came upon pails of tinabál cured with a phenomenal amount of salt, my blood pressure shot up just looking at it.
And with that we entered the dried seafood section. I can’t even begin to tell you the names of the fish on display, there were simply too many.
If you’re curious about the radioactively pink stuff on the lower left, that’s ujáp (fermented shrimp paste). Sautéed with heaps of onion, tomato, and hinilisan (fatty pork crackling), it’s as delicious as it is pungent. Bring on the boiled bananas.
And in case you still crave more umami on top of that, there’s always Aji (see below, upper left).
As for shrimp, I ended up buying from the batch I had snubbed earlier, that being the only shrimp on sale that day. They came in wildly differing sizes, but the vendor declared the transaction koridas, which meant that I could not pick out the ones I liked. I wanted variety, I got it — never mind that it was forced on me.
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