“Look!” I exclaimed as we made the turn into the Bato public market. “Old-fashioned hotcakes!”
I was wrong. They were hotcakes, sure, just not the kind we used to get at the town plaza back in the 1970s: honeycombed (via waffle iron), bright yellow, dredged in sugar, then folded into a quarter circle. Gummy rather than fluffy (from cornstarch, I had been told), I would probably have had one and then promptly forgotten about it, but until such time I was in the grip of nostalgia.
Disheartened, we drifted over to the next stall. Hotdog, fish ball, squid roll, tempura (“So that’s what it is!”), kwek-kwek (more like tokneneng since it contained chicken egg), and something I had never seen before: cigar-like tubes of sliced bread with smears of something orange and rolled in panko.
“Pizza roll,” the girl volunteered. “Want one?”
I did, despite myself. But not there. Her setup looked less than sanitary. On to the next.
“We’ll have three of these,” I said to the man.
“The New York sandwich?”
“Is it now? The girl over there said–”
“Pizza roll. That’s what the kids call it.”
Whatev. Fried and cut up, it revealed a measly strip of hotdog within, and tasted the way I imagined: bleh — and that’s with a healthy dollop of mayo-ketchup sauce. What was I expecting for eight pesos? I speared a fish ball off a companion’s plate — another first for me; that’s after I checked where the public toilets were. I’m not being mean, just sayin’. Memories can be all sorts of things.
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