And indeed, it’s quite a diverse range. Ambeth Ocampo has written a short but encompassing article in which he asserts that the Philippine halo-halo comes directly from the Japanese kakigori, which has existed for at least a millennium—it appears in the 10th century Japanese text Makura no Soshi, translated as The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. The Japanese influence in the Philippines came before the actual occupation by armed forces during the Second World War: during the 1920s and 1930s, Japanese were already living and working in the Philippines—thus the famous stories of innocuous-seeming Japanese gardeners who turned out to be ranking members of the Imperial Army. The Japanese were also very much present in industry and retail trade as well. Manuel L. Quezon spoke of the “thousands of Japanese subjects” residing in the archipelago, “second only to the Chinese.”

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The red bean content of halo-halo seems to stem from this era—we have very few desserts that use this as a flavoring, but it’s a cornerstone of Japanese confectionery. But we have several desserts that do not involving mixing a number of diverse flavors together, but use ice: mais con hielo, saba con hielo, and so on. For these desserts, it’s not essential that that the ice be shaved, as with halo-halo; they can use crushed ice. But first, there had to be ice. The Spanish were enjoying iced desserts, at least among the nobility, since the 17th century. But the problem, then as now, was transportation. Unlike colder countries, where you could build an insulated ice-house in the winter and then pack it with snow or ice, the ice in Spain was likely cut from the mountains and transported to the lowlands packed in straw.



PHOTO: Jio de Leon

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It is unlikely that we had any knowledge of ice until the Americans. The galleon ships, which stopped over at Acapulco, were too slow to carry ice, no matter how well insulated. It was the invention of the fast clipper ships from America that first brought ice to our islands. Ocampo writes that the ships carrying ice from Wenham Lake arrived in the Philippines as early as the mid-nineteenth century, but the first ice plant was not until the turn of the century. In the early days, crushed ice was, simply, crushed: placed between two pieces of cloth and smashed with a mallet or a pestle. The fine, snow-like consistency of shaved ice, which lasts only minutes before it re-freezes into a hard ball, needed the rotating kakigori-ki which has remain unchanged in both shape and principle from the pre-war days.