A READER named Max Fabella asked me if I’d ever had the tamilok (what it is, you’ll soon find out). I did—and I wrote about it many years ago. His query prompted me to go over my old files, and so, starting today, I’ll be posting some pieces from the “Barfly” column I wrote for the newspaper TODAY back in the early ‘90s.
Few people will remember that column in TODAY’s Lifestyle section (where a sassy young writer named Jessica Zafra also got her break), but the story behind it was that TODAY hired me from the start as Editorial Writer (a job I shared with the publisher, Teddy Boy Locsin). But after about two years of pontificating three or four times a week on urbi et orbi, I felt I needed to decompress in a wala-lang column for the back page, which I asked for and got. Thankful for the relief, I wrote Barfly for free, and had loads of fun until I left TODAY and joined the Star in 2000. (I later compiled some of these columns into The Best of Barfly, published by Anvil Publishing in 2002.)
So here’s a blast from the past, on Max Fabella’s tamilok.
Let me also take this occasion to say that I’ll be gone again for a few days, this time to Hawaii, on nothing more and nothing less than a press junket. Someone’s got to do it.
I ASKED for it. Down in Palawan last week, at a beachside birthday party (regrettably not mine) that I crashed as gracefully as I could, I had the temerity to bring up a subject perhaps better left in the closet—or, in this case, the mangrove swamp. It was that of the tamilok—the marine borer, or woodworm, that I'd written about before in this column, but had yet to see. More to the point, as far as my hosts were concerned, I had yet to eat the bloody (bloodless, actually) thing, which reputedly ranks even higher than raw sea urchin and crunchy seaweed in the pantheon of Palaweño delicacies. Awash in broiling lobsters, marlin, squid, lechon, and even a calf roasting on a spit, I made the mistake of asking for the invisible—something that I thought would be as rare as a blue mushroom—and got my wish.
"How's the tamilok?" I asked Ben Torcuato, an affable balikbayan from suburban Chicago who runs the disco at Puerto Princesa's swanky Asiaworld Hotel. It had been Ben who, a couple of months earlier over dinner at Asiaworld, had introduced me to this creature—in theory, because they don't have it on the menu at the hotel, the better to maintain their high occupancy rate. I thought that inquiring after the tamilok would be a friendly way of greeting Ben and reminding him of how we first met—you know, they're called "pleasantries," these innocuous remarks people make about the weather, etc. I should've told Ben what a nice day it was, as truly it was with Honda Bay glimmering in the brilliant sunlight, but instead I just had to open my mouth and ask about a woodworm.
Indeed Ben remembered our first meeting, and promptly chided me for passing off my shoddy fictionalizing as responsible journalism. "You wrote about it," he said with a wry smile that damned me better than an accusatory glare, "but you've never had it!” Well, I thought, that was hardly my fault. "So, where is it?"
That, I found out, was a question you don't ask someone from an island where they have native peacocks and exotic lizards running around in their backyards. Ben clapped his hands, calling the attention of an obliging local who, before I could steer the conversation around to the wondrously familiar virtues of roasted calf, returned with two—not one, but two—heaping bowlfuls of fresh woodworm swimming in a briny bath, with vinegar on the side.
How does one begin to describe what the stomach insists should remain ineffable? The first thought that seized me was that I was in the presence of a future "X-Files" episode, with me not as Mulder but as one of those hapless extras who die in the teaser, just before the opening credits and the first commercial. I knew what Scully was going to tweezer out of my cold tissues on the autopsy table. It was going to be a slimy creature about six inches long, as round and as thick as your ring finger, a translucent gray slightly darker at the core, and—wait a minute, where's the head? The head, folks, is the only hard part—the literally hard part—of the tamilok, a cartilaginous affair topped by a snail-like pair of horns. Scully won't find any heads, because you're supposed to bite them off.
OK, here's how it's done: you take your pick from the catch of the day (I naturally sought out the Mickey Rooney of the lot, still a formidable morsel at four inches), hold it by the head between two fingers, dip it into the vinegar for that contrasty effect, raise it above your head, close your eyes, open your mouth, and remember what made Linda Lovelace a household name in the '70s. And as Linda would've sagely advised, don't gag; relax those throat muscles; let the thing in as gently as you please. (But don't forget to bite down—on the tamilok, of course—to decapitate it; I think it's an ancient ritual to ensure that the creature doesn't regenerate where it shouldn't.)
Halfway through this exquisite ordeal, it occurred to me to ask Ben if one was supposed to chew on one's tamilok, to hasten the digestive process, but I should've known that you really can't speak with your mouth full, especially with what I had in mine. So I concentrated on swallowing that mouthful instead, as quickly as humanly possible. And I succeeded, retaining only the vaguest impression of having ingested something quite unlike shrimp, certainly unlike tenderloin, most definitely unlike potato chips or french fries. I washed the experience down with a fresh bottle of Coke, wiped my lips, and did the next best thing to being miserable all by lonesome, which was to inflict the same opportunity on others.
"Yummm, that was great, I can't believe how good that tasted!" I announced to the curious, to my fellow Manileños—men and women both—who had been watching me with the greedy anticipation of a crowd at an execution. "Try it. You really must. You'll be sorry all the rest of your lives if you don't.” And one by one, they did; and standing as their witness, I thought I saw a flash of recognition in those stricken eyes. But then the one goaded the other on, and then the next one, and so forth—and then, with all of them proclaiming the woodworm's savory qualities, I understood how the tamilok became a delicacy, and how delicacies come into being.
I thanked Ben and left him to clean up what was left in those bowls, a task he happily performed—you don't find too many mangrove swamps in Skokie, Illinois—and helped myself to the pancit.
Next time I wish on my stars, it won't be for some woodworm, that's for sure.
(Photo courtesy of juanthesleepwalker.blogspot.com)