Celebrating fiesta is part of Boholano culture. Boholanos are fun-loving, generous and deeply religious. These traits push them to celebrate and yearly honor saints in towns and barangays of the province. Celebrations are highly structured that includes the preparation of luscious food to entertain visitors.
May has been hailed as the “Fiesta Month” as most of the feast days in the province of Bohol fall on May. Visitors can enjoy the month long revelry by hopping from town to town and to the barangays. Everybody is welcome. There is no need for invitations. Feast days are likewise a time for family reunions. Boholanos from all parts of the world come home to attend the feast day and the reunions. If circumstances beyond their control deter their coming home, they will send monetary support to their families in order for them to be able to celebrate the fiesta in style.
No Boholano can escape from the fiesta fever. For the rich, expect them to include in their preparations a cow and goat and the forever present “lechon” or roasted pig and all those mouth-watering desserts.
Desserts perse, torta outshines them all. Depending on which part of the Philippines you are from, torta can mean one of three things. If you’re from Bukidnon, it can mean an ensaymada-like bread. People from Manila regard torta as a dinner roll made with lard, while in Bohol, a torta is a large, sweet cake, sometimes anise-flavored.
A few fiestas ago, I chanced upon a friend hawking her specialty, tortas, she called them. They resembled large ensaymadas cradled in parchment paper. Yellow and dense, they had a tight crumb which would proceed to crumble once bitten into or pierced with a fork. They had an old-fashioned taste to them, similar to the flavor acquired through baking in a clay oven. The torta was also very rich and since it was late night, it’d pair quite well with a mug of tsokolate.
From what I’ve learned about this torta, it’s native to Cebu and Bohol, its distinctive ingredient being tuba (too-BAH), a coconut wine/stem sap. The tuba’s primary purpose is to leaven the cake, and add its characteristic flavor. While modern-day advances and lifestyles dictate baking powder or some other faster-acting leavener, the tuba is traditional, even though it takes seven to eight hours for it to do its work.
Other ingredients used in the making of a torta are flour, egg yolks, sugar, and milk. Lard is also a key component, guaranteeing moistness and shelf life. I’ve also heard of tortas that have raisins added to them as well as anise seeds for fragrance and textural contrast. The use of a clay or wood-fired oven is preferred over the conventional oven.
When in Bohol for the monthlong celebrations, we praise God and and honor St. Joseph as devout catholics, we dance to the beat of Sandugo and other festivals. But there is another thing that unites Boholanos, celebrations can never be complete without a taste of torta, the star of of Boholano fiesta.
I fondly remember a trip to Bohol with my friends three years ago. While returning from one of our day trips, we passed by the most amazing smell. We asked the driver to make a u-turn and entered the house/makeshift bakery, and we saw rows and rows of torta!
Unfortunately, she wouldn’t sell it to us. Apparently, they were pre-ordered.(I was desperately craving to rememeber, I just know we couldn’t eat it!). She ended up just selling us ONE torta (the only one she can spare), which was quickly devoured by fifteen hungry mouths. Such a sweet memory of Bohol
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