Inlubi: Food for the goths

Outsiders often say that it is only in Pangasinan where black rice cake is a preferred delicacy. They rightly observe that, in other places, it is simply shunned – the color black is routinely associated with darkness, death and even the devil.

In Bayambang, people don’t buy that idea – black is beautiful. In fact, it used to be that the black rice cake delicacy was prepared only during All Saints’ Day, but nowadays it seems to be available all-year-round. People eat it as snack and nothing untoward ever happens, except perhaps spikes in blood sugar levels.

Truth be told, black rice cake is just like the regular rice cake called biko. And a note to outsiders: it is not actually made of black rice per se but blackened rice. It is basically glutinous white rice boiled in freshly pressed coconut milk and sugar with a sprinkling of anise -- except that the rice used is immature grains that were burned in the field and then pounded using wooden mortar and pestle until the grains are flattened. The pounded grains are then winnowed using a woven winnowing basket to separate the chaff from the grains. The finished product looks somewhat like black oatmeal except that the grains are thicker and very chewy even when still in that form, their edges nicely toasted.

At this partially cooked stage, the rice grains are called deremen. But because it is already precooked from the burning, the toasted grains are somewhat edible in this state and taste sweetish with a bitter edge and have a fragrant smell, like that of pinipig, another native farm-processed glutinous rice product, with a light green color. Deremen is thus likened to the Pampango duman. In the rest of the Ilocos region, it closely resembles what they call binagkal.

As a child, I would often steal a handful of deremen bought from the market and eat it on the sly. My grandmother was the one who presided over the cooking of this black biko because she alone knew how to make it the perfect way – it was a big risk to allow the other members of the family to try. Year in and year out, she went busy with this ritual, and she constantly ordered us children to help her grate and press the coconut or wash the dishes used. My stealing, though uncaught, would be punished with a bad stomach later on, and I would regret my misdeed.

After the deremen goes over the fire and is stirred to taste, the resulting rice cake is now called inlubi. My lola would always cook the sticky black rice cakes in two ways: the first would be boiled in coconut milk and sugar until the concoction solidifies into a cake, with a full body glistening from all that coconut oil. The second appears half-cooked and soupy as the grains are steeped in boiling water, with the thick coconut milk, grated young coconut strips, and sugar added much later. Each version has a different taste and texture. Lola would often exchange her versions of black ricecake with those of the neighbors, and so we would often have what looked like an impromptu Inlubi Festival, complete with a secret compare-and-contrast observations. We would praise in whispers those gifts that passed her high standards and mercilessly criticized those that did not. The scene reminds me of Chinese Mooncake Festival and Chinese New Year, or even the Filipino New Year scene, when people wish one another well by exchanging the same thing, whether mooncake, tikoy, or fruitcake.

Maybe one way to package inlubi for the market is to treat it as one of the novelty items for any event or group of people that takes to anything black like it's the normal thing. For example, since All Saints' Day in the Philippines have been hopelessly Americanized into Halloween celebration, we could take advantage of it by staging parties with food items that are unapologetically black or blackish in hue: maybe a black beans dish here, a blood sausage there, some dinuguan here, then skewered tiles of blood here studded perhaps with black sesame seeds, and of course for dessert, we have black grapes and what else but inlubi? 

A special target group would be the punk and goth subcultures, those whose members dig punk music and love to put on anything black, from wristbands to earrings to lipstick and fingernail paint. I figure they would find it cool to be caught eating inlubi when they are not wolfing down black burger.

Kidding aside, we locals do not in the slightest feel a need to promote inlubi outside Bayambang or Pangasinan. What is important is to satisfy our cravings for the dark glutinous treat, especially come All Saint's Day. If one or two outsiders make the discovery someday and share our enthusiasm with the rest of the world, that would be a nice bonus.