(Confined land crabs cooked with coconut meat)
A children’s story for adults
By Lina Sagaral Reyes
Already, I had grown fond of Pikas-Mata, the One-eyed Kagang, months before Papa Ned handed over to me some pasgong (cylindrical bamboo traps) two days after the full moon in September 1972. Months before, boys laid those devices over burrows inside our fenced yard by the kanipaan (nipa swamp) in Villalimpia, a barangay in Loaya town along Bohol’s northern coast.
My father had given the trespassers a piece of his mind and leaving the traps behind, they never came back.
I was then 11, and a house-bound 5th-grader as Martial Law, the reign of soldiers, as my father described it, had just been declared. We wouldn’t return to school until October.
Since April that year, I had been watching Pikas-Mata as it would clamber up the antuwanga (hibiscus) shrub. One morning, its large claw’s teeth gripping a bud, it sauntered sideways back to its den, and I spied its single eye-on-stalk, its small claw, just a stub, while its large pincer’s dactyl was chipped at the tip.
I set the pasgong, with bait of grilled lahing (mature coconut), over burrows on Monday evening as the moon was a waning gibbous. Early the next morning, Pikas-Mata and four other kagang were caught inside two pasgong while the third pasgong captured the pechay-gorging manla (mud lobster).
The land crabs underwent the laming (confinement) in a panggaw (woven bamboo trap) for the next five days. I fed them a surfeit of leaves: sprigs of madre de cacao and hagonoy, and One-eyed’s fave, the antuwanga buds. This diet, I was told, would fatten them, rid their flesh of the muck’s smell, and kill infesting germs.
By Sunday of the waning crescent moon, the nilaming would become our lunch.
Villalimpianons must master hunting for these denizens of the lapok (mud) as well as cooking the crustaceans, and eating them deftly, kinamot-style.
My cousins learned the rudiments by heart, such as Jojo, who lived in the ancestral house adjacent to the Chapel of the Santa Cruz Exaltacion.
Our Great Grandfather Tan Orog had found a wooden cross among debris in the swamps after a flood in the late 1800s. That very spot, approximately half a kilometer from the shore fronting Hinawanan Bay, where Legaspi and Sikatuna held a blood compact on a ship in 1565, was reclaimed to site the Chapel, where the stranded crucifix is now enshrined.
At this Chapel, on May 13,1983, as the century’s worst El Niño was ravaging the archipelago, the village devotees “feasted” on kagang nilubihan and vinegar-laced sasing (marine worm), instead of the usual pork humba and pancit. The villagers must have prepared kagang using a recipe of mostly approximations that Jojo shared with me:
- Clean the kagang (it should still be alive) then you open up the kabhang (carapace). (We pity it.)
- You smear the aligi (crab fat) on slivers of butong (young coconut) meat.
- Saute the garlic and sibuyas dahonan (spring onions).
- Add water.
- Put in the kagang.
- When the kagang is almost cooked, put in the aligi-smeared butong.
- Add salt.
- Add humutan (native basil).
In Malanda, Queensland, Australia, cousin Lourdes would crave for kagang her mother Paciencia used to cook for her husband Ciano and sons who worked at their smithy, forging bolos and knives. Out there, she kept remembering the heady aroma of humutan as she battled homesickness and cancer.
Tersa,who lives in sitio Cagangan, learned how to cook kagang from her father Aster, a fisherman-carpenter:
“You clean the kagang, you brush the shell clean, remove the 8 kuyamoy (legs), discard the kabhang, wash off the dark ooze. Remove the gills.
“Place all of what’s left and the viscous coconut meat (sagbay-luwag, younger than butong) in a cooking pan over wood fire.
“Add garlic and onions.
“You may add achuete. But just a little. A pinch of salt, too.
” Ginger? Yes, but just a pinch,” she said, stressing that the crab’s taste must not be drowned by too many spices.
Villalimpianons must master hunting for these denizens of the lapok (mud) as well as cooking the crustaceans, and eating them deftly, kinamot-style.
By the kitchen sink, Papa called me.
Excitedly holding Pikas-Mata by its carapace, he said, “Look, look!”
I saw a clump of the tiniest translucent black globules on the underside of its body. Then father brought the crab outside, put it on the ground, and gravid Pikas-Mata scuttled towards its lair.
Back in the house, father played the Tango LP record on the stereo phono, then began to cut the crabs in two by the sink, using the cleaver he bought from Nong Ciano.
He cleaned the halves-of-crab below the faucet’s running water, keeping everything, even the gills.
Improvising further, he used pechay and tanglad (lemongrass) instead of humutan.
The coconut he chose was bagatungol, older than butong but younger than lahing.
At lunch, each of us siblings got half a crab, a large pincer, and the greens and cocomeat in bowls while a ladleful of broth was poured over the smoking-hot red rice on our plates. Mama Monica joined us even as she won’t eat anything from the mud for they are not til-ugon. Instead, she had kinamunggayang tuway (clams with moringa).
As we ate with our hands, Piazzolla’s bandeneon playing ‘Tanguedia’ in the background, we listened to Papa Ned explain why Pikas-Mata needed to be free.
He said Pikas-Mata would tunnel its way through soft earth past the pig sty to the swamp’s edge where its thousands of roe could hatch.
“Then the currents would bring the pito-pito (larvae) past Hinawanan Bay to Bohol Sea, and later the surviving crablings, riding the high tides, would return to the swamps, clambering back to land,” he told us.
Fifty years later, even as our house by the swamps had been demolished by fierce typhoons and fiercer neglect and now I prefer Gotan Project to Piazzolla, and the dictator’s son is back in Malacañang, in Memory’s kitchen, that meal on the 1st of October 1972 blazes on: broth-soaked rice cooled with our own breath, the briny meat of kagang, with a floral whiff of hibiscus and a hint of lapok, the bitter of pechay and the sweet of lubi blending inside the mouth, and the reassuring vision of Pikas-Mata’s progeny returning again and again to the fringes of Villalimpia’s kanipaan. WWW
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