I came across the Doreen Gamboa Fernandez Food Writing Award announcement and decided to join. Thinking about this year’s theme, “Minatamis,” I found myself reflecting on dessert in my own hometown, and this essay grew from there.
The cool smoothness of chilled leche flan just freed from its mold, the syrupy gleam of cathedral jellies in a bowl, the faint clink of a spoon against the side of a glass serving dish. Dessert has its own music in my hometown. At fiestas, birthdays, and weddings, that music plays first for the presidential table.
The primera mesa, or the presidential table as we call it now, stands tall at the center of every celebration. It is the first thing you see when you enter the hall: a long table set at the front under a white-draped backdrop trimmed with flowers and ribbons. It is the stage within the stage. Here sit the bisita de honor: the priest, the mayor, the principal sponsors, the balikbayans, facing the rest of us as we eat.
At the presidential table, the buko salad appears in chilled bowls crowned with cherries. The leche flan rests on a platter still cold from its mold. Special cakes stand with their frosting stiff from the refrigerator. Guests here eat without hurry. Plates are replenished before they are empty, and the sequence is unbroken: soup, lechon, rice, main dishes, cold dessert [3].
From the common table, the view is clear. The presidential table is a performance. Every garnish is intentional. The service itself is choreography, and dessert is part of the finale. Here, sweetness is a signal. It marks who has earned a seat and who will eat later, if there is anything left.
I learned this early. Once, during a fiesta, I tried to slip into the kitchen, drawn by the sight of a deep bowl of buko salad, pale green and pink with tiny cherries. My aunt’s hand reached out and pulled me back. Para sa bisita ‘yan. I returned to my seat, knowing my turn, if it came, would be after the bowls had been scraped clean.
This practice is older than our town. Early 20th-century accounts describe the first table at large feasts, often for women of rank, served by male family members whose task was to attend to their plates before anyone else’s [2]. It was a display as much as a courtesy. In the Philippine fiesta, the presidential table became a public stage: the most visible table, with the best china, floral centerpieces, and printed cloths. To be seated there is to be recognized by the community. The protocol extends to the food. The choicest cuts of meat, the most elaborate dishes, and the finest desserts appear here first, in full view of the rest of the hall [1].
Perhaps this is why dessert in my town feels less like the end of a meal and more like a guarded treasure. Sweetness is a currency. It arrives from the city: cans of fruit cocktail, jars of nata de coco, cartons of condensed milk brought home in balikbayan boxes or bought at the palengke for special occasions. In everyday life, we sweeten with what’s around: coconut milk, brown sugar, saba bananas. But for the presidential table, the taste of imported syrup carries its own prestige [5].
The word minatamis is both adjective and past tense. It can describe the taste, “sweetened,” and also the act, “was sweetened.” Something has been worked on, transformed, and preserved. The coconut jam you buy from the old lady at the market is minatamis na bao, slow-cooked in coconut milk until it holds its shape in glass jars for months. The minatamis na santol is fruit stripped of its sting by patient boiling, soaking, and sugar. This past-tense nature is telling: sweetness here is rarely spontaneous. It takes time, patience, and often, rationing.
If the savory dishes at the common table are democratic, rice piled high and viands replenished until the pots are scraped clean, dessert is aristocratic. The earliest plates go to the presidential table. Children may wait for their share, or settle for what is left: sticky kakanin, cubes of gulaman, the occasional slice of gelatine. Even within the category of sweet, there is a hierarchy. A cake specially delivered from Conti’s sits at the center. The ones brought by visitors from Red Ribbon are arranged in the middle. Plastic cups of jellies fan out to the sides like guards protecting the more important cakes.
In many fiestas, these desserts carry reputations of their own. Leche flan, rich with egg yolks, is a sign of care and expense, often the first to vanish from the table [4]. Buko salad, with its canned fruit and sweet cream, signals celebration, a dish saved for occasions when the hosts wish to show abundance. Cathedral jelly, with its stained-glass colors, is more decoration than indulgence, completing the table’s look before it fills anyone’s plate. Each sweet has its place in the performance, as much about what it says as how it tastes.
I have seen this same instinct elsewhere. In Iloilo, the best pinipig ice cream appears only when the mayor’s wife is seated. In Quezon, a wedding’s pastillas de leche are passed hand-to-hand among the principal sponsors, never reaching the younger guests. In some towns, even halo-halo becomes ceremonial, served in glass to a select few, while others get “dirty ice cream” in plastic from a street vendor paid for by the balikbayan.
Why guard sweetness? Partly because sugar has long been a sign of status here. During the Spanish period, refined sugar was an export crop, planted and milled by those who owned the land, sold abroad to sweeten European tables. What was left for local kitchens was brown, coarse, and used sparingly [1]. To have white sugar in abundance was to have wealth. In rural communities, that memory is not so distant. The imported canned fruit, the condensed milk, the gelatin in bright packets, all are purchased with care, and their use is deliberate. Even today, some foods are perceived as “more class,” often those that are foreign, costly, or labor-intensive [5].
Sometimes, the guarding is practical. A fiesta may last all day, with visitors arriving in waves. To set out all the desserts at once is to invite shortage before the last guest comes. Over time, practicality became etiquette, and etiquette became tradition. In my town, no one questions why the best sweets go first to the presidential table. It is simply how things are done [1].
Still, there is a different kind of sweetness in the everyday. The buloy-buloy (cassava balls in sugar or carioca) sold by vendors beside schools for children to enjoy, the banana que at the sari-sari store by the roadside, or the special ampaw (pop rice) by the Mogpog church, and pilipitin, uraro cookies, bibingkang lalaki, panganan, saludsod at the markets-all heritage sweets of Marinduque now fading from memories. Even the minatamis na saba made from our own produce or the pinaltok (ginataang bilo-bilo) made on rainy afternoons when the day slows and there is no one to impress. These are the democratic desserts: open to whoever is present, whether or not their name is on the guest list.
Panganan
Elsewhere, dessert is about abundance in the open. In a Greek home, baklava is passed around until every hand is sticky with honey. In a Mexican fiesta, trays of pastries are left in the center of the table, inviting second and third helpings. Here, dessert is about precision. The slices are measured, the cups counted, the serving spoons guarded. It is less about indulgence and more about stewardship, ensuring the right people taste the right thing at the right time.
And yet I imagine another ending. A birthday where the leche flan is sliced for the children first. Where the buko salad comes out with the pancit instead of after it. Where no one asks if you are a guest of honor before handing you a plate. Dessert would be less about arrival and more about presence, eaten under a tent, shared with whoever happens to be beside you, no seating chart between you and the sweetest thing in the room.
Sweetness, after all, does not diminish when shared early. It grows in memory, carried by those who tasted it without having to wait for permission. Perhaps one day, in my hometown, the music of dessert will play across every table: the clink of spoon against glass, the soft scrape of syrup from the bottom of a bowl, and it will belong to everyone in the room.
