It’s amazing what your mind remembers when you pause long enough. This is the season when santol trees are generous, heavy with round, woolly fruit from July to August. The kids would have a time sucking at those soft, juicy, cottony white seeds until the pulp and all juice were gone. Faces would light up with joy or pucker based on the lottery pick–sweet, tart, or completely sour. Which would not matter at all because we loved them all.
The santol’s bounty was too much to eat fresh, and so preservation became both a necessity and an art. The rainy season of July always meant bottles and bottles of sinantolan lining up on kitchen shelves. Mixed with chili and bagoong, it turns into a tangy relish eaten with fried fish or grilled meats. Burong santol, pickled in brine and chilies, was another staple, lining household shelves in jars beside atchara. Some inventive farmers brewed santol wine and vinegar. Abundance always breeds ingenuity, and santol was no exception.
Yet what I miss most is minatamis na santol, a sweet that seems to have vanished from most homes, displaced by easier recipes and imported panghimagas. Where did it go? What happened to it? How did it quietly go from collective memory to a story of nostalgia?
In the small island of Marinduque where I grew up, these sweets were as abundant as the santol chopping boards, which are available in the market. Housewives used to bottle them in syrup for dessert. Santol jam and marmalade became staples too, sold in glass jars at markets and even exported abroad. Some families sun-dried candied santol until it turned chewy and sweet-tart.
In the sun-dappled classrooms of the fair Butansapa Elementary School, our home economics teacher reigned in bespectacled authority, her prized relic an old, stained, typewritten copy of Maria Orosa’s canning guidelines. Miss Magahis guarded it like a war secret, copying its contents onto the blackboard for us to rewrite in our notebooks and memorize. From it, she drilled us in the art of jams, jellies, and marmalades. In my mind, Maria Orosa, that chemist and war heroine, who pioneered the preservation of fruits like the dear santol sometimes merges with Miss Magahis and memory becomes a tangled history, her stained canning guidelines a bridge between my childhood and a broader culinary legacy.
One of our class projects then was to turn the season’s glut of santol into preserves and confections. I remember scouring the neighborhood with classmates for fruit. We’d form picking parties, and neighbors waved us into their yards to gather the windfall. We hauled sacks on our backs, racing to find the ripest santol. We learned to choose the native variety, with thinner, almost red skin over the newer, sweeter, yellow Bangkok variety. Miss Magahis always preferred the smaller fruits with small seeds, the kind we were tempted to swallow but were warned would sprout in our bellies. Folklore wove its threads here too, my Ilocano father spinning tales of the pugot, headless spirits haunting kids who dared to swallow the jeweled seeds.
Only later did I learn that santol itself was not as “native,” nor endemic as we proudly pronounced it to be. Known to botanists as Sandoricum koetjape, the fruit was said to have come from Malesia, a grand, living geography of plant life that includes Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and New Guinea, and carried into the islands by trade hundreds of years ago. By the time Spanish friars catalogued it in the 1800s, the santol was already everywhere, adopted and naturalized into the Philippine soil.
Miss Magahis taught us the steps of making the jams and jellies with a loving but unwavering sense of discipline. In the heat of the afternoon, we were herded through the Home Economics kitchen, the tiles gleaming white. Being there filled me with pride because it seemed to me like hallowed ground. It was the first full kitchen many of us barrio kids had seen, so different from the soot-darkened banggerahan of our small homes. No doubt it was there that I began to dream of my own kitchen, with a complete array of tools and implements. There were moments now when I had to slice an ingredient, and I am taken back to that exact feel of the hard tables in that kitchen where we toiled and peeled and scraped the santol.
There we learned to peel away the santol skin with stainless steel knife to prevent discoloration. We were told, in a rather stern voice, not to waste the white flesh by cutting the skin too thickly. I was astonished to discover that there could be a purpose for those fleshy rinds, as they were the very parts we typically discarded as kids.
We used to have contests to see who could peel the santol in the longest unbroken strip. Even now, I still attempt to show off to my kids by carefully peeling the santol from top to bottom, even if it sometimes breaks.
As with other fruits, we were taught to be creative with their cutting. There were all kinds of shapes to learn. For basics, we shaped the rind into hearts, stars, moons, birds, or flowers. But the knife was not a skill I mastered, even then. Up to now, I only barely remember the cutting of flowers. Mostly I focused on trying not to cut my fingers.
The sap of an unripe fruit stung our hands, left stains on our uniforms, but still we persisted under the guidance of the patient teacher. We were taught the science of using apog or hugas-bigas in preparing the fruit, though I hardly remember them now. And after a day of hard work, we leave them to cure in it for two days, to firm up the flesh and temper the tartness.
After two days of curing, we washed them off and we sorted the santol by eye to see which would be best for canning, which are over-ripe or just so, or how we can divide them so we can also make assorted delights. We were shown how to bottle santol in used colored jars with functioning seals, poured with still hot sugar syrup, and then boiled on huge vats, until the pieces gleamed like amber stones. It was a process I avoided at home for decades, haunted by lectures on poisoning.
Jewel-toned jellies were made with the flesh cooked down in sugar until the kitchen smelled of citrus and honey. My classmates and I alternated with stirring them with our thin arms, each turn a strip of time unfurling, each curl of rind uncovering the taste of childhood. The smell was unforgettable, a sour fruit softening into honey, a fragrance both tart and floral. Even now, just the memory is enough to make my mouth water.
I remember writing all the recipes and being surprised with the amount of things you can do with the fruit. How ever do you differentiate between fruit preserves, jams and jellies, marmalades, fruit butter, and my favorite, the chewy Santol candy, I asked. Fruit butters have spices such as cinnamon or all-spice, marmalades have slices of fruit in them, jellies are made with pectin, fruit preserves are usually whole or recognizable and is preserved in sugar syrup, candies are fruit butters but are dried, cut into pieces, and wrapped in colorful cellophane.
By the end of the day, our hands were sticky, our uniforms stained with dagta, and our mothers angry at the stained clothes. But when we proudly carried home our sweet projects to our mothers like offerings, then all the things are forgiven.
As a child, I didn’t know that these practices echoed older traditions of conservation. What I did know was the thrill of unwrapping a cellophane candy, the taste of sour and sweet on the tongue, and the pride of having helped turn an ordinary backyard fruit into something worthy of a gift.
We ate them when we wanted, but we often found ourselves searching for them after a hefty meal or dinner, devouring them in small bites, a habit I still have now, storing sweets in the fridge for easy access. At the time, we had no grand concept of panghimagas. To us, dessert was leche flan rich with egg yolks, chilled buko salad crowned with cherries, cathedral jelly glinting like stained glass, stage desserts belonging to weddings and town feasts. They are indulgent, dense, and celebratory.
In our homes, a sweet ending meant reaching for a santol candy or spooning a bit of jam to papak while the adults drank their after-meal coffee. I realize now that more than himagas or postre, they were palate cleansers to remove the umay factor after a rich meal.
Which is probably why we love fruit desserts, -saba con hielo, mango at sago, even halo-halo -these are common kind of sweetness that is just so, to refresh after a heavy meal, cut through coconut cream, oil, or salt, and ready the body to move on. They are democratic sweets, available outside special occasions or in the neighborhood talipapa, unburdened by hierarchy.
So while rich desserts on special occasions can emphasize festivity, everyday Filipino sweets play a subtler role: they restore balance, and ensure sweetness doesn’t overwhelm but resets. Minatamis na santol belongs here, in this quieter register of sweetness, an everyday ending, small but memorable.
The last time I tasted minatamis na santol was decades ago. In most kitchens today, santol is grated for sinantolan or eaten fresh with salt. The candies and jams have nearly disappeared, perhaps too tedious in an age of instant sweets. But memory is its own form of preservation. Each July, when the santol trees sag with fruit, I remember the smell of sugar, the sting of dagta on the skin, the laughter of classmates with sticky hands. Memory itself is peeled this way, one strip at a time, curling back through years, carrying both sourness and sweetness until what remains is a coil of childhood laid bare.
To write about what we ate, Doreen Fernandez reminded us, is to write about who we were. For me, minatamis na santol is the taste of childhood, of neighbors opening their gates, of a teacher with her Maria Orosa cookbook, insisting we learn not just how to cook but how to value what grows around us. It is a taste that links me to a fruit’s long journey from Malesia to the Philippines, to generations of cooks who bottled its sourness into sweetness, to a food scientist who taught us that preserving food was another way of preserving culture.
Perhaps its revival awaits in modern kitchens and farm-to-table movements, where new hands might stir its syrup once more, blending old ingenuity with new flavors. Unwrapping that sticky, glistening memory, I taste fruit and history, sour, sweet, and wholly ours.
