01/05/2022
Kare kare 🇵🇭
History
Kare-kare's storied history as a Filipino food goes back hundreds of years. There are four stories as to the origins of kare-kare. The first one is that it came from Pampanga (the province which became known all over the country as the "culinary capital of the Philippines"). The Kapampangan people often have a reputation for cooking to their hearts’ content and coming up with deliciously rich fare. The second is that the dish, specifically the sauce, from the galleon ships of Acapulco. Its key ingredient, the mani or peanut, was widely transported in it just like corn, also from the Aztec Empire and from a distant land. Mexico's Costa Pacifica provinces of Jalisco and Guerrero continue to serve Lomo Encacahuatado, practically the same dish. The only difference is the type of pork part. In Mexico it is the loin/ Lomo or Ma**za. In the Philippines, it is the pork tail or oxtail. The word "Kare-Kare" is supposedly a dimunitive of "Cari" which was a term to denote "golden brown"--- in fact it was what the Spaniards and Portuguese called the brown natives they saw at their ports of call. The third comes from the regal dishes of the Moro elite who settled in Manila before the Spanish arrival (in Sulu and Tawi-Tawi, kare-kare remains a popular dish).The fourth story is from Indian sepoys from Southern India that settled in Philippines during the British occupation of Manila. Homesick, they improvised their own cuisine with available materials. They called it kari-kaari, curry, and now, kare-kare. Its name derived from a reduplication of Tamil: கறி, romanized: kaṟi, lit. 'curry; thick sauce'. Kare-kare has a similar flavor to satay because of the peanuts in the sauce. -wiki
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