Tinuom Festival

The town of Cabatuan in central Iloilo is holding a Tinuom Festival as a prelude to its patronal fiesta on September 10. Street dancing and a search for Tinuom queen are some of the activities during the festival.

Tinuom is a way of cooking where the ingredients are wrapped in a leaf, preferably banana leaf. The wrapped mix is them cooked over boiling water. The resulting cooked food is also called tinuom.

Currently, when one talks about tinuom, he means chicken cooked the tinuom way. So much so that people from other places thought tinuom nga manok is the specialty of the people of Cabatuan. But I beg to disagree. I grew up in Cabatuan, and I haven’t heard anyone cooking the tinuom way as part of their daily life. One time our Owaw cooked tinuom for us. And it was tinuom nga isda. Or tinuom nga uhong (mushroom). She cooked tinuom because we were in the far away farm of my father where it was hard to buy lard or cooking oil.

Last I heard, tinuom was just a specialty of one carinderia in Cabatuan. While the other carinderias serve batsoy, linaga, arroz caldo, or pata. But no one complained that there must be a Linaga or Pata Festival to commemorate their own specialties.

Herewith are pictures I took during the opening salvo of the Tinuom Festival. The streets were lined with stalls selling burloloys, ukay-ukay, finger foods, DVDs, and ice cream. Tinuom is sold in a secluded corner of the makeshift pavillon, away from the prying eyes of the spectators. But looking at the sidelines, this festivity could have been called Burloloy Festival. Or Ukay-ukay Festival. Or Bisan Ano Festival. And nobody would have felt the difference. @