In front of the San Pedro Auxiliary Fire Station in Pacita Complex, San Pedro City, is a large lot that, before the Covid-19 pandemic, was used as a bus station. (It’s still used as a terminal in the mornings, by UV Express vans going to Manila.) Since the pandemic, however, it has become a mini-food bazaar of sorts, hosting at least two carinderias and stalls selling street foods like fish ball and kikiam.
One particular stall selling bibingka and puto bumbong has caught my attention, particularly since it seems to be the only one selling those kinds of foodstuffs all year round.
Bibingka and puto bumbong have become, as we all known, associated with “Paskong Pinoy,” where they are usually sold outside churches after “Simbang Gabi,” or the nine-day Novena Mass Catholics attend in preparation for Christmas. The fact that this stall sold bibingka and puto bumbong long before the Christmas season has piqued my curiosity.
Recently, someone on San Pedro City’s social media groups proclaimed that stall to be the “best” bibingka ever sold in the city. That, admittedly, is the main reason I finally gave in to the temptation of buying one on my way home (since I pass that stall every day on my way home from work).
I can’t explain what came to me when I finally got a taste of that bibingka. Suffice to say, it suddenly brought back memories of my youth – memories of another tradition that has, unfortunately, been laid aside as I grew up.
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I first got my taste of bibingka at a bus stop in San Miguel, Bulacan, around 2006 or 2007. Back then, going back to my father’s hometown in Nueva Ecija was a twice- or even thrice-a-year tradition, and if we weren’t joining one of my uncles to go there, that would mean taking a bus all the way to Nueva Ecija.
During the time, all buses going to Nueva Ecija pass through Bulacan province, and it was also at around the time when we switched from Baliwag Transit to Five Star as our preferred bus company. It was at that stopover in San Miguel, where Five Star buses usually stop over on the way to Nueva Ecija, where on a whim, I asked my father to buy me one of those large bibingkas on display at the restaurant.
Man, imagine how I felt when I first tasted that! The rich smell of roasted banana leaf, the riot of flavors as the saltiness of the “itlog na pula” and butter competed with the sweetness of the rice itself – and I was hooked. It became a sort of tradition for myself to have that bibingka whenever we commute to Nueva Ecija.
Then sometime in the 2010’s, the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway was completed, and with that, almost all buses to Cabanatuan switched to the new route. While it gave us direct access to our hometown of Zaragoza, I kinda missed that bibingka that we had usually gotten at that stopover in San Miguel. (Last I heard, that stopover closed its doors before the pandemic).
And as I grew up, and after my father passed away in 2017, trips to Nueva Ecija became a once-in-a-blue-moon episode. The last time I tasted that bibingka was in 2019, at Five Star’s new stopover in La Paz, Tarlac, just before the pandemic struck.
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Back to the present. Imagine my surprise when I finally tasted that bibingka from that nondescript stall in front of the San Pedro fire station. It was almost exactly that taste and smell that I remember from my early childhood, back to a time when things seemed so much simpler.
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