ANGELES CITY — The city’s Sisig Fiesta, officially two years old this year, sizzles off April 28 with but a few hitches of a toddler yet treading towards firmer path.
Perhaps overly flattered by The New York Times describing sisig as “arguably the best pork dish on earth,” the city government passed last year Ordinance No. 405, Series of 2017, declaring the pork dish an “intangible cultural heritage.”
This year, Sisig Festival has the food company Fresh Options as the city government’s collaborator in the feast. The food firm is sponsoring among 33 barangays in this city a dish contest using its packed sisig product as basic ingredient.
In a press conference on the festival, however, questions related to the sisig as this city’s heritage cropped up.
This, amid the insistence of Kapampangan chefs that the true Kapampanga sisig should never be served with egg nor mayonnaise.
Yet, organizers of the festival have encouraged participants in the sisig dish contest “to submit their own twisted dish creations.”
The ordinance itself seemed lacking in imposing standards that qualify a dish a sisig to serve as basis for identity amid the possibilities of fusions.
City tourism officer John Montances noted that the term sisig first appeared in a Kapampangan dictionary compiled by Augustinian Fray Diego Bergaño in 1732. The friar described the dish as “salad, including green papaya, or green guava is eaten with a dressing of salt, pepper, garlic and vinegar.”
The city government has retained hopes that sisig will eventually be recognized by the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the gastronomy category.
Again this year, most of the activities lined up for the Sisig Festival on April 28 would be held at the so-called Crossing along Valdez Street where sisig started to lay claim to fame, initially among beer drinkers at the stretch that used to be lined with honkytonks.
City tourism officials seem so convinced that sisig has enough culinary magnetism to drive tourists to the city that the cover of their folded brochure highlights the phrase “Home of Sizzling Sisig.” Burp.
