Cornik

One very interesting aspect of Pinoy food would be how often it is eaten and how extremely varied the fare can be. Filipinos eat often. That's a fact that most expats seem to wonder about. They can't believe that we can eat so much yet stay slimmer than they are. I'm actually overweight, but I still lok slimmer than many Americans (caucasians) I've seen. It could be the climate, heredity, or a combination of both and other factors.

Snacks are quite common. "Chichirya", or junk food (could also be used to mean snack), are indespensible to the average Filipino. Take for example the ubiquitous "cornik."  Everyone here has eaten cornik at least once in their lifetime. I get weird looks from expats when I try to explain to them exactly what those brown kernels of deep-fried corn are. Many can't believe we eat corn that way, sun-dried and irreverently fried in coconut oil.

In my younger days, cornik was sold by street vendors frying them in stoves sitting in improvised karitons. That's actually the norm till this day, but I remember a time when a chain called Baliuag Pasalubong tried sprucing up its product image by franchising. It actually worked for a few years. People generally bought cornik from them simply because they kept their stalls cleaner than the average tindero (street vendor). They also started the "MIX" craze. When I had 5 pesos to spare back then, I would ask for 5 pesos worth of MIX, to mean 2.50 pesos worth of cornik and 2.50 worth of fried peanuts. They would use a long-stemmed teaspoon to mix the stuff right in the paper bag, with the optional teaspoon of cooking oil spiked with hot peppers. They take that from a jar nearby filled with oil and what looked like a billion mashed hot peppers, the sight of which could make anyone salivate. Anticipating how hot it would turn out to be more fun than the actual eating. LOL!

Baliuag also made (actually they still do) sweetened kidney beans, my personal favorite. Imagine the dried tender candied beans dusted in powdered sugar. Yumm. Of course, Baliuag's popularity went down when the gossip spread that they were using vetsin (MSG) to season their cornik and fried peanuts instead of salt. Whether that was true, I could only speculate. Although Baliuag Pasalubong has shriveled as an island-wide chain, similar stores are still popular in Bulacan where it was born. I still buy the candied beans from the cornucopia of vaguely-named stores whenever I visit a cousin of mine in Baliuag.

The renaissance of cornik did come after that when they introduced Corn Bits - cornik cooked and packed in factories. They made cornik a mainstay in grocery shelves, all the more to the chagrin of parents. Anyway, the cornik of today is standard grocery store fare, ranging from the plain to flavored and the outragouesly mixed. You can now eat cornik that comes in a number of flavors which include adobo, hot and spicy. Mix now includes deep-fried peas.  As an offshoot, they now sell butung-pakwan and peas in similar packaging and peanuts now come packed with nitrogen. What good nitrogen does to peanuts, I have no idea. I wonder what's next?