While doing research on a fishing village in a Batangas town in the early 80's, I ate, along with the locals, a scrumptious dish called sinaing na tulingan ( also called tambakol or gulyasan in Batangas). The skipjack tuna, with its entire body palm-pressed until flat and its head either sliced off or wrapped in a piece of banana leaf to prevent disintegration, was braised in salt and water for four to five hours and soured with dehydrated bilimbi (kamias) fruits. I was hooked from then on. My subsequent meals of fish sinaing were the store-bought ones that did not come close to the delightful taste of that first homecooked-by-the-sea encounter.

Fast forward to last week when, pensively looking out a second-floor window of one of our apartments under construction, I looked down past the scaffolds at trees randomly growing in our yard. There is guava, calamansi, malunggay, and several kamias (bilimbi) trees laden with plump yellow-green fruits! That made my mouth water and tummy hankering after fish sinaing. I had a construction worker climb up one kamias tree to pick as many ripe fruits as he could possibly muster under the blistering sun. For one week, I had them dried until all the water had vaporized. All that sour taste is now packed in these desiccated fruits ready to flavor a dish with its flavorful patis sauce which renders the steaming white rice absolutely divine.

A few weeks before, cousins Det and Cit gifted Roli and me with two (or maybe three?) kilos of fresh roundscad, galunggong, as we are very fond of frying them crisp. This fish could substitute easily for skipjack in a sinaing because they have the same rubbery texture that cooks for long hours without crumbling. Except, of course, the heads. That’s why whoever whipped up this recipe thought of wrapping a piece of banana leaf around the head. My sister, Sonia, on vacation from Sydney, cooked the dish for me because it so happened that she was with me in 1982 learning how to cook fish sinaing from the wife of my fisherman informant whom I was interviewing for a term paper.

And so it is that my pining for fish sinaing was satisfied. A potful of it will keep me sated for a long time!